Been using HA for 3 days now, and this is my first post ever.
I have a Hive Thermostat and have been trying to automate the central heating and hot water triggered off simple time of day. Central heating is working fine. For the hot water, I’m just changing the operation_mode between off and on, using the water_heater.set_operation_mode service, but nothing happens.
I created the automation in the visual editor. When viewed in YAML it’s as follows …
Seems I spoke too soon. Over the past couple of weeks the hot water has failed to turn off. It’s a very simple automation, time based only, and most of the time it works. But just a couple of times now, the hot water stayed on, even though I can see that the automation fired as expected.
As I say, most of the time it works fine, so not sure what to try next. I could add additional ‘off’ commands to the automation, separated by a few seconds/minutes, or I could go back to having the schedule in Hive, which would be a shame.
Could there be some weird dependency between the state of the heating and the state of the hot water? Any other things to check?
Pre HA, schedules in the Hive app worked fine for years.
Haven’t noticed any other automation failures, just the hot water. First time it happened I just put it down to one of those things. But then it happened again a few days later, also at 9pm. I’ll see how it goes with the extra turn off operation, but if that doesn’t work I’ll just have to go back to Hive schedules, at least for the hot water.
Are you aware that the Hive integration may stop working next summer so you might want to consider moving it across to Z2M (Zigbee). Advantage is that it is faster (and local of course).
Yes, I got the recent email announcements from Hive and was wondering whether that would affect HA.
I read that it’s possible to control Hive smart switches and bulbs locally, but didn’t know about thermostat functions. Do you expect that’s feasible, and what newbie-friendly Zigbee hardware would you suggest? Is this something you’ve tried? Thanks!!
Edit, I should have mentioned that I’m running HA OS on a RPi4B
Had another occurrence of the hot water failing to turn off this morning.
I clicked on the automation event shown in the logbook, and can see that there’s some kind of error …
Triggered by the time at 21 November 2023 at 08:00:00
Call a service ‘Water Heater: Set operation mode’ on Thermostat 1
Stopped because an error was encountered at 21 November 2023 at 08:00:00 (runtime: 0.16 seconds)
‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘status’
I have no idea how to debug this intermittent problem. I don’t think it’s a network issue because this is the only automation that I’m having an issue with. It’s not even a general Hive issue because the central heating schedule is working fine. It’s just the hot water turning off.
Hi, just looking through this as I’m in the same boat and I’ve found this thread very helpful
In the example above the operation_mode has been set to “off” in both cases … I expect you intended to set it to “on” in the first action.
Hi, no, it’s as intended. I’m only showing the code for turning the hot water off. Making two attempts, separated by 1 minute. Just my feeble attempt to improve the reliability, but it didn’t help. So I went back to using the Hive app for heating and hot water scheduling, but in the next few months I’d like to try moving to Z2M, hopefully with help from jchh.
When I was using the official integration I used sensor.hive_water_target_state that reflected what the state should be and then used this simple automation:
yaml
automation:
- alias: Hive water
id: "hive_water"
description: ''
mode: queued
initial_state: true #ensure automation is turned on when restarting HA to set/reset water correctly
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: sensor.hive_water_target_state # target state changes
id: "target state change"
- platform: state
entity_id: input_button.set_hive_water # reset state back to target
id: "target state change"
- platform: homeassistant
event: start # reset state on restart
id: "target state change"
- platform: state
entity_id: input_select.hive_water_mode # mode change
to: 'Boost'
id: "boost start"
- platform: state
entity_id: input_select.hive_water_mode # mode change
from: Boost
id: "boost over"
- platform: state
entity_id: timer.hive_water_boost # boost completed
to: idle
id: "boost over"
action:
- choose:
- conditions: #-------------------------------------------------------
- condition: trigger
id: "target state change"
sequence:
- service: water_heater.set_operation_mode
data_template:
operation_mode: "{{ states('sensor.hive_water_target_state') }}"
target:
entity_id: water_heater.thermostat
- conditions: #-------------------------------------------------------
- condition: trigger
id: "boost start"
sequence:
- service: timer.start
target:
entity_id: timer.hive_heating_boost
data:
duration: "{{ (states('input_number.hive_water_boost_time') |float()) *3600 }}"
- conditions: #-------------------------------------------------------
- condition: trigger
id: "boost over"
sequence:
- service: input_select.select_option # return mode if timer finished
target:
entity_id: input_select.hive_water_mode
data:
option: "On"
- service: timer.finish # finish timer if mode changed
target:
entity_id: timer.hive_water_boost
The sensor looked like this:
yaml
template:
- sensor:
- name: Hive water target state
state: >
{% set shed1 = states('input_boolean.hive_water_1_scheduled') %}
{% set shed2 = states('input_boolean.hive_water_2_scheduled') %}
{% set shed3 = states('input_boolean.hive_water_3_scheduled') %}
{% set shed4 = states('input_boolean.hive_water_4_scheduled') %}
{% set on1 = states('input_datetime.hive_water_1_on')[:5] %}
{% set on2 = states('input_datetime.hive_water_2_on')[:5] %}
{% set on3 = states('input_datetime.hive_water_3_on')[:5] %}
{% set on4 = states('input_datetime.hive_water_4_on')[:5] %}
{% set off1 = states('input_datetime.hive_water_1_off')[:5] %}
{% set off2 = states('input_datetime.hive_water_2_off')[:5] %}
{% set off3 = states('input_datetime.hive_water_3_off')[:5] %}
{% set off4 = states('input_datetime.hive_water_4_off')[:5] %}
{% set mode = states('input_select.hive_water_mode') %}
{% set time = states('sensor.time') %}
{% if mode == 'Boost' %} on
{% elif mode == 'On' %}
{% if shed1 == 'on' and (time >= on1) and (time < off1) %} on
{% elif shed2 == 'on' and (time >= on2) and (time < off2) %} on
{% elif shed3 == 'on' and (time >= on3) and (time < off3) %} on
{% elif shed4 == 'on' and (time >= on4) and (time < off4) %} on
{% else %} off
{% endif %}
{% else %} off
{% endif %}
It was based on setting both off and on times but I since changed it to on and duration.
If any of this interests you, I’d be happy to share all the entities behind it etc.
Thanks John. Your automations look like they’ll be useful once I’ve got things running but I need to get the basics down first. ie. Turning the water heating on and off at all
Also, I’m using zigbee2MQTT and think that the devices and operations available to me might be a bit different to what you’re seeing.
I think I’ve made some good progress this evening. I took a look at the page Zigbee2MQTT → Hive Receiver → Exposes and I played around with the values there. What I learned was that simply changing the System Mode’ (ie. the operation_mode) isn’t enough to make the boiler turn on. I (probably) also need to set the “Temperature setpoint hold duration” to 65535 and crucially I need to set the “Temperature setpoint hold” to True.
From what I can tell, the idea is that you queue up the setting(s) that you want to make (whether its turning the water off or to heat or whatever) and then throwing the “Temperature setpoint hold” switch to True is the action that makes the system actually act on the requested changes.
So my (work in progress) automation for heating the water for 30mins looks like this:
Turn off Hive receiver Temperature setpoint hold water
Set value for Hive receiver Temperature setpoint hold duration water
65535
Water Heater: Set operation mode
“heat”
Turn on Hive receiver Temperature setpoint hold water
Delay
30mins
Turn off Hive receiver Temperature setpoint hold water
Set value for Hive receiver Temperature setpoint hold duration water
0
Water Heater: Set operation mode
“off”
Turn on Hive receiver Temperature setpoint hold water
Turn off Hive receiver Temperature setpoint hold water
I suspect that I might be able to just set “Hive receiver Temperature setpoint hold duration water” to 30 and skip all the stuff from the Delay onwards but thats an experiment for tomorrow.
