Q: Add smart TRVs to Hive multizone or... start from scratch? A: Deployed Eurotronic Spirit Z-Wave TRVs

Our tank is just a standard vented one. I had a look around it last night but didn’t notice any pockets for sensors. I would most likely make a small hole in the insulation and fit the sensor that way. The TH16 and 2 sensors are on the way to me and hope to have them by Saturday. Then I can also check the DHW thermostat to see if it has permanent live or how does it operate.
Next step would be to order a few TRV’s from amazon.de for the radiators down stairs. Configure and test them before I commit to buy the rest of the house. I don’t think I would mess with the controller/wall thermostats until summer, I don’t want an angry wife over Christmas :smiley:

Thanks again for taking from your time to answer my questions :+1:

@bikefright

Do you run your TRV with one of the preset enabled?

I am finding my TRV’s are always over shooting the set point.

I think long term I want to remove all the Hive control and control my Boiler ,Boiler pump, Central Heating pump through something like a Sonoff 4Chan Pro. Then use something like Schedy to control the heating based on if I am home or not and if the TRV’s demand heat etc.

@wills106: I don’t - remembering that I have a cold blooded wife and daughter, and I’ve exposed a 30min boost (aux_heat, which boosts hive for 30mins @0.5c above the current temperature of the hive thermostat) via the Eve iOS app, during winter I expect a bit of overshoot :rofl:. However in comparison to the previous 1-5 type thermostatic radiator valves, it’s night and day - what the bloody hell does 1,2,3,4 or 5 mean?

However, my greatest benefit (central heating wise) has come from installing the external temperature sensor (called different things by different manufacturers, but essentially it’s a thermistor of a given value which alters the resistance of a circuit on the boiler PCB allowing it to gauge the outside ambient temperature in terms of a resistance value). This means when it’s mild (like today), the hot water circulating through the radiators is of a lower temperature than a day when it’s sub zero outside.

The knock on effect for me is that when the hive thermostat reaches the setpoint and starts the shutdown sequence for the boiler (which includes a 10 minute overrun to prevent boiler damage), on a warmer day like today where it’s been up to 10c outside, the water in the rads has only been around the 50c-60c mark, so much less thermal mass and much less overrun - not allowing for my boost fanatics of course!

Judging by your one or two degree overshoots, that’s not bad IMHO, but I’m comparing to before I had the Spirit TRVs where my overshoot could be as much as 5 or 6 degrees.

What is the water temperature in your rads when you get the overshoot? Do you have an external temperature sensor on your boiler?

I also have two separate inbuilt stats on our boiler, one for SL1 (C/H) and one for SL2 (DHW), so I can individually set the max temp if I disconnect the external sensor - do you have something similar you could use to adjust the temp of the water?

At the end of the day, when the setpoint is reached and the boiler switches off, there is still the residual heat of several hundred litres of scalding hot water (potentially) sitting dissipating heat for half an hour or more after everything is “off”, which I suspect is what is mostly to blame for the overshoot.

I agree about the Hive, I often find the boiler has fired and is heating, but the manufacturer’s own Hive app doesn’t reflect it. I think the Hive integration (rendii) default update interval is 4 mins IIRC. The Sonoffs I’ve deployed with temp sensors are all set with a “teleperiod” of 30s, so it is very sensitive, with no effect on my MQTT instance whatsoever. The out of the box setting is 300s (5 mins) which is probably more like what the Hive stats update frequency is!

Of course now you’ve mentioned it, I’m going to go obsess over my new infuxdb/grafana reporting capability…:wink:(only set it up two days ago, so not enough data yet).

The next thing I need to do it to start tracking the Water temp leaving the boiler / going into the tank, temp coming out for heating and obviously the tank temp.

I have a few D18x20 sensors knocking about so was going to put them to use.

I’m not convinced the Tank Stat is working 100% but don’t fancy pulling it apart to replace.

I too have only just setup infuxdb/grafana (Yesterday) as I wan’t to monitor my electric use and also the solar etc. So I can add the various temp readings while I’m at it. Well once I figure out how to use it all.

I do have basic outside temp condition on my heating. Basically if the outside is below 10oC the heating automation works. If it’s above 10oC heating doesn’t come one. Obviously that needs calibrating more for Spring / Autumn use. That’s hopefully where Schedy comes in.

I’m currently working on a whole bunch of new heating control routines within node-red. Once I’ve resolved my new node-red based heating configuration, I will be testing them against a stand-alone (and not in use) single channel Hive heating receiver I’ve purchased off eBay using the three zigbee sticks I have (different manufacturers) to find the best (and most reliable) match. All this is the groundwork for next spring when I want rid of the vendor based Hive control. My plan B is the Danfoss dual channel receivers I mentioned above.

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SOoooooo, I didn’t get very far with HA and the Hive receiver, so I purchased 2 x Danfoss RXZ-2C dual channel receivers from a well know auction site and proceeded to bang my head against my wall with those instead.

The Hive receiver worked fine on my SystronicsRF RPi - but that has an Aeotec Z-Wave stick and a different way of profiling devices.

Long story short (Ha! you should know beter to believe that!), both are now under HA control and as a result of some troubleshooting I also have another Aeotec Z-Wave Gen5 USB stick sitting on my desk.

The Danfoss receivers were not fun to include in my Z-Wave network on HA, but after some fun with openHAB, ST and my SystronicsRF platform to see if it was just HA/open-zwave etc, I came up trumps.

Next phase over the coming weeks is to fine tune some of the new automations I’ve been working on over Xmas/New Year. I’ve been testing them against a pair of spare Sonoff Basic switches running Tasmota, “pretending” that the switches were/are the climate receiver relays.

The beauty of these Danfos dual channel receivers is that they are just a faceplate swap - remove the Hive receivers and replace with these :slight_smile:

I’ll provide another update soon.
bikefright.

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Am interested in where you have got to now as I am just about to return 5 Hive TRV’s which I’ve been wrestling with for the last 4 months.
3 main problems in had were:
(1) they are overheating / underheating,
(2) are widely inaccurate on temperature (in 1 room I have three radiators and they can vary by as much as 5 degrees between the radiators) and
(3) are heating a room where the valve has been set to 5 degrees or 7 degrees to ensure it does not come on in the morning

This last one was the straw that broke to proverbial camels back!

Back to the drawing board now - the mean reason I got these was so that I could turn off radiators overnight (bedrooms mainly) so that they did not come on when the heating came on in the morning. Call me lazy, I know!

Has anyone else managed to find a good working (at reasonable cost) TRV that integrates with HA?