Drayton Wiser Home Assistant Integration

jamesmel · December 20, 2022, 7:52pm

I can’t help thinking that turning on your hot water for significant periods might be inefficient. I’ve no idea about what the hysteresis on an average immersion tank thermostat is, but I don’t think your boiler is efficient if it’s regularly only being asked to raise the tank temperature a few degrees.

Each time you cycle through heating / not heating the tank there’s some heat loss from the boiler and the pipes between them
Your boiler has a warmup time where it might pump cold water through the tank before the hot water arrives.
You boiler might deliberately run cool for a while before it starts heating the water. I have a Glow worm boiler that deliberately doesn’t try and reach target flow temp until it’s been active for 10 minutes. (I think this sometimes confuses Wiser when using TPI to heat rooms, but it always gets there in the end)
Boilers are most efficient with a temperature delta on the return flow, but if your hot water tank is already pretty warm then it’s just hot water coming back on the return.

If it’s winter, and your boiler is already pumping lots of heat to the rads, then I’d imagine these issues could be relatively negligible, but in summer I would worry it’s not efficient.

I’m afraid I don’t have any evidence for this, as I’ve just moved to a new house with a tank and fitted this: https://www.tsmart.co.uk/ which allows me to see the temperature of the water in the tank, and also in case of a gas outage (or future solar panels / night time electric rates) I can heat the water with electricity.

I’ve then used the temperature reading to turn off the hot water request in Wiser, meaning that I only heat the tank once, and don’t leave the tank request for heat cycling the boiler. I also now use a minimum temperature in the tank to kick in a hot water boost on the Wiser so that nobody gets a cold shower. This was all done with OpenHAB but I imagine could be implemented in HA.

Another mechanism I thought of to detect the hot water being active is putting a power meter on your mains feed to the boiler. You’ll have a base energy load for the Wiser hub and boiler control electronics, but the bulk of the power I’d imagine is consumed by the pump. Compare the graph of power usage to the boiler active status reported by Wiser and you’ll probably be able to spot when heat is only being requested for Hot Water. Not perfect but should give you a good feel for what it takes to heat in the summer months when the heating isn’t active at the same time.

Definitely agree this is a gap in the market Drayton could fill neatly with something integrated to the hub, and suspect it could help with using Opentherm with heating and water side by side.

crankshaft · December 20, 2022, 11:44pm

I also looked into the Hot Water control a few months ago.

My conclusion then was to leave the existing thermostat as a safety cut off, and turn it up above the desired temperature range so that it would cut off the boiler when it got too hot.

Then install an ESPHOME / DS18S20 sensor into the tank insulation touching the tank and use an automation to monitor that and Boost Water / Cancel Boost etc via the Wiser integration.

crankshaft · December 21, 2022, 11:19am

@msp1974 - Mark, I have a feature request, I need to store some additional attributes in a dictionary for each climate.zone, but now, those values get overwritten each time the integration is refreshed.

This data is from a balancing app that I have written in appdaemon.

Would it be possible to add a ‘custom_data’ attribute that can persist and is not deleted / overwritten on each update ?

It would be great if it could also persist and survive reboot, but if that’s no possible then it would still be good to have this.

msp1974 · December 21, 2022, 11:40am

Its not really the job of this integration to store custom function data and certainly makes it messy if we support requests of this kind. I am not familiar with appdaemon but can it not store your data or use the custom variable component on HACS?

crankshaft · December 21, 2022, 11:45am

Yep, appdaemon can do pretty much anything, basically python with hass api.

I can store it lots of places, would have just been very tidy to save the data with each climate instead of creating a new sensor for each one, and by just creating one field, it could be used by anyone for anything, and not limited to just my data.

Anyway, I thought I would ask.

edmund · December 21, 2022, 5:43pm

For anyone still suffering from wifi issues with their hub, I can confirm that a Switchbot integrates well with Home Assistant, and presses the setup button on the hub effectively. So my ridiculous solution to the wifi issue is an automation that waits for updates from the hub to fail, then calls the Switchbot to press the button twice, with a 10 second gap. Not failed me yet!

Chris_J · December 21, 2022, 6:47pm

Both ridiculous and ingenious, all at the same time!

I’ve been following this thread now for months, in anticipation for a WiFi issue fix. Lots of promises that they “are close” but nothing else.

Reckon we will get a fix, at least before the spring!?

robertwigley · December 22, 2022, 12:11am

I suggested using a SwitchBot way back in the thread to power cycle the hub on the main power switch for it, but decided it was not going to be reliable enough and bought a Sonoff Basic Zigbee relay that I was going to wire in between the switch and the hub to power cycle it until @jamiebennett joined the group and we discovered that pressing the Setup button ‘mostly’ (but in my experience definitely not always) works to reconnect the hub and that Drayton are working on fixing the issue.

Thanks for reminding me, as I’ve held off doing anything more as I don’t really want to rewire if there is a fix coming and this is a quick and non-permanent short-term temporary fix, until we get the firmware fix released to us.

RolandLT · December 22, 2022, 8:45am

Had a weird one during the night.
Seems like HA stopped receiving any data from Hub between 9pm and 10pm last night, but as soon as I’ve triggered restart of HA this morning everything gone back to normal.
I don’t have pinging set up for the hub, so not sure if this was caused by hub not being able to reconnect, but as HA restart resolved issue it makes me think it wasn’t Hub not being able to reconnect - any suggestions how to investigate this (I’m new to HA)?

Tommy8884 · December 22, 2022, 8:46am

One of the most infuriating things about the wifi and the hub, is its ability to choose the wifi access point furthest away from itself, despite there being a wireless access point feet away from it!

RolandLT · December 22, 2022, 9:31am

I’m tinkering about with using iTRV in one of the rooms directly via MQTT. I don’t want room to demand for heat, just get heat if boiler is on. It seems to be working as expected but when I look at history it’s all weird

I’m wondering if this issue of disconnecting people were mentioning or something else. I’m expecting set point to be flat line. Thanks

Tommy8884 · December 22, 2022, 10:41am

My room stats display humidity. Is that value exposed to this integration at all. I tried the method mentioned here, but nothing reports…

tombadog · December 22, 2022, 10:43am

It is reported as an attribute of the relevant climate entity.

Tommy8884 · December 22, 2022, 10:59am

Thanks. I tried the following as template sensors, but nothing is recorded:

      #Humidity from wiser
      hall_humidity:
        friendly_name: "Hall Humidity"
        value_template: "{{state_attr('climate.wiser_hall_downstairs', 'humidity')}}"
        unit_of_measurement: "%"
        device_class: humidity
      study_humidity:
        friendly_name: "Study Humidity"
        value_template: "{{state_attr('climate.wiser_study', 'humidity')}}"
        unit_of_measurement: "%"
        device_class: humidity

I can see this in the wider config file:

Tommy8884 · December 22, 2022, 11:05am

Nevermind, the correct attribute was current_humidity.

Works now

liveware-problem · December 22, 2022, 11:07am

If you go to Integrations -->Wiser → select Configure and tick ‘Enable LTS Sensors’, then the integration will create humidity sensors for you.

msp1974 · December 22, 2022, 6:10pm

All, just to update on wifi issues. Im being told that the firmware release with the fix for wifi dropouts is due late Jan.

Chris_J · December 22, 2022, 7:19pm

So have they actually identified the cause, or is that a guesstimate based on current progress?

RolandLT · December 23, 2022, 11:10am

Thank you @msp1974 for great automation recipe. I have couple of questions

Would it be possible to update script to work on multiple TVRs under same schedule?
Could script be update to also prevent heating the room when it’s not needed?

Explanation for these questions:

I have two radiators in living room, one on internal wall and one on external. Having them assigned to single room haven’t given good results in the past and I’ve been running them as two rooms with two same but offset schedule. Using automation allowed me to now only use one schedule, but I had to duplicate Wiser Boost automation - one using loop.first and one loop.last to boost both TRVs
I get situations where room is still warm enough and there is no reason for boiler to have few minutes of burn which have no impact on actual room temperature

I’m a programer myself but still a bit unfamiliar with HA and HA not having a way to simulate triggers to debug automations is not helping either. Thanks for input in advance

msp1974 · December 23, 2022, 11:30am

The test version of firmware i have is dropping wifi very rarely and only for less than a minute, so not perfect but also see other devices doing same on my wifi. I understand it has been to do with it not rescanning available wifi APs quickly enough when wifi drops to allow it to reconnect.