Hi, @gwatuk - we can’t be more than 30 mins apart - I’m not far from Oxford.
I’m away from home right now, but would be happy to share everything when I can.
What sort of things do you want to do with your Hive?
Good to hear from you!
There’s a couple of things I’ve been wanting to do.
Selective heat on demand - so it only happens at certain times of the day.
(So that would be to ditch Hive’s heat on demand and design something similar but more flexible.)
And secondly I’d like to have a kind of group boost option. If I want to boost the temperature of my lounge I need to boost two TRVs and boost the system’s thermostat (which is in the lounge).
Those two things are actually quite similar.
But it’s very early days for me. I’ve only created one automation so far - making a temperature sensor boost a TRV. But I was really pleased when I’d made it work!
OK, so I don’t have heat-on-demand (I have no smart TRV’s). I got one for Christmas to play with, but haven’t tried it out yet. If I understand you correctly, you want the TRV to call for heat within certain time-windows? That’s sounds possible but I haven’t programmed that.
Basically, I put a calibrated Hue temp sensor (any make will do) into each room and then load-balanced my radiators. That is to say, I adjusted each (manual) TRV until I got the right temp in each room for a given temp at the Hive thermostat.
My concern with on-demand TRV’s is that one may call for heat, then the next, then the next such that your boiler is always on but only ever servicing one radiator at a time. I’m not sure if that is a real concern or not, but I have no experience with them.
My use of the smart TRV’s would only be to turn upstairs radiators down when house_mode: awake (i.e. during the day). It would then turn the upstairs TRVs on (back to the balanced point) when outside_light: dark (i.e. in the evenings). …something like that, anyway.
My heating spec is as follows (let me know if you still want to have it):
Basic modes:
-
Heating: [off, on, scheduled, boost]
- Scheduled windows override
house_modebut notpresence.- This means I can set the heating at 6:30am before I get up (
house_mode: asleep). - I set this window to the default day temp setting so, when I do get up, nothing changes
- This effectively means I can set the time when
house_modeisawake) ashouse_mode: awakeis currently triggered on first movement downstairs after 7am. - Now I think about it, I should add a time component to waking the house up.
- This effectively means I can set the time when
- Outside of the scheduled windows (which sets a specific temp), the temp goes back to the default (based on
house_modeandpresence). - I have 4 scheduled windows (but easy to make more)
- This means I can set the heating at 6:30am before I get up (
- On:
- has 3 temp defaults based on
house_modeandpresenceso: - home and awake
- home and asleep
- away.
- …but I have never had to use ‘On’.
- has 3 temp defaults based on
- Off:
- I personally set the ‘Off’ temp default to be my anti-frost temp.
- Boost
- Pushing the ‘boost’ button temperature increases relative temp by an amount (according to a default setting) for a duration (according to a default setting).
- Scheduled windows override
-
Hot water: [off, on, scheduled, boost]
- follows the same principles as heating but without any temp defaults and so not influenced by
house_modeorpresence. - The only default setting is boost duration.
- follows the same principles as heating but without any temp defaults and so not influenced by
In reality, the Hive heating is always on, but the temp setting varies according to the mode (above) and the influences (below). I typically leave the system in ‘scheduled’ mode all year round and rarely have to adjust the defaults.
Influences:
- House mode: {Awake, Asleep, Manual}
‘Awake’ is automated
‘asleep’ is set by a ‘good night button’
house_modecan be manually set in my dashboard - Presence: {home, away}
Both ‘home’ and ‘away’ are automated based on user andzone.home
Each mode and influence has a default temp setting for heating (which can be adjusted) and a boost setting for heating and duration.
After a couple of days getting the defaults right (and setting the schedule windows), I’ve been able to leave it almost completely alone. …hope that all makes sense.
Future
- My Hive is currently working via the Hive integration (which uses the Hive online account). Now that I have got it working as I want, I will changeover to using completely local control (without the modem device) using Zigbee2MQTT. I am only waiting for it to become warmer outside to make the switch.
- Integrate the single smart-TRV as mentioned above to see if I want to add this is as a proper influence.
Here are some screen shots of the control dash so you can get an idea…
Main dash button
Pushing that button takes you to the control screen…
- You can see:
- I am in ‘schedule mode’
- 4 scheduled windows are set and active
- We are in the 2nd scheduled window right now
- The boiler is heating right now
- The graph:
- The grey bars on the graph show when the boiler has been actually heating.
- the temp changes last night show when HA was being upgraded and some other docker-related updates so Hive defaulted to ‘off’ which for me is set to 12 °C.
- I am in ‘schedule mode’
- The default settings are hidden behind a drop-down so I don’t modify them by accident.
- The most important defaults (to me) are displayed on the screen but tapping them does nothing so I can’t change them by accident.
- I have to look in the drop-down to change them.
So, homing in on the ‘default settings’ drop-down…
Away defaults:
On defaults:
Schedule defaults (1st scheduled window showing):
‘Boost’ defaults:
[edited for content, typos and clarity - I posted too early by accident]
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I’ve got Hive TRVs everywhere except the hall. On the whole I think they are pretty good. But the problem with all TRVs is that they are responding to the temperature as measured right next to the radiator which is bonkers really (although I think Hive claim that they have some kind of algorithm to beat this). So with HA I’m planning to put a temperature sensor in each room at some distance from the rad and let them control the TRV target temperature settings. I’ve bought some cheap Tuya sensors from eBay (£5 each!) and they seem to be pretty good. (They’re within about 0.2 degrees of the Hive thermostat and are also consistent with some other sensors I have from SensorPush.)
If you fit your Hive TRV in your bedroom without using heat on demand and set its schedule to heat in the evening just before you go to bed then there’s a reasonable chance that the main Hive thermostat will have the boiler turned off. And if you use heat on demand to deal with this you will then burn lots of gas heating the rest of the house when you don’t need to 
.
The Hive TRVs are quite expensive but I’ve always thought that they would pay for themselves. (This is the second property where I’ve installed them - we only recently moved to Oxford and installing the Hive system was one of the first things I did.)
If I can get HA to control them it takes things to a whole new level and should have a significant impact on our gas bills 
.
Hi John, is there any chance you could post your YAML files, this is exactly what im looking for ( but not got the knowelege to get it running) please 
A word of warning the messages zigbee sends for climate devices appears to be in the wrong format for Hive.
I’m considering raising a github ticket on it to see if they’ll change what is posted or not.
(It’s small things like 1 and 0 vs true and false, and missing parameters when things are changed - you seem to need to resend the full message versus just
There’s some other good posts on it but the main thing is you basically need to listen for events on the real Hive device (to read current temp, set temp via Stát and mode) and create a manual mqtt climate device which will send commands from HA for you.
This is a good view of it.
Other device is also there, SLR2, which has slightly different endpoints (basically the same but _heat, _water IIRC).
There’s also this, which is a bit more straight forward.
My own views of the messages, with minimal experience, is that its impossible to sync or update the schedule to/from HA - doesn’t seem to impact you as you’ve created HA only schedules as well?
This is because the schedule is clearly maintained on the Thermostat but all other messages are to the receiver and its unclear if you can change the schedule. I might mess around with it again in summer myself but I got annoyed.
It seems like the stat sends a message for the next day of schedules to the receiver -
Thanks, but I’m not sure what you mean by this. Are you integrating via the hub (cloud) or via Z2M (local)? When you write ‘zigbee sends’, which direction are you referring to?
I am currently via the hub but intend to change to Z2M (to remove the cloud integration) when it’s so I can play without worrying about it needing to be on. All the comments with Z2M appear to be OK regarding control (I was aware of that thread you posted - very informative).
I’m referring to local, so Hub removed.
I had issues with heating not activating via default zigbee2mqtt messages from HA.
Both threads offer solutions but I’ve temporarily gone back to cloud.
OK, good to know - thanks for the tip!
Hey John,
Any chance you feel comfortable posting some of what you have done above?
I’m back messing with mine and you’ve got some real good stuff.
Do you think my name is John? I dismissed the email notification from you at the time because I assumed you were asking someone else.
So, 2 emails to John now and I’m thinking maybe you guys are referring to me. Let me know and I’d be happy to help.
Please be aware that I am about to change my logic to remove both ‘off’ and ‘on’ as I have found them essentially redundant. I’m then going to try setting it up MQTT (spring is here so I can afford to not have heating for a while) so this means you can have what I have now, wait a bit to have the (better) simplified version and/or wait a bit longer for the MQTT version (if it works).
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I went off the other poster hahahahaha.
Apologies.
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No need to apologise!
I’m on Mqtt myself as the Hub disconnected a few times so I lost “remote” control and I figured why the hell not.
At the moment just going with turning it on and off.
jchh , sorry I was using a font that made your user name look like John. I really apologise , yes it was you. could we please have a look at your code
What was the font? …this sounds very strange to me.
Either way no worries and no apologies necessary - it simply took me a while to work out you were referring to me 
All the hive logic is in a single package file but it refers to a couple of non-hive entities (like presence, and contact sensors etc) so give me a couple of days to annotate the package, get the external referenced entities (as you’ll need to use them as well or remove their presence from the logic) etc.
thankyou ( as well as the font it could be my age , i hate getting old lol )
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Hi,
Sorry for the delay, I made some changes to the water package which is now identical in logic to the heating package. I also did some testing to ensure that it survives a restart during a change (this happened to me last week). I’m always happy to self-diagnose, but in sharing this with you I wanted to ensure it is as robust as possible.
OK, If you’re ready, I’ll upload the heating package first. I have added some annotations, but they won’t be enough, so take a look and then ask me as many questions you like. If/when you’re happy with heating, I’ll share the water package which will relatively simply being a near identical copy of water - only one real difference (regarding HA restarts). I use a custom dashboard to control it all which uses a bunch of HACS custom cards which we can go through as well.
Ready to receive?
I just moved across from the Hive integration to MQTT, so now have 2 versions, both working. Perfect timing as MQTT survives an internet-outage (which I just had).
Both versions are 99% the same, but I will only be updating the MQTT version from now on.
Which version are you interested in?
Hi @jchh, @gwatuk,
I have followed this thread as I am planning a similar setup to Garreth’s and be independent of the Hive Hub. I am planning to replace my current setup with a Hive Thermostat V3 with a 2-ch receiver to be fitted to a standard gas boiler + hot cylinder and fit TRVs to almost every radiator in the house. Ultimately, I want to be able to switch off the entire ground floor overnight and leave the bedroom + bathroom radiators on at 19-20ish, and then warm up the ground floor early morning before we wake up.
I have a few questions and I would really appreciate any help provided:
- Can you share your hardware setup relevant to the MQTT?
- Have you implemented the Tuya-based temperature feedback and does it work better than the Hive TRV algorithm?
- Can you share you HA files to use as a starting point for my setup?
I am an electronics engineer by background and I have done my fair share of coding, but it would be incredibly useful to have something that works as a starting point!
Thanks in advance for any information relevant on how to get the Hive setup running with zigbee2mqtt or similar.