Recommendations for boiler controller/TRV/thermostat

Hardware
1

Hello,

I’m very new to this (haven’t even installed Home Assistant yet) and have a somewhat weak grasp of how my central heating system works. I consider myself a techie, but haven’t done anything with e.g. Zwave, and am not much good at soldering :smile:

We have a badly-insulated house, which I’m planning to make more energy-efficient over the next year or so, but the main upshot is that temperature in different parts of the house is very variable and heating bills are annoyingly high, hence the main requirement for TRVs…

I believe it is gravity-fed system (i.e. there is a hot water cylinder) and according to this, is a “Y-Plan” system. The valve is dodgy and needs fixing, though, as the heating gets stuck “on” sometimes, and needs a good old turning-off-and-on-again to turn the heat off :roll_eyes:

What I’m after is recommendations for TRVs which will integrate well with HomeAssistant (but can also be easily overridden by non-technical people (i.e. the rest of my family) or e.g. be controlled via Amazon Echo or an app. It looks like I also need a boiler controller and a thermostat to talk to that controller as a sort of “turn the boiler off of last resort”.

There is a somewhat interesting caveat to this in that I’m planning to get a Sunamp heat battery put in in the fairly near future in order to cut out gas usage and utilise our solar panels a bit more than they currently are. This will cut out the water cylinder, but effectively the central heating should remain the same, i.e. calling for heat from the new heat source in the same way. I guess that means I don’t want to be spending loads on e.g. the boiler controller if we’re ripping the boiler out in the near-ish future

We are also using Octopus Agile to take advantage of super-cheap or even negatively-priced electricity in the middle of the night, though there hasn’t been a lot of that so far this year. The main reason for this would be the Sunamp, though it will be a while until we can get that installed, but for now we try to manually adjust electricity usage to be outside the 1600-1900 peak and maybe run the energy-intensive stuff when it’s cheaper…

I hope that all makes sense, happy to clarify anything if needed…

2

@ticktockhouse , did you make any progress? I’m trying to figure out my best setup for my newly bought home. Very interested how you managed to fix your setup.

3

@fschade Not yet no, ran into some cash flow issues, so I haven’t been able to do anything yet. I’d like to get something done before the winter ideally, though.

I saw a guy from Tado on Fully Charged, though, which also appears to have a Home Assistant integration, though, so might look into that.

I would put more links in, but it appears I’m not allowed at the moment…

If you do make any progress, let me know how you get on :slight_smile:

4

Hi @ticktockhouse , The downside from Tado is the monthly fee and that the don’t support the bus control (MUST WATCH BEFORE CHOOSING A SMART THERMOSTAT! - YouTube). Modulating the boiler is essential for good efficiency.
I would like to use Tuya TRV’s as they have many options and well priced as well. The thing i don’t know is how these should communicate to the boiler. I have a vaillant boiler. I can add a module so it will talk OpenTherm, but not sure what is need between the Tuya valves and this module.

5

Appreciate that this is a year on, but also it’s coming up to winter so…

I have used Tado with Home Assistant and it was great - easy to integrate, lots of control, and if you use the Home/Away automation in Home Assistant you can skip subscribing to Tado too :crazy_face:

Regarding bus communication, the wired tado does allow the data bus connection to a whole range of boilers, using both OpenTherm and proprietary communication protocol. Mine was hard wired to my Worcester Bosch, allowing it to modulate for best efficiency.

If you choose the wireless version, then they decided to only allow the relay on/off control which was a bit disappointing…

6

@jesseb4me, thanks for getting back to me. I may consider Tado. So you say, you don’t need to subscribe to the monthly fee?