Best Wifi enabled thermostat

[weeboot]

bit of a necrobump, but the thread is still valid.
Now that we've got back to the cooler time I've year, I'm starting to think about how I can better schedule the heating in our house.
Already have evohome running everything, but we have a bit of a mixed occupancy profile due to being a "blended" family.

Anyone got any thoughts on how I could implement a two week schedule with Evohome? I run home assistant as well, so could leverage some of that, and probably google calendar or something along those lines..

Any thoughts

[LocoBlade]

We have a somewhat split weekly calendar at the moment as I currently work alternate shifts that requires getting up at 5:30 every other week. I set a normal weekly heating schedule that comes on when my wife and kids get up for school but use Home Assistant to control or Geniushub system to put the heating and hot water in earlier if I'm on an early. I do that by running an automation at 5am every weekday morning and if my phone alarm is set within 30 minutes of that time it fires up the heating/water for an hour, anything more than 30 and it quits without doing anything so reverts to the regular schedule at about 7am. You could do similar things with the home occupancy sensor for each member of the house (with a phone) to turn individual bedrooms off etc and I have one that turns everything off if everyone is over 10 miles away meaning we aren't going to be back home imminently.

Happy to share the automations if they're useful

[weeboot]

LocoBlade said:

We have a somewhat split weekly calendar at the moment as I currently work alternate shifts that requires getting up at 5:30 every other week. I set a normal weekly heating schedule that comes on when my wife and kids get up for school but use Home Assistant to control or Geniushub system to put the heating and hot water in earlier if I'm on an early. I do that by running an automation at 5am every weekday morning and if my phone alarm is set within 30 minutes of that time it fires up the heating/water for an hour, anything more than 30 and it quits without doing anything so reverts to the regular schedule at about 7am. You could do similar things with the home occupancy sensor for each member of the house (with a phone) to turn individual bedrooms off etc and I have one that turns everything off if everyone is over 10 miles away meaning we aren't going to be back home imminently.

Happy to share the automations if they're useful

Sounds like you've worked something good out there, but I want to be less reliant on user devices... The schedule is definite, it's just a 14 day cycle not 7..

[rossyl]

If you have a home which
- just has one heating circuit,
- want to be able to turn off some rads but have others on,
- have 15+ rads
- remotely control it; and
- modulates boiler heating, rather than just turn it off and on,

What's the best product?

Wiser seems to have so many TRV problems
Evohome seems to have a very outdated app
Hive just turns the boiler off and on, without modulation.

Grateful for thoughts.

[LocoBlade]

weeboot said:

Sounds like you've worked something good out there, but I want to be less reliant on user devices... The schedule is definite, it's just a 14 day cycle not 7..

I don't know Evohome but assuming there's no customisation like that available then HA is probably your only realistic option, removing the weekly schedule from Evohome entirely and using something like this to build a custom schedule

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/scheduler-ca...

This custom component also only supports weekly based schedules by default but I suspect there'll be ways to set up a couple of separate schedules each with a condition perhaps based on week number (odd weeks run x schedule, even weeks run y schedule) or something like that.

[LocoBlade]

rossyl said:

If you have a home which
- just has one heating circuit,
- want to be able to turn off some rads but have others on,
- have 15+ rads
- remotely control it; and
- modulates boiler heating, rather than just turn it off and on,

What's the best product?

Wiser seems to have so many TRV problems
Evohome seems to have a very outdated app
Hive just turns the boiler off and on, without modulation.

Grateful for thoughts.

From my understanding, modern boilers generally modulate their output based on return water temperatures regardless of controls being used (even a mechanical stat). If you want it to go a stage further and also modulate water output temperatures etc then I believe you'd need to look at the boiler manufacturer's own controls or maybe something compatible with Opentherm if your boiler also supports it. On that basis Hive isn't any worse than any other third party controls

Where Hive does have a slight disadvantage is that it's a "dumb" room stat that doesn't learn how the room heats/cools and possibly where the "lack of modulation" comment has arisen from. With Hive if you set it to 20c it will call for heat until the room stat measures 20c before it switches off and won't switch back on until it drops back below. That's no worse than a mechanical stat but compare that to most other smart stats that learn the room's characteristics how quickly it heats up/cools down and often also adjust for outside temperature to turn the heat on and off at different temperatures above/below the set room temperature to try and ensure the room temperature stays more stable. From experience that wasn't a major issue with conventional radiators that react pretty quickly, but with slower responding heating systems like underfloor heating it's a real pain as turning off at 20c means the room doesn't stop heating until it gets to about 23c, and then by the time it's dropped to 20c it's too late to heat the floor to keep it near that temperature so it drops to about 18c on the downside.

[threadlock]

rossyl said:

If you have a home which
- just has one heating circuit,
- want to be able to turn off some rads but have others on,
- have 15+ rads
- remotely control it; and
- modulates boiler heating, rather than just turn it off and on,

What's the best product?

Wiser seems to have so many TRV problems
Evohome seems to have a very outdated app
Hive just turns the boiler off and on, without modulation.

Grateful for thoughts.

We've had Tado for 3 years in a similar situation and it works very well.

[kambites]

We have Wiser in a very similar situation (only 12 radiators) and it's been pretty much faultless.

[rxe]

I have Wiser on about 10 radiators and it has been perfect. The only issue has been the cheapo batteries that come with the valves - a decent set of alkalines seems to last a year, and the lithium AAs haven’t expired yet.

[BigBen]

Wiser on 16 rads and agree on swapping the supplied batteries for almost anything else. Other than that faultless.

Top tip, if you move and take the Wiser system with you don't leave the batteries in such that you can hear them adjusting in a random packing box in your temporary digs.....

[AW10]

Good to see that Wiser has added modules to control single and multi-zone wet UFH to their product line.

[AC43]

number2 said:

Just get a NEST. For the majority of households this will be perfect. All the WiFi TRVs etc sound like a right unreliable faff for no material gain.

I posted here in June 2019 saying my Evohome system had been rock solid in the first 10 months.

Two years and four months later its still utterly reliable. Also, useful and efficient.

[VEX]

HEADS UP

Lots of Black Friday Tado offers with between 40 and 50% off when shopping around

Just ordered starter kit from Tool Station and 9 TRV's from Amazon. All in for under £500.

[AW10]

Amazon has dropped their price for Wiser starter kits (hub, 1 thermostat and 2 iTRVs) from £210 to £150 but still a far cry from last year's black friday prices of £80.

[VEX]

Tado delivered saturday.
Installed yesterday.

Great app and set up. Whole system done in 3hours, which included a fight with the wiring centre (lots going on in there)

Very happy so far.

[AstonZagato]

Any advice on installers? I'd like to do this but I'd want someone who knows what they are doing as I have a very complex system (over 40 rads).

[ecsrobin]

Hoping for some help. I have a tado system running off an extension kit added to the combo and all the radiators with smart TRV’s and it works very well.

Kitted my mothers new build out with them but instead of extension kit used 2 wired thermostats as it has dual zone heating and then Smart TRV’s. The zone controllers are in the master bedroom for upstairs and randomly in the hallway the other side of the living room door downstairs, both having a radiator associated with them that does not have any TRV.

Upstairs seems to be fine but downstairs when any room calls for heat it fires up the living room radiator. I’ve tried various things but just can’t get the system running how I’d like.

All TRV’s are associated to the correct zone controller as I assume the radiator would not get heat without this.

Any thoughts from the PH collective?

[AnotherGuy]

LocoBlade said:

weeboot said:

Sounds like you've worked something good out there, but I want to be less reliant on user devices... The schedule is definite, it's just a 14 day cycle not 7..

I don't know Evohome but assuming there's no customisation like that available then HA is probably your only realistic option, removing the weekly schedule from Evohome entirely and using something like this to build a custom schedule

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/scheduler-ca...

This custom component also only supports weekly based schedules by default but I suspect there'll be ways to set up a couple of separate schedules each with a condition perhaps based on week number (odd weeks run x schedule, even weeks run y schedule) or something like that.

I have the same issue. I'm now wfh and back in the office on a 2 week cycle (week1 in the office and week2 wfh) and the lack of a 14 day programme in Ecohome is a pain.
I run SmartThings and Honeywell have been promising SmartThings native control forever without ever delivering. I'm now looking at an Edge based driver/routine to see if I can implement this (Groovy now is now old-hat for SmartThings).

I'd also echo the folks above. i have Evohome running hot water, 8 rads and wet ufh system without hiccup for over 2 years.
(note: there is a known bug with the Evohome control unit allowing the rechargeable batteries to go flat and therefore only lasting a couple of minutes off the stand - the fix is pretty simple, involving removing the batteries putting it on the charger which then means it notices the batteries are missing and starts chraging them when they are replaced)

[weeboot]

Back again, and I've finally had some time to work on a Google Calendar. Home Assistant, Evohome integration.
I've got as far as getting a calendar entry in Google Calendar to trigger a state in Home Assistant which drives an automation to set temperature and turn on a zone in Evohome. Very pleased with myself.
However, I think I need to delete the set points in Evohome, as it. within minutes, resets the state of the zone back to the set point stored in the schedule.

I'm not sure if I'm doing the wrong thing in HA or Evohome, but if anyone has any thoughts I'd gladly hear them!!

[LocoBlade]

Yes I suspect you may need to delete the existing schedules but not sure. I have my regular schedules set in Geniushub and simply use the HA integration to call a boost when I want heat outside the normal schedule, so when it detects via my phone alarm that I'm on an early shift it just boosts the heating for the bedroom and kitchen for an hour at a higher temperature than it would otherwise be set to, rather than trying to rewrite the schedule itself.