Edit: 14/12/24 to include step for Hive Local Thermostat
Edit: 22/12/24 The same principles should apply to the Danfoss Ally TRVs. The Hive TRVs are detected as Danfoss by Z2M. Not sure if the Danfoss boiler control/ thermostat operate the same way though
How to move from Hive to Home Assistant
Please note that I am not an expert in HA in any way whatsoever. This post is to detail my own observations on using Hive with HA via ZIgbee2MQTT and I’m happy to be corrected if anything is wrong
I’ve been having issues in the past month with my Hive heating system not working correctly in Home Assistant. I don’t know why, will likely never find out and don’t particularly care as it gave me a final push to move wholesale over to Home Assistant controlled heating. In case it’s pertinent, I have a gas boiler for my heating with a separate hot water tank.
What I’m moving
11 Hive TRVs
1 Hive Thermostat
1 Hive Heating and Hot Water Receiver
I’ve already got a Zigbee2MQTT network set up so all devices were added to this same network. The first thing I did was turn off the Hive hub. Then I followed the pairing instructions from here - Hive SLR2 control via MQTT | Zigbee2MQTT - to add the Receiver and then quickly after, the Thermostat.
Apparently the quick way to put Hive TRVs into pairing mode is to remove them from the Hive app. As I mentioned earlier the first thing I did was turn off the Hub so I couldn’t do that. I manually put each TRV into pairing mode by removing a battery then holding the button below the temperature screen while popping the battery back in. It didn’t take long and worked out for the best as it meant I was adding each TRV individually so could keep track of which one was which.
Setting up the TRVs
There’s a lot of entities and switches for each TRV. Be careful not click on anything you don’t want to! I don’t claim to be anywhere near an expert and admit to being a bit flummoxed over some of the settings available however I only found a few settings need changed -
Mounted Mode Control - false
Programmed Operation Mode - setpoint
And for my particular case, the following were set
Thermostat vertical orientation - true
Viewing Direction - true
For each TRV, set Adaption Run Control to initiate_adaption. This tells the TRVs to find the points when the valve is fully closed and open and allows them to more accurately determine flow rate into the radiators.
I didn’t change any settings for the Thermostat. A brief note on the Thermostat, as you may wonder why only one entity is exposed (Battery). The Thermostat is necessary to send a command to the Receiver to turn on the boiler and that seems to be the only function I can find for it. In Zigbee2MQTT the Receiver Exposes are split into two - one for the heating, the bottom one for the hot water. I set System Mode to Heat for both of them and changed nothing else.
Setting up Home Assistant
This first step is important and is NOT optional. In HACS, download Hive Local Thermostat and take your time to set it up correctly. If this step is skipped or not set up correctly then your heating system will not respond correctly to commands. As the maintainer states, the Hive Heating and Boiler Receiver requires a series of MQTT commands to be issued in a certain order to work. Once Hive Local Thermostat is set up, you don’t have to worry about it.
I use another HACS custom component called Better Thermostat to create a meta TRV for each physical TRV. I have various temperature and humidity sensors in each room as well as a weather station outside all hooked into HA. Better Thermostat allows me to use these external sensors and in my opinon provides a warmer house without any spikes in temperature which happened with Hive. You don’t need to use Better Thermostat but I recommend it. From now on when I talk about thermostats I’ll mean the Better Thermostat ones.
I used two types of Helper - the first one is a Binary Sensor Group of all the Hive TRVs. This will be used in an automation later. The second helper used is Schedule which I used to create schedules (shockingly enough) for each Better Thermostat TRV and also the Hot Water.
One thing that really bothered me moving from Hive to HA is how to turn the boiler on and off when the TRVs required heat. Thankfully, Hive TRVs expose a sensor called Heat Required which does exactly what it says on the tin. When heat is needed by the TRV, the sensor turns On, when it’s not, the sensor is Off. The Binary Group Sensor created in the previous paragraph turns On when ANY TRV is On and Off when ALL TRVs are Off. I created two Automations (which should probably be just one) to set the Target Temperature on my Receiver to 25 which turns on the boiler and hot water starts being pumped out to any radiators that require it.
Turning on the hot water took me a bit of figuring out as the Controls exposed don’t tally with what I expected and seem to be redundant. At this moment I’m still not sure that everything is 100% working here but the hot water was turned on and the hot water tank got hot which is a good start. My hot water tank has a thermostat on it so all I needed was a way to turn the hot water tank on via the Receiver. This was achieved using Climate.Turn_on. “Hive Boiler Control” is my name for the Receiver.
Automations
In all cases remember to change the entity_id to your own
alias: House - Call for heat action ON
description: ""
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id:
- binary_sensor.hive_trvs
to: "on"
conditions: []
actions:
- action: climate.set_temperature
metadata: {}
data:
temperature: 25
hvac_mode: heat
target:
entity_id: climate.hive_boiler_control_heat
mode: single
alias: House - Call for heat action OFF
description: ""
triggers:
- trigger: state
entity_id:
- binary_sensor.hive_trvs
to: "off"
conditions: []
actions:
- action: climate.set_temperature
metadata: {}
data:
temperature: 15
target:
entity_id: climate.hive_local_boiler_control_climate
- delay:
hours: 0
minutes: 0
seconds: 10
milliseconds: 0
- action: climate.turn_off
metadata: {}
data: {}
target:
entity_id: climate.hive_local_boiler_control_climate
mode: single
Hot Water - on/ off
alias: Schedule - Hot Water
description: ""
triggers:
- entity_id:
- schedule.schedule_hot_water
trigger: state
conditions:
- condition: template
value_template: "{{ trigger.to_state.state in ['on', 'off'] }}"
actions:
- alias: Off? - turn hot water off. On? - turn it on!
if:
- condition: state
entity_id: schedule.schedule_hot_water
state: "on"
then:
- action: climate.turn_on
metadata: {}
data: {}
target:
entity_id: climate.hive_boiler_control_water
# below, the "button" pressed is the Hot Water Boost on the Hive Local Thermostat
- device_id: 31f09acfcca5ef40e3ad727e51810a85
domain: button
entity_id: 94878aaf86b8ae356033ad75134088da
type: press
else:
- action: climate.turn_off
metadata: {}
data: {}
target:
entity_id: climate.hive_boiler_control_water
mode: restart
Schedule Run - note I have different temps for Off, Morning and Evening. These are variables in my own set up which I replaced for clarity
alias: Schedule - Temperature Kitchen
triggers:
- entity_id:
- schedule.schedule_kitchen_hive
trigger: state
conditions:
- condition: template
value_template: "{{ trigger.to_state.state in ['on', 'off'] }}"
actions:
- if:
- condition: state
entity_id: schedule.schedule_kitchen_hive
state: "off"
then:
- data:
temperature: 14
target:
entity_id: climate.kitchen_hive_bt
action: climate.set_temperature
else:
- if:
- condition: time
before: "10:00:00"
then:
- data:
temperature: 18
target:
entity_id: climate.kitchen_hive_bt
action: climate.set_temperature
else:
- data:
temperature: 20
target:
entity_id: climate.kitchen_hive_bt
action: climate.set_temperature
