I’m in a quandry and looking for some thoughts or experience on heating/cooling control.
We’re based in Europe but have had HVAC installed upstairs in the house. It can heat and cool, but in reality we only use it to cool when it is hot and to circulate air.
Otherwise, we have a normal system gas boiler with a dumb radiator system with ordinary TRVs and one dumb thermostat in the downstairs hall. We’re often finding as a result a conflict between the systems and having to fiddle with the TRVs to avoid the Ecobees being triggered to cool a room.
So I’m looking to put in place a smart TRV system. Ideally it would pull the temperature readings from the Ecobees so that they are all working with the same data and the risk of conflict falls away (as long as the desired temperature is also set the same, which should be pretty easy).
However, where my research has got me is:
- Ecobee does not natively support controlling any smart TRV.
- Most thermostats do not obviously support contolling both HVAC and boiler/radiator systems at the same time. The only vague possibility seems to be Nest Learning Thermostat, but it does not have any native smart TRV. It works with Energenie TRVs but I read the integration between them is poor. But I might be wrong about this. Has anyone found a system that does?
In light of this, I was wondering if there is a smart TRV system that integrates into HA, which I have up and running and integrated with everything smart at home. In particular, I would then be looking to use that integration to get the smart TRVs to defer to the Ecobees (at least in relevant rooms upstairs), at a minimum to do their work (essentially automatically turning the radiators up and down) based on at least the actual temperature reported by the Ecobees and their room sensors and ideally also based on the minimum desired temperature set on the Ecobee.
If nothing else, this would also address issues I read about with smart TRVs that they struggle to read room temperatures properly because they are next to the radiator itself.
It may be this doesn’t exist or isn’t workable. I turn to this forum only after many days of research!