Pete's R&D Build Thread

So I've ordered a few more bits!

1x Honeywell Evohome Wireless Thermostat
9x Honeywell TRV's
1x Wireless Contact to replace a cack tilt sensor I had on the garage door. Now I should be able to trigger things as soon as the door is open slightly, rather than needing the entire door to be horizontal before the tilt sensor triggered.
Also received the Loop Electric & Gas meter today so will start playing with those!
Received 1x Additional Philips Hue light also. Easy install for the new baby's room!

8x Stella TRV's are going for £300 and the NEST for £120 - Make me an offer.
Stella TRV's are about 2 weeks old, the nest is around 8 months old.

Looking forward to seeing what cool things I can do with the elec & gas monitors, plus the new Honeywell system !

Received the Honeywell kit today, looks good!

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1447248578.943929.jpg (120.88 KiB) Viewed 3936 times

Mmm shiny!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Hmmm, tempted with the Stella TRVs but not sure if I need 8! Thanks for the fibaro motion pictures, I've just added one, if their product pictures hadn't made them look like monstrous things I would have gone for them in the first place!!

Here they are next to the aeon labs 6 in 1.

Happy to consider selling a few of them separately? I think I may have sold 2 or 3 of them - Would 5 or 6 be of use to you?

Aeon Labs look okay - think I still prefer the fibaro's though!

So I've setup all of my new goodies!

DSC Wireless Contact Installation Difficulty: Easy | Installation Time: 30 Minutes
It's been a while since I made any changes to my alarm system, so this one took me a little while (and googling) to figure out how to add another wireless device to my RPK5500 keypad. But aside from that it was quite straight forward! Now I can actually detect if the garage door is open a tiny amount rather than needing the entire door horizontal before it registering that it's open.

I've got a few triggers set up on the garage door. If the door is open and the garage sensor is under 8 lux, then the LED flood light (plugged into a TKB Plug) will switch on. If the door closes, the light goes off. Lastly, if the door is open for more than 5 minutes, it will iMessage me to tell me the garage door has been left open.

Loop Gas & Electric Monitors Installation Difficulty: Easy | Installation Time: 30 Minutes
This was a surprisingly easy install. I loved the way the installation was all guided via their website with step by step instructions.
Electricity is monitored via a clamp that goes around one of the mains cables going into my electric meter.
Gas seems to be monitored by a sensor that sits onto of the very last digit on the gas meter. I'll need to check it's accuracy in a few days to see if it actually works.
It'd be great if this can be integrated into Indigo some how since the loop reports energy usage and can even report the current cost per hour of combined Gas & Elec, as well as keep track of how much actual money you have spent so far this day / week / month, pretty neat!

Honeywell EvoHome Installation Difficulty: Medium | Installation Time: 2 Hours
Installation depends on how comfortable you are with fiddling with the boiler electrics. Fortunately I've now owned a Tado, Nest and now the Honeywell - so I'm quite used to dismantling / wiring in things to my boiler. Since I already had the nest wired up, all I needed to do was move the wiring from Nest's heat link over to the Honeywell link, pretty much like-for-like.
Once wired in, it was a really simple case of going through the setup process on the wireless touch-screen controller (I got big Wife points for this bit!)
The TRV's were equally simple, more-so than the StellaZ's actually. Plug in the batteries, then go into the controller and create a new zone, when the controller asks you to sync the TRV just hit hold the button down on the TRV and the screen picks it up & automatically adds it.
Once done, you can then work through the schedules to define a specific schedule for when the TRV's should heat each zone up individually, much like the StellaZ's. However there's no limit as on Autolog's (very good) plugin to how many schedules you have in a day. You can create as many temperature points throughout the day as you wish, for each individual zone. This is useful for things like the Living room which might be warm in the morning, an hour over lunch then the evening.
The HUGE advantage with these TRV's are the local control and the small, backlit LED screen. It shows you what zone it is (good for initial Syncing of all the TRV's, then just picking up the right ones for fitting to rads) as well as the current temp it's set to. You can adjust the temperature locally so technophobes can use them like normal TRV's.

Once it's all plugged in and wired up, the display shows temperatures from all around the house - so one quick glance can show us that the nursery is a good temperature, or that the study is freezing cold - if I'm about to go and play some Xbox in there
It does lack on the integration a bit, however I'm hoping to start looking at this a little more.
There is IFTTT integration, which can use things like Life360 to set away status when the last person leaves the house, but I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed with location things! I use iFindStuff, plus Life360, plus IFTTT. I'm thinking to go back to just using Life360 to trigger emails which then control the state of who's home & away. We'll see.
One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to set the Honeywell system back to Home ! The only IFTTT recipe is to set away when someone leaves. There's no option to set back home again...I'll carry on playing.

Picture of the touch screen controller in night mode.

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1447285642.451666.jpg (297.64 KiB) Viewed 3823 times

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1447285685.922392.jpg (226.22 KiB) Viewed 3822 times

One of the TRVs and the LED screen that angles up (nifty feature!)

One problem I have had is I couldn't fit one to my dining room rad. The thread is just a tiny bit too small for it to screw on. I tried a few adapters that came with the Stella and Evohome but no luck. Any ideas?

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1447285871.730221.jpg (62.3 KiB) Viewed 3821 times

Lastly the quick actions from the controller. These seem to be the ones you can trigger from IFTTT

Great pics. I'm leaning more and more towards Evo.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Good feedback so far on the Evohome! Wife is liking it as it's so easily adjustable, and also I've figured out how to set home / away properly via IFTTT.

I've also just changed to using Life365 and IFTTT combined with emails to set my Indigo Home / Away status.
I've found it to be pretty accurate so far, and with no real impact to battery life that I can see.

8x StellaZ TRV's going for sale - £37.50 each, plus the nest is going for £120

Sorry for the lack of updates! We had our first baby last Friday so just taking some getting used to right now... !!

Had another delivery of 2x LED Strips / PSU / Controllers etc.. arrive today so I'll start playing with those soon.
Also need to get the electrician back in to finish my stairs wiring.

One comment about the Evohome - really, really good! Love how easy it is to change schedules. The Wife also gives is the thumbs up.
So much so that my Dad has now bought one for his own home.

Still need to get around to looking at integration with Indigo - however the IFTTT is pretty comprehensive. The main thing I'd like to look at doing is to heat a rad based on motion, since location-aware home & away is taken care of via Life365 and IFTTT.

Re: Nest and TRV's. Feel free to make me an offer - they're just sat in the house at the moment and I don't really have time to eBay / Pack & Ship !

Congratulations! A baby is the ultimate automation device, it's useless until you've programmed it correctly but once the setup is complete it'll do the dishes, Hoover the house, even go out and get groceries for you!

A baby is the ultimate automation device

Hahaha, I love this analogy. A baby also costs you a lot of money and extremely time consuming. You need years to get it it right and you always adding touches to it.

They also tend to become quite temperamental when they start getting a bit older, some bug called puberty.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk