Zigbee TRV Recomendations?

Hardware
1

I’m new to Home Assistant and home automation. After being unimpressed with Hive smart TRVs I thought about getting some Zigbee ones and building something that actually works.

I bought one Moes TS0601 to see what they’re like before going all in and buying 6 or 8 of them, and so far I’m fairly unimpressed with that. The buttons on the device are pretty unconvincing and don’t work half the time, and the device seems to do what it wants (I’ve got the most basic automation set up to turn it on in a morning and off at night).

I’m looking for plain Zigbee TRVs supported by Zigbee2MQTT.

What TRVs do you have and how do you like them? Would you buy them again?

2

Everything Smart Home has some reviews.

I bought a single Aqara E1 to test, and it works as expected. I particularly like that it supports an external temperature sensor since the on-board sensor is always going to give you false readings.

I plan on buying some more for the other rooms where it makes sense to use them (those rooms that spend a meaningful part of the heating cycle unoccupied).

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3

I have those from moes. They are oke for my usage. I want to have a trv that will shutdown the radiator when temperature is x. They are working flawlessly for that. I want explain again why I want that, it will be a long post.

But you know…how much money that much quality and features.
It mostly depends on what you wanna do with those valves.

4

Yes, the price of the Moes was the main draw for me, almost half the price of most other brands. I’m not interested in fancy functionality either, just the basics and then control it through HA.

5

Its not the brad, its just a tuya valves. You bought the cheapest ones.

Basic functionality for smart trv is to turn on boiler or furnace if you can set it up to work with it. But many of them have a built in programs so you don’t need trv for that.

They are very precise in turning on/off radiator or reducing hot water flow especially if you combine them with bedroom and outdoor temperature sensors. And this is good because you can always have a few favorite radiators on some high temp what will reduce energy bill if you have boiler or furnace with warming up function.

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Just FYI: About the MOES TRV’s - they work fine but mine keep (hardware) breaking. Where the body screws on the base plate which connects to the Radiator, after a while, the plastic “ledges” break off and the two bits don’t connect anymore. Just had to buy another batch of them. They are not too expensive but it’s annoying.

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I hope this isn’t necromancy yet - I’m also looking for a decent zigbee TRV and it seems there’s no good resource that compares features. I’ve been reading reviews here and there, browsing aliexpress looking for models that don’t just look like rebrands of other ones, but that’s quite exhausting really.
I’m currently playing with the aforementioned MOES TRV (and have a sonoff on its way), but what’s become clear to me already here is that I want a valve that can open more gradually. And that’s something I almost never see mentioned anywhere. The MOES can only go in 25% increments, and already at 25% my radiators get really hot really fast, so it always overshoots the target temp by 2 to 3 degrees.
I’d be fine with automatic control using a target temp if that works fine, otherwise controlling the valve directly and using a more involved HA setup would work for me too.
I thought about indirectly controlling the MOES by repeatedly updating the target temp and thus getting it to open and close more frequently, but I assume that would wear out the battery quite quickly.

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I’m using better thermostat integration to calibrate trv with room temperature sensor. I didn’t noticed that it overheat the room with lower temperature setting. Its always around that temperature.
Moes trv is not perfect smart trv but for that price is very very good. It lacks some options like shut down trv but this can be emulated using better thermostat integration.
As for 25% opening goes it really doesn’t mean much to me. Radiator valve has very small shift from fully open to fully closed so I think it will be very very hard to make smart trv that will open on 1 % ratio. Maybe it can be done if radiator valve has long valve shift.

9

I was planning at looking at BetterThermostat, but I think the main problem in my situation is the valve. But as you said, at least it’s pretty cheap so I guess one shouldn’t judge it too harsh…

I don’t know how this differs from region to region - I’m in a fairly old shared building, the central heating is running at 60°C which is quite high. At 25%, the whole radiator gets hot quickly, the temperature still shoots up way after the valve is closed again. I guess I can make the interval shorter with more involved rules or BT, but again I think that would mean I need to open and close the valve quite frequently, draining the battery. And I guess it would only accelerate the problem described by @doubledutch , making the plastic ledges break sooner. So a TRV that has more opening positions would still be my preferred solution, if that exists.

10

Try better thermostat first. Sure, there are better smart trvs than this one from moes, but also much more expensive. As for this smart trv goes it never felled off zigbee network. This is the only battery powered device that I had that never dropped out.
Yeah, have some quirks… You can always try something more expensive, but will you get quality and features you want is another thing.

11

Hi, I’m new in the community, therefore complete newbe on Home Assistent in general, i just bought a homeassistent green with a skyconnect dongle and from aliexperss a TS 0601 TRV, when i try to integrete the TRV in Home assistent i only have firmware update option, no other options are visible, yet on Smart Life aplication i have many options, like temperature control, schedule on 4 time intervals, ETC, do you experience the same issues as i do ?

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12

That means the TRV is not officially supported by ZHA yet. If you feel like fiddling with ZHA quirks (just google, there’s a ton of tutorials of how to set it up), you can use the custom quirk being developed here. You basically drop a *.py file in a special folder and restart HA, then it should work (work better at least).

In my experience, Z2M (also mentioned in the github issue) has much better support for devices, so I did the switch. It’s a more complicated setup than just using ZHA which is integrated into HA, as it’s an additional piece of software running that HA will be talking to via an MQTT broker, but so far seems worth it to me.

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Update:

I’m pretty much done with the BRT-100-TRV. They’re rubbish, complete garbage. I bought three of those. Over the course of about two months, it’s happened three times (with two valves) that it just stopped accepting any zigbee commands. It was still on the network, it still reported any changes I made on the TRV directly, but it just ignored any changes I made via HA. The only way to fix this is to remove the batteries for a few seconds.
The first time that happened was before I used BT, I had some basic automation set up but still sometimes adjusted the heating setpoint manually on the TRV itself. So I though “OK, let’s use BT and not touch the TRV anymore, maybe mixing this gets the TRV confused.” I enabled the child lock, switched to BT, introduced a router to my network, even switched to Z2M 3 weeks ago, and then this morning I was greeted by a cold kitchen again, same symptoms. Second time the kitchen TRV did that. It happened another time in a different room with the same TRV.

To summarize:

  • First time was when I had no routers, used ZHA, used an automation but also adjusted the TRV manually
  • Second time was a different room, already on Z2M, a router in between, but still sometimes adjusted the TRV manually, no BT
  • Third time was the first TRV again, controlled by BT, child lock engaged, never touched it to adjust anything manually

It would be OK if I lived alone, I don’t mind fiddling with that stuff, but I have family and I don’t want this kind of B/S happening when I’m not home. This kinda makes home automation the opposite of it, you’re fixing that stuff more than it serves you…

I currently have two other contenders in the race:

The SONOFF just looks nice and is like 3,50€ more than the MOES one. The dial is awesome as it gives you haptic feedback should you decide to manually intervene. On the MOES one you have to find the middle button first, then be careful to not touch it again or you’ll change the mode and fsck everything up, and then find the +/- button. God, touch controls are awful.
But then again, the SONOFF is weird because it made me realize that dials and valves work the opposite way: Clockwise means closing a valve, but for dials it means “up” (= warmer). So at first when I just wanted to turn off the heat during installation I instinctively turned the dial it clockwise only to see the number on the display go up. :confused: :slight_smile:
Also, I couldn’t get this to pair via my router ( TS011F_plug_1), I had to dismount it again, take it to my coordinator and do the pairing. It then works fine via the router so far, but let’s see if there’ll be any surprises.

The TV01-ZB looks like you can make a “the 90s called” joke about it, but it performs surprisingly well. It’s still running without an external temperature sensor and BT, but according to an old (dumb) thermometer I put in the room it can hold the target temperature pretty well.
I picked it because it was another contender with actual physical buttons, but they feel cheap, and if you press the +/- buttons a little too hard, the case flexes in a weird way, which pushes all the buttons down at the same time!! I mean, just don’t do that, but still - why!? Anyways, I have another temp sensor on the way, so let’s see how it does with BT.

14

I understand your frustration. I have been there myself.
Last week I removed all my TRVs because they keep acting up, do stuff they shouldn’t and as soon as the battery gets low overheat the room costing money.

So I opted to go for this type:
Thermal Electric Actuator Water Separator Temperature Control Valve for Manifold OCT31: Amazon.com: Industrial & Scientific
It’s not this one exactly but a very similar type.
They give you on or off, no settings. And is mains driven.

They take about 5 minutes before they open/close the valve but are completely silent and do it well.
You might think they would be hard to control with no settings but I’m very surprised how accurate I can keep the temperature with these.

Here you see when we left home on Friday and the radiators turned off, the temperature dropped.
Then we got home and someone was home during the whole weekend so it kept the radiators on when needed.
Only when the sun gives us free heat does it go above it’s set temperature (orange line and the blue right now even though the radiators are off)

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The target temp on the purple, orange and light blue is 20.9 with a cold tolerance of 0.3.
The dark blue line has a set temperature of 21.3 and a cold tolerance of 0.3. But this room faces south so it gets a lot of heat from the sun

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You have probably problems with your zigbee network. Maybe you don’t have enough routers. I tested this on 3 trv only one was unresponsive. And this is even close to coordinator.
I paired it again and it works without problems. I don’t remember when I last time paired this valve.
But feel free to give us updates on another trv you bought.

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Dunno, I have 3 routers and 9 end devices, doesn’t sound like there can go an awful lot wrong there, but I’ve rebuilt my network three times now (1x ZHA, 2x Z2M) and the issue persists.

I’ve got an update on the Sonoff: As mentioned in my previous post, I could only pair it when I placed it next to my Coordinator, not via the routers. This would be a minor inconvenience, but there is another potential problem, at least if you don’t have a rock solid uptime of your network and don’t experiment: Battery drain.

When I first unboxed it and tried to unsuccessfully pair via the router, I just left it unpaired for about a week, because it was in a room I wasn’t using much, and using the physical dial on the TRV was actually really pleasing. I needed to adjust the temp maybe two or three times during that week. So, come next weekend and I decided to do further experimenting. Managed to pair the TRV successfully via the Coordinator, but to my surprise, the device reported 24% battery left. After a week!
But at least then in worked, and the battery would not drain any further. Fast forward two weekends, and I decided to rebuild my network, just in case the problem with the Moes TRVs would go away then. Fresh install of Z2M, start pairing a few devices, but get distracted eventually, so I left some unimportant devices unpaired for a day, including the Sonoff, since I would have to get the wrench out, take it to the Coordinator, you know the dance… Imagine my surprise when I re-paired the Sonoff the next day, and it showed 14% battery left.
So apparently, when the Sonoff loses connection to the zigbee network, it just starts spamming around like crazy trying to get on the network again, draining the battery really quickly.

That makes the TV01-ZB the only one that didn’t misbehave for me so far…

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17

Moes TRV are the the worse smart product I ever bought

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Look i don’t say that moes trv are the best in the world but this does works for me in my setup. I currently have 92 zigbee devices. Ie. smart trv are programed to shut off when furnace switch to summer mode. And they did few days ago. As the weather is like it is, it switched back to winter mode and all trv are fired back on to heating.
In my experience so far number of routers and their placement around the house plays a significant role in zigbee network. For example i have 3 zigbee switches in a living room. Two of them usually works immediately and one has a lag. That one that has a lag connected it self to different router than other twos. Solution is to add another router closer to them so that they connect to the same router.
I’m writing you this because you have to understand that zigbee network will work as good as it has enough routers to manage all devices. And most of all routers must have good connection between them to manage end devices properly.

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I guess so. Maybe I set my expectations too high for this stuff to “just work”, especially when not buying premium brands.

This is exactly the kind of things that don’t make sense on a theoretical level. It should still work just fine either way. And to me that means that even if I do enough fiddling now, repositioning routers, adding routers, and eventually getting the network stable: Every time I want to add another device, the whole network could just go apeshit again and I have to spend days trying to fix it, again.

But while researching some more, I found that changing my coordinator’s firmware might actually improve network stability, since according to some comments in the z2m issue tracker, people do experience problems with CC2652p with the recent 20230507 firmware, and should either switch to a new beta or older 2022 release. Fingers crossed.

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Well it wont. This is becuse they communicate throught routers. I had the same problem in another room. Adding router to it solved problem. To have everyting working super fast without any lag you will need enought routers. How much is enough depends on varoious things, like wall thickness, how big is a space, zigbee channell, coordinator placement etc.