Drayton Wiser - Hints and Tips Thread

[B'stard Child]

London1986 said:

B'stard Child said:

For this specific issue I quickly found that not heating rooms put a much greater demand on the CH system when the rooms were required to be heated

My example - Dining Room and Living Room are not used AM but used PM

Not heating AM meant that the warm up time PM was much longer than I would like so ended up increasing the heating time to compensate - what I did was effectively set the AM temps to a set back so they did get a little heat up to 3-4 deg less than target

This meant that the PM warm up was much faster and didn't require extended heating periods

Yes exactly this. Do you use comfort mode or are you manually setting your target temps for the PM?

All manual although I have started to use ECO mode now the temps are milder to stop overshoots - my current boiler configuration doesn't lend itself to comfort mode right now.

London1986 said:

B'stard Child said:

I considered this but ruled it out on the basis that Mrs BC would walk into a room controlled by a dumb TRV - determine that the room was too cold (even if the heating had just come on) and would wind the fker up to max and then leave the room........ I think I'm not alone in being burdened with a partner than has no understanding of a heating system and the control element of a TRV........

Ha yes this would throw your whole experiment out the window. You are definitely not alone there mate, however my mrs is under strict instruction not to touch the valves or the wiser room stat. Any changes in temp she needs to come to me so I can adjust the schedule. I’m trying to get to a point where I can set and forget the temp. Once I get something consistent, then I’ll try experimenting with smart valves vs dumb

I know I'm not alone on that

They really can be a different breed when it comes to understanding and expectations

Yesterday Mrs BC moaned the water in the shower was too hot - I got in there after and the temp control was wound round pass the safety stop and at the max - I said well what do you expect if you turn it up to max - she said I tried it everywhere - as usual she has an instant expectation of change

[B'stard Child]

London1986 said:

Does anyone know if having the Wiser system removes the ability to control the heating flow temperature for your boiler?

I've turned my boiler flow temp to zero just to test it, and the radiators are working normally, and according to the boiler manual this should turn the heating off, so not sure if this is because of the wiser system or or if I have a faulty boiler.

I'm not sure what you mean

If you mean you've turned the boiler target temp down to the point at which it switches off the boiler - wiser won't know this - it will open rads and turn on the circulation pump and just pump cold water round the system

Only if your system boiler has control of the pump (not normal in most systems will it result in all the TRV's opening but no circulation pump on)

[B'stard Child]

London1986 said:

B'stard Child said:

If you mean you've turned the boiler target temp down to the point at which it switches off the boiler - wiser won't know this - it will open rads and turn on the circulation pump and just pump cold water round the system

Yes that's exactly what I mean and what I've done. Here is a pic of my current boiler controls.. notice the heating dial is set to zero.



However the rads are still getting hot which leads me to believe it's likely a faulty dial.

That's a combi set up right? (Different temps for Rads or HW) with a built in timer for heating times

I'd be wondering how Wiser is wired up cos that's blew my mind (well outside my experience on a system boiler with single temp output)

[B'stard Child]

London1986 said:

Anyway... bringing this chat back to Wiser... is anyone aware of a an app or device that allows me to track when my rads have come on?

For example, in the Wiser app, I am able to see (via insights) what the actual room temp was for a room (or at least what Wiser thinks the actual temp was!). I'm also able to see what my schedule is set at. But I'd really like to see when there was a call for heat just so I know when the room is being heated via rads vs the sun/outside temp.

The app does show you when a room is calling for heat in real time so they obviously have that data, just wonder whether they store it, would be really good to see historical data as opposed to just real time.

If you go on insights and then select an individual rad do you see the heating cycles (mine I know is by time rather than rads calling for heat whenever they are below target but it looks like this



Ignore the AM and look at the PM - you can see the solar gain in the room in the afternoon and the the start of heating and the room temp rise as the heating starts to bring the room up to temp

[B'stard Child]

Sort of - the black line shows target temp - when room temp is below target temp the TRV opens - I just wondered if in your set up a rad coming on would show as a black line going vertical like mine does running on a schedule

If that makes any sense?

[B'stard Child]

London1986 said:

B'stard Child said:

Sort of - the black line shows target temp - when room temp is below target temp the TRV opens - I just wondered if in your set up a rad coming on would show as a black line going vertical like mine does running on a schedule

If that makes any sense?

Yes correct the black line is target temp, but it doesn't necessarily correlate to if your radiators are on or not.

Coming back to this specific issue

Heating started at 9am and scheduled to run till 11am on all rooms

All the rooms that have hit target temp by 9.30 am look like this



That says to me that wiser has put some heat in the room seen the temp rise and shut down the TRV

[B'stard Child]

Joe M said:

B'stard Child said:

Coming back to this specific issue

Heating started at 9am and scheduled to run till 11am on all rooms

All the rooms that have hit target temp by 9.30 am look like this



That says to me that wiser has put some heat in the room seen the temp rise and shut down the TRV

What schedule so you have set for that room?

Black line is the setpoint, varied by schedule or manually. It can sometimes come on or off early depending on your settings for comfort and eco modes.

Schedule for that room is same as all the others 9am to 11am

Eco is on and I manually increased to room temp to a stupid number - the rad was luke warm (I checked) and the TRV opened - however the schedule ended at 11 so it never made the silly temp in time before heating went off (big room)

[B'stard Child]

London1986 said:

B'stard Child said:

Coming back to this specific issue

Heating started at 9am and scheduled to run till 11am on all rooms

All the rooms that have hit target temp by 9.30 am look like this



That says to me that wiser has put some heat in the room seen the temp rise and shut down the TRV

Yes but this doesn’t neccassarily mean that ‘Wiser put the heat in the room’. From that graph, the outside temp starts to increase around 5am and notice the orange temperature line starts to increase BEFORE your set temp at 9am. This could indicate that maybe the outside sun had heated this room.

Yeah south facing room - gets some good solar gain but not normally that early

The temp increasing before wiser days heat comes on - seems to be a characteristic/alignment of wiser v real time

[B'stard Child]

London1986 said:

B'stard Child said:

The temp increasing before wiser days heat comes on - seems to be a characteristic/alignment of wiser v real time

Interesting.

Here are some of my examples, notice how the set temp (black line) is before the actual temp. Do you have comfort mode activated? If so, then yours would make sense

No comfort mode

Your first example shows exactly same thing if you look closely



I think it’s just a Wiser thing

[B'stard Child]

OutInTheShed said:

So basically, it's coming on 30 minutes ahead of the increased 'set temp' in a miserable failure to have the house warm when you want it.
The actual temp is still 2 degrees short of the set point 2 hours later.

That doesn't seem great.

What post are you referring to?

[B'stard Child]

London1986 said:

dhutch said:

What you ask for and what Wiser actually does is certainly a bit random. And what it reports is again not always exactly what it does.

This is kind of why I have turned the smart modes off (comfort and eco). I know they say it will 'learn over time' but I don't really have faith in their algorithm. I've experienced too many times where the heating comes on too early or goes off too early. I prefer using my own algorithm, it certainly is a lot quicker for me to learn how quickly it takes to heat a room than Wiser!

The Eco mode I’m starting to like - didn’t use it over the winter period because I knew what temp I wanted and wasn’t worried about overshoots - spring however it’s proving quite useful in stopping overshoots but it doesn’t cope that well with outside temp swings so I may well bin it off again

[B'stard Child]

BlindedByTheLights said:

Now we are moving into the warmer months, is there a way to just turn heating off without having to go into each room and each schedule to decrease the temp? Honeywell I used to just be able to turn heating off but I can’t see anyway to do this in the wiser system, thanks

Go into settings

Find Away mode

Heating setpoint set to Off rather than a specific set back temp (which it probably is right now)

Make sure the "Turn off Hot Water" is not enabled

Leave the app in "Away mode" for the Spring, Summer and Autumn

If we get a cold snap switch off "away mode"

[B'stard Child]

Regbuser said:

Create a moment called summer. In that you can turn all room trvs off, but keep heating and appliances on their schedules.

Oh liking that one - I created a moment called "winter night time" to allow the CH to be permenantly on is really cold snaps but that's a clever way of dealing with warmer days in Spring, Summer and Autumn

[B'stard Child]

B'stard Child said:

Regbuser said:

Create a moment called summer. In that you can turn all room trvs off, but keep heating and appliances on their schedules.

Oh liking that one - I created a moment called "winter night time" to allow the CH to be permenantly on is really cold snaps but that's a clever way of dealing with warmer days in Spring, Summer and Autumn

I've now done that - will be interesting to see how the system reacts to it at 4pm when the schedule should start......

[B'stard Child]

B'stard Child said:

B'stard Child said:

Regbuser said:

Create a moment called summer. In that you can turn all room trvs off, but keep heating and appliances on their schedules.

Oh liking that one - I created a moment called "winter night time" to allow the CH to be permenantly on is really cold snaps but that's a clever way of dealing with warmer days in Spring, Summer and Autumn

I've now done that - will be interesting to see how the system reacts to it at 4pm when the schedule should start......

And it turned on as normal - the summer mode was only active until the next scheduled intervention

[B'stard Child]

Regbuser said:

If it's not doing what you want with a moment, create a new schedule, it's not hard..

Or in my case 24 new schedules

12 for Monday to Friday and 12 for Saturday to Sunday

12 rooms with TRV’s set to the right temps for morning and afternoon heating cycles due to Wiser temps not being accurate

I was resigned to doing that but thought a moment might work better than away

[B'stard Child]

BlindedByTheLights said:

I’ve managed to create a moment so that it basically turns the heating off with very low room temps and leaves the water on schedule. However the moment keeps turning off and going back to the normal schedule with the heating coming back on, any ideas to make the moment stay active longer than what seems a few hours? Thanks

Use away mode - moments are cancelled once a new schedule event is reached

If your shedule is a single temp / single event it will work

Heating target 18 deg c 24/7

but if you are setting your schedule like a timer

6am - 8am heat on
8am - 5pm heat off
5pm - 7pm heat on
7pm - 6am heat off

Moments won’t work

[B'stard Child]

BlindedByTheLights said:

B'stard Child said:

BlindedByTheLights said:

I’ve managed to create a moment so that it basically turns the heating off with very low room temps and leaves the water on schedule. However the moment keeps turning off and going back to the normal schedule with the heating coming back on, any ideas to make the moment stay active longer than what seems a few hours? Thanks

Use away mode - moments are cancelled once a new schedule event is reached

If your shedule is a single temp / single event it will work

Heating target 18 deg c 24/7

but if you are setting your schedule like a timer

6am - 8am heat on
8am - 5pm heat off
5pm - 7pm heat on
7pm - 6am heat off

Moments won’t work

Understood, thank you.

No problem - The only success I've had with moments is to set a temp for overnight when it's really bloody cold out there - then it runs from 7pm to 6am and brings in the boiler and rads and stops the house getting too cold that the morning time can't get it even close to temp.

Away mode seems to work well leaving water heating on but all rads off (can also turn off water too for holiday periods)

[B'stard Child]

Well just over a year since Wiser system was installed so here is my end of term/year report

Started with 6 rads controlled with "Smart" TRV's and 7 with dumb TRV's and then over the 12 mths increased to 13 Rads all with "Smart" TRV's

One room has the TRV controlled by a Room Thermostat (Large room only one rad at one end) and it's the room that takes the longest time to heat up (I will eventually add another rad next year)

The App is prone to crashing out occasionally but overall is fairly easy to use and Having recently been away for two weeks holiday and turned CH and HW off I appreciated the visibility to see what the house temp was doing (it got down to 8 Deg and the functionality to allow me to heat the house for a whole day before we got home - not that I liked the kW burnt to do it

The "Away mode" was used a little in spring to cap the heating after the house warmed up quickly - it wasn't used all Summer (I still have a room stat in the hallway that is linked in and I can turn that down) it was used for a little of Autumn - it remains my choice for killing the heating if the outside temps are higher than expected for the time of year

I've recently been experimenting with running heating longer with set back temps and wiser algorithms really started to frustrate me.

Specific to my CH system but when radiators are getting close to set point wiser starts to turn off the boiler for a few mins at a time - last year this caused a bit of kettling as I was running much higher flow temps and when the boiler is turned off so is the pump - I fixed that issue with a pump over run timer (3 mins) which as the TRV's don't close down means the heat can be pushed out of the boiler.

Now this year I'm running much lower flow temps and I have increased the anticycle time on the boiler to allow much more time between burns and get the return temps down and have fewer burns per hour (Also set the Wiser system to Oil rather than Gas)

Wiser keeps turning the boiler off in the middle of a burn and with long anticycle settings it seems to reset the boiler so it fires up again too soon and short cycles............

So now as a result of something I read on here and now can't find (so I can't credit the person who said it) I've removed one Smart TRV and replaced it with a dumb one - that TRV now has the same heating schedule time wise as all the other TRV's but has a target temp of 25 Deg C for all the scheduled heating periods.

Tried it tonight and I'm pretty sure it's working as intended - need to check for a longer period but now Wiser doesn't turn off the heating/Boiler if any of the rooms are coming up to temp because it still has a TRV calling for heat - this means my Living room which is a compromised layout of 1 rad at one end actually gets to temp)

Is it saving me any money? Maybe in having more control of rooms temps (albeit with different set points for rooms to compensate for TRV offsets (validated most of the TRV's with a stand alone temp display and they can be up to 1.5 deg out from actual either way)

I binned off Eco and Comfort last year as they just introduce more variability in the process - I might try them again when I've got a system that can cope with 24/7 running with set backs during the day and night but I'm not there yet

Overall I'm going to give it a solid 7 for functionality/visibility and a 5 on the fkwittery level (TRV Temp inaccuracy and it's "energy saving" interventions that I hope I've found a way round )

[B'stard Child]

Joe M said:

Does your boiler have an opentherm option? If so it may resolve your issues...

Nope it has ebus *Valiant/glow worm #substituteopenthermsoyouuseourcontrols