Big kudos for making and maintaining this integration! It works really great
Iāll make a short writeup on my experience for anyone who can use it. I needed a smart heating system for our radiators (heated up by district heating) and after seeing your HA integration I bought the 2nd generation hub, 5 x iTRVs and 5 x room thermostats and crossed fingers it would work. Iām located in Denmark where the Wiser official home app is not supported. Instead you have to buy the āgatewayā to connect your devices and use a danish rewrite app which wouldnāt work with this integration at the moment.
Since the hub only features wifi and zigbee (no ethernet) I had to use a Andoid phone to install the Wiser home app with an APK downloaded from a mirror. I set it up by choosing āprofessionalā and āotherā country and then set up the hub to my home wifi to get it to work with the HACS Wiser integration. From here on I simply followed the āConfiguringā section on Github and seems to work exactly like your configuring your HubR device.
Itās been a few days now and all seems to work very well without any dropouts or strange behaviour. If you have any questions please let me know. Keep up the good work.
I canāt help thinking that turning on your hot water for significant periods might be inefficient. Iāve no idea about what the hysteresis on an average immersion tank thermostat is, but I donāt think your boiler is efficient if itās regularly only being asked to raise the tank temperature a few degrees.
Each time you cycle through heating / not heating the tank thereās 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 doesnāt try and reach target flow temp until itās 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 itās just hot water coming back on the return.
If itās winter, and your boiler is already pumping lots of heat to the rads, then Iād imagine these issues could be relatively negligible, but in summer I would worry itās not efficient.
Iām afraid I donāt have any evidence for this, as Iāve 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.
Iāve then used the temperature reading to turn off the hot water request in Wiser, meaning that I only heat the tank once, and donāt 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. Youāll have a base energy load for the Wiser hub and boiler control electronics, but the bulk of the power Iād imagine is consumed by the pump. Compare the graph of power usage to the boiler active status reported by Wiser and youāll 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 isnāt 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.
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.
@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 ācustom_dataā 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 thatās no possible then it would still be good to have this.
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?
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.
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!
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 āmostlyā (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 Iāve held off doing anything more as I donāt 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.
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 Iāve triggered restart of HA this morning everything gone back to normal.
I donāt 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 wasnāt Hub not being able to reconnect - any suggestions how to investigate this (Iām new to HA)?
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!
Iām tinkering about with using iTRV in one of the rooms directly via MQTT. I donāt 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 itās all weird
Iām wondering if this issue of disconnecting people were mentioning or something else. Iām expecting set point to be flat line. Thanks
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 itās 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 havenāt given good results in the past and Iāve 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
Iām 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