I was sucked into a Black Friday deal, and am now the proud owner of three Shelly BLU TRVs, which I have integrated into my HA setup. I’ll put some brief notes here: if you’re interested in the devices and want to know anything, ask away.
I have a 1980s house with gas-fired boiler and a single radiator circuit, 15mm mains and 10mm pipes to the rads, which is a pain. Luckily, I’ve fitted a number of normal TRV over the years, and even more luckily, I chose to fit Honeywell and Bulldog units, both of which have the same thread as the Shelly units. A number of adapters are supplied but I didn’t need any of them.
Installation was super-straightforward: pair with the supplied gateway, screw off the old TRV and screw on the new one (give the valve pin a few stout presses to clean it out first). The Shelly unit runs a quick calibration cycle and it’s away. It works completely standalone, but it’s best to add it to the Shelly app.
Their promises for gateway range seem a bit optimistic: but you are supplied with one gateway per TRV, even in the multipacks. They just need a USB-A power socket somewhere in the same room or close by the TRV.
One of my units has a much weaker BLE link than the other two, so after trying different combinations, I am in the process of getting that one replaced. Customer service appears excellent thus far, but I’ll save judgement until I have a working replacement.
The HA Shelly integration handles the TRVs through the gateways, exposing the unit as a climate entity. If you have it set to auto-adjust to the temperature in the Shelly app, you get to set a target temperature and you have a sensor that reads out the valve position. If you turn auto-adjust off, you get a temperature readout as part of a read-only climate entity, and a number entity that you can use to control the valve position.
The motor noise is certainly noticeable, and too loud for use in a bedroom. I tried it and it woke both me and my other half up, which is not good for spouse acceptance factor.
To work around this, as I really want it in there to run the bedroom cooler during the day when not needed, I’ve turned off auto-adjust and created an automation that works out an ideal valve opening position to set at bedtime so that when the heating comes on in the morning the rad warms up to an appropriate amount given the outside temperature. I’d imagine this will need tweaking, but it does mean no valve actuations during the night!
I haven’t got any of them independently calling for heat yet: the heating is still based off a temperature sensor on the hall wall, and the TRVs have to wait until the heating is running to actually have any impact. I might work out some sort of heuristic to allow a number of below-target rooms to call for heat, or if a single room is substantially lower.
Lots more playing to come. Hopefully they might save some noticeable proportion of their purchase price over their lifetime! At least I’ve been able to replace the aging Bulldog TRVs with the displaced Honeywell units.
UPDATE: I’ve taken manual control of all the valves now, as they make small audible adjustments even whilst the heating is not running, which is annoying and wasting the units’ batteries. Now I have the freedom to make adjustments only when I want to.