Eurotronic Spirit Thermostats firmware issues

Hardware
65

Doing the calibration is not forcing you to abandon your scheduler…
I’m using Schedy in AppDaemon for that. It just restores the correct state if necessary. And it even has retries in case commands (or their responses) get lost. Happens quite often in my setup.

Here’s my automation for recalibration:

- id: '1579029042197'
  alias: Thermostat Recalibration
  description: ''
  trigger:
  - at: 09:00:00
    platform: time
  condition: []
  action:
  - data:
      entity_id:
      - climate.spirit_buero_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_dg_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_og_heat
      - climate.spirit_kinderzimmer_heat
      preset_mode: boost
    service: climate.set_preset_mode
  - delay: 00:00:15
  - data:
      entity_id:
      - climate.spirit_buero_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_dg_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_og_heat
      - climate.spirit_kinderzimmer_heat
    service: climate.turn_off
  - delay: 00:00:10
  - data:
      entity_id:
      - climate.spirit_buero_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_dg_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_og_heat
      - climate.spirit_kinderzimmer_heat
    service: climate.turn_off
  - delay: 00:00:30
  - data:
      entity_id:
      - climate.spirit_buero_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_dg_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_og_heat
      - climate.spirit_kinderzimmer_heat
    service: climate.turn_on
  - delay: 00:00:10
  - data:
      entity_id:
      - climate.spirit_buero_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_dg_heat
      - climate.spirit_bad_og_heat
      - climate.spirit_kinderzimmer_heat
    service: climate.turn_on

I doubled some service calls due to shitty zwave command reliability. Without it sometimes some of the thermostat were hanging on “off” sometimes which is not that fortunate.

66

Has anyone tried to use the Spirits with the OpenZwave Beta Addon?
Not sure whether it works and whether the valve control is possible with it.

I’m still running an older version of HA as dedicated zwave instance alongside my HA Supervised installation.

67

Nope. I don’t want to run Docker on my machine, and the new beta integration unfortunately requires it.
I’m really hoping they will scrap the docker idea for the 1.0 (haha) release.

68

I had Schedy in use, but I was never really satisfied with it.

OpenZwave is also still on my todos, but I think I’ll get back to that when I have a lot of time. Maybe tomorrow in my home office. :joy:

69

Guys I’m sure you are experienced with trv so you could know the answer. what about using AC (ie 230V) powered TRVs, driven by some smart relay (like Shelly1) based on temperature in room?
I mean dumb trv driven by home automation.

Can you comment on such approach?

70

You should create a separate thread for hardware recommendations.
But what you’re describing could be controlled with something like this:

or more advanced with a PID controller:

Cheers

71

So, I’ve just received a “new” Eurotronic Spirit from Amazon. What I can already tell is that the firmware version is exactly the same as it was before (application_version: 0.16).

Now I’ll have to wait a couple of days/weeks (depending on the weather) to test it again, but I don’t have high hopes about this “new” device… :confused:

72

How do you know it’s a “new” one?
Is there a manufacturing days on them? If not is there a way to identify this from the S/N?
Planning to get some and is like to be able to be clear on my request when I message the seller to ensure I get some from the right batch

73

I don’t. Hence the quotation mark. I only hope this is a fixed one since the info I have is that issues were between 2019 Sept and 2019 Dec, and already 10 months passed by. But I surely cannot know.

It does have a S/N (in the battery compartment) but there’s no publicly available list of the wrong ones.

1 Like
74

Would you mind sharing your heating control script? And how you manage the time-scheduling (German is perfectly fine for me too)

76

(This is a bit off-topic for the firmware issues, but here is a great scheduler:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/scheduler-card-custom-component/
it is still in development, but is already great.)

77

I want to avoid to handle manually valve opening like @jo-me said and let the thermostat autonomous.
Is there any other z-wave thermostat (or zigbee) with normal behaviour ?

78

I saw a few days ago that there is a new version, but it is also a bit more expensive than the old one. But I couldn’t bring myself to try the new one yet. :sweat_smile:

79

if someone can test :pray: :grin:

80

I finally decided, with winter approaching, to try again with sorting out these TRV’s (I have the INS issue, on nearly all mine).

I saw in a German forum, a response somebody had posted from Eurotronic confirming that the batch of TRV’s I have are faulty due to a component fault. I’m going to now return them all for replacement. If there is a newer version, I hope they do the decent thing and replace them with a newer version, if it resolves the issues.

I already had the return address/DHL label generated from the details in the other post, but yesterday had a response from Eurotronic after a couple of weeks.

Thought I’d post their response online here, since I know a lot of people have these issues, and I couldn’t find one in English anywhere:

Thank you for having chosen a product from our company.

In recent years, our Spirit Z-Wave Plus surely has prompted many positive headlines in the heating and smart home area.

This has surely approved our sophisticated hard and software technology.

Unfortunately, we had to find out, that one of the electronic components was defect in the delivery batch of autumn 2019.

The failure of this electronic component leads to the often described jump to the „INS“-modus or the overheating. The only thing, which we can do in this case is, to say sorry and to assure you to replace affected products unbureaucratically.

Devices, which do not show the described error within the first 2 weeks, are not affected by this problem.

We would be pleased if you would continue to place your trust in us.

Due to this problem, we would be happy to replace your defective thermostat.

Please send the defective goods to our service center:

Teknihall GmbH
Dept. Eurotronic GmbH
Breitefeld 15
64839 Munster

A copy of the invoice and the address of the sender must be enclosed with the package.

You can create a free return label at DHL.

Following link: www.myreturn.biz + number 0080088800666.

The link takes you to a mask, select the country flag and enter the respective sender data.

Please indicate here as a reference: AU Eurotronic.

As soon as the goods have arrived at Teknihall, they will be exchanged as soon as possible.

The service can be reached by customers at the following telephone number: 06667 91847-17.

We would be pleased if you would continue to place your trust in us.

So this confirms the INS issue, but also about overheating issues.

Will update here once I get the replacements…

2 Likes
81

At least it is confirmed now from many sides. I just tried my replaced one from Amazon, and before I had no INS issue just the overheating one, now this one does not even want to properly install. After trying to install it onto the valve the Err, Err1, Err2, Err3 errors showing up randomly.

I’m really loosing my faith in Eurotronic. The new version 2 is noticeably higher priced than the not version 2 one. For that price one could by a different and working TRV.

1 Like
82

I find the Zigbee TRVs equally temperamental. Some TRVs will just randomly disconnect from the network and on the display will not show the Antenna icon. Removing the battery fixes this and if not, frequent resets are required to repair.

I also noticed that rechargeable batteries (such as Bonai Rechargeable Batteries AA 2,800 mAh NI-MH Batteries High Capacity) will drain within 2-3 days and immediately upon replacement show 5% charge (often also no charge).

I found that some thermostats will randomly go into boost mode or will just open the valve all the way while displaying an “ERR” on the display. After a few resets everything is back to “normal”. Those are not TRVs I would leave running by itself without supervision.

I contacted Eurotronic 2-3 weeks ago, no response yet. I did order the TRVs beginning of September, so I believe that they are not affected by the component failure. Unfortunately not many other TRVs out there.

83

That is an issue with many electronic devices - if you wish to use rechargeable batteries it is best to check beforehand if the device supports that. Rechargeable batteries have different characteristics (lower voltage and I think lower resistance), causing “battery meters” and such components to misread their capacity. Some device have a setting you need to tourn on when using rechargeables.

84

I finally decided to try with OpenZwave and after some digging and trying around it worked out quite well. They look very stable and reporting properly to HA.

Issues still pending:

  • Valve opening is only available via MQTT or appdaemon (the climate entity shows the opening percentage if the reporting is enabled) however the UI does not show anything regarding valve opening.
  • Setting the valve manually in Manufacturer specific mode does not work with HA (I could only do it by directly sending the commands via MQTT)
  • The valves seem to respond with some delay compared to my old setup when changing values from the UI…but this may be because I run everything in a raspberry

What I found very promising is that for example, you can set all the configuration via MQTT like child control, delay of the backlight, valve opening reporting, etc which opens a lot of possibilities to customize…the downside is that you need to find the ids to send the commands per each valve.

85

I think you can do the same via the “original” zwave integration, via node configuration options/protection, via the gui or by service call (zwave.set_config_parameter) - just FYI