I recently bought 11 SwitchBot TRVs (Smart Radiator Thermostats) along with a SwitchBot Hub 2 and a Hub Mini, with the plan being to get my currently single-zone heating system to be able to adapt to the situation in each room.
According to the product blurb these all support Home Assistant and Matter, but it turns out I turned up way too early to the party and the documentation is very sparse!
But I have got them up and running and present in HA so I thought it might be useful to write this up for anyone else.
Key points
- The TRVs themselves have no wifi - they are resolutely BLE only
- You then need some kind of SwitchBot hub (minimum of Hub 2 or Hub Mini Matter) to act as a BLE bridge
- As BLE is relatively low range, you likely need more than one hub (which is why I have two - one for each floor)
- The hubs support Matter, which would appear to be the only way to get the TRVs into Home Assistant
Config
- Get the hubs set up first otherwise the TRVs will stay in BLE, non-bridged mode
- Set up each TRV individually
- From your phone, install a new Matter device and scan the QR code of each of the hubs in turn
- The hubs will be added, but no TRVs yet
- Back to your phone for the missing link: within the Switchbot app, select the hub, go to Settings and “Matter Setup”
- Inside Matter Setup there’s a buttong for “Secondary Devices” - go in here, and you should see your TRVs - expose each of them
- Do this for all hubs
And now the TRVs should appear in Home Assistant!
Hub limits
Note that the hubs have limits on the number of devices they can expose:
- Original Hub Mini - none (avoid!)
- Hub Mini Matter - four
- Hub 2 - eight
- Hub 3 - thirty
Note that you have to explicitly expose specific devices from a specific hub, so this means they won’t be “load balanced” across multiple hubs, so plan the purchase, location and pairing of the hubs accordingly.
Hope this helps some folks - it was far from obvious and far from painless!