- Posted on
Sun Oct 28, 2018 5:37 pm
-
jrcitizen
offline
-
- Posts: 26
- Joined: Jan 04, 2017
I'm a bit mixed on Evohome.
Two plus years ago I was looking for a solution that would let me control my heating both as part of a home automation system as well as independently. At the time I was not impressed with the Z-Wave TRV's available. Of the thermostats I saw, the few Z-wave devices I saw were pretty ugly, and I wanted to avoid a system that was reliant on cloud services to work (I don't mind having cloud as an option, but wanted something that could run fully locally). I wanted to control the boiler, heating, electric underfloor heating, andI struggled to find good solutions. Many of the wifi-enabled thermostats were totally reliant on cloud, so that ruled them out.
After reading a lot of reviews, I decided to go with an Evohome. I found a local installer in the UK who was a top chap at this - he communicated regularly, provided a detailed breakdown of costs (parts + labour), and he offered to come over and look through the property to confirm he could do the job as proposed. He was great before, during, and post installation (and I still use him for other plumbing needs).
The installation was relatively painless. In the two years since, the batteries have lasted about two years, and the system performs as expected when used on its own. I have never had an issue with the hot water programming.
But there are some frustrations.
I have a few BDR91 Wireless Relay Boxes installed to help cover the range. However, I still periodically get TRV's that lose their connection back with the hub, meaning they don't turn on/off at the set schedule. This is not a distance issue – the BDR91's are sometimes just a couple feet away in an open space from the TRV's.
Another user pointed out that they have their heating controlled exclusively through Indigo. I would agree that you either have to control fully either through the Evohome system, or through Indigo – but not use both. Too often I had conflicts of one overriding the other, and it not only became a pain, but ran up heating bills.
Setting schedules on the Evohome control panel is a pain in the arse. The scheduling options are not that great - you have to set each TRV one-by-one, day by day. While you can copy schedules from one day to another on a single TRV, you cannot copy schedules between TRV's. While this is largely a case of set-and-forget, I dread having to make any programmed changes.
Within the Evohome environment, you cannot create groups. While you can with the Evohome Alexa plug-in, it is frustrating that you cannot have a group that sync's across devices (the hub, Alexa, and the API).
Honeywell's online systems are ok, but not great. There have been a number of occasions where their system went offline. The API that is used by the plugin relies on their cloud platform being up, so if this isn't working right, it impacts how your Indigo automations work. On a couple occasions I have had to contact their support - once where erroneous devices appeared tied to my hub, and once when Alexa wouldn't sync correctly. Though on both occasions they fixed the issue, in both cases it took over a week to resolve, and in both cases it was due to problem on their backend. It does feel as though support and a robust cloud enviroment are not given high priority by Honeywell.
Finally, I find the idea that the room temperature is set by the TRV itself quite frustrating. The issue is that being right next to the radiator, the temperature will always be warmer. I tried - unsuccessfully - to have another thermostat in one room and use this to override the Evohome TRV in setting the temperature, but the only way to do this would be to remove all the schedules for that room and try to have Indigo fully configure this. While you can purchase separate Honeywell thermostats to measure temperature in the room, they are quite big; if I need to have something to read temperature, I would prefer it is small and as close to invisible as possible. Honeywell does not provide such an option.
For the moment, I have disabled the Indigo Evohome plugin as it was causing too much conflict.
Would I buy evohome again? Not so sure. Its not horrible, but in hindsight, I am not sure it was the right fit for me. Now that there are better Z-wave TRV and thermostats in the market, I would probably be inclined to go the Z-wave route this time around. As I already have the investment in Evohome, I don't want to rip it out, but if after this year I can't get it to work as intended, I may explore that option.
At some point, I will make another attempt at getting this right. I will start by removing all control from Indigo and going back to the beginning, then removing the Evohome schedule from two rooms, and then starting anew setting up Indigo to control those two rooms. If that works, I will play with expanding this further. I am not looking forward to the investment of time it appears will be required to make this work as I would like.
In short - I would say the Evohome is great when a) you have basic set schedules, b) you have no desire to set schedules from other platforms (such as Indigo), and c) when you don't want to have "scheduled manipulations" (such as variable temperatures by room based on specific conditions, nuances such as working from home, etc.). If you do have those requirements, though feasible, it will take a lot of coding to make work. With so many Z-wave options out there, it seems that a better option these days may be to use native Z-wave TRV's and thermostats, and instead of investing the effort in coding the Evohome, spend the time on making Indigo perform your schedules as you prefer. The benefit would be that you are not only investing time in making the heating aspect work, but you can tie it in with other capabilities too. Moreover, if you already have a robust Z-wave network, then having more devices (such as TRV's) will only strengthen that network.
Finally - some of my experiences of trial and error may not be correct. If anyone has other opinions on my frustrations above (including workarounds), do please share – both for my benefit and for those interested in the platform.