TRV Controller Discussion Thread

Yes please Jon.

Sam.

PM sent.

Sam
Yes the brightness is the valve open amount. There s a config setting to get it to report at various thresholds. Mines at 1 for testing but not sure on battery impact.


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PM sent.

Thanks Jon!


Sam.

Yes the brightness is the valve open amount. There s a config setting to get it to report at various thresholds. Mines at 1 for testing but not sure on battery impact.

Mine is set to 1, and has been since commissioning. The Spirit has been on the radiator for a number of weeks and the battery percentage is still 100.

That can mean one of two things:
The battery life is great!
The battery life reporting is not so great!



Looking at the comprehensive instructions Jon has just sent me, it stores the values in CSV files which I had not realised (and I assume that is what you are using for your graphs). That makes the plugin even more useful.

Sam.

The CSV export was only added to the plugin yesterday and available for the first time yesterday evening.

I am hoping to be able to use Matplotlib to display the graphs from the CSV files rather than use Grafana/Influx as I found that that combination used a lot of CPU time. In fairness, I hadn't spent a lot of time looking at that solution though.

Mine at down to 70-80% battery after 6 weeks. Not checked to see if that was large loss at start and minimal loss since?

I use Grafana plugin. It's amazing but as Jon says, seems to use 10-20% CPU, approx same as Homekit.


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Worth noting, these are currently just under £35 on Amazon UK

Sam.

Cheers. Will stock up!


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Worth noting, these are currently just under £35 on Amazon UK

Sam.

And on Amazon ES:)
Will buy a few more!


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Short question about the intended usage of the TRV plugin:
I would like to use my own indigo schedule to schedule which temperature is set when. Should I adjust temperature in the TRV controller or the original TRV. The controller controls but also monitors the TRV, so it should not matter, right?

Furhter: I use the plugin since yesterday. I get several errors from different TRVs like this one:
TRV Error Z-Wave wakeup missed for TRV device '136 - Thermostat (Devolo 09356) Schlafzimmer', controlled by 'TRV Schlafzimmer'. Last Z-wave command received: 2019-02-08 06:41:30

I also see that temperature is not updated at the TRV. Anything I should do about it?

Hi @superholz,

... Should I adjust temperature in the TRV controller or the original TRV. ...

You should alter the temperature of the TRV Controller not the TRV. The TRV Controller will most likely ignore any setpoint adjustments made to the TRV.

... I get several errors from different TRVs like this one:
TRV Error Z-Wave wakeup missed for TRV device '136 - Thermostat (Devolo 09356) Schlafzimmer', controlled by 'TRV Schlafzimmer'. Last Z-wave command received: 2019-02-08 06:41:30

I also see that temperature is not updated at the TRV. Anything I should do about it?

The TRV Controller monitors the wakeup schedule of the battery based TRVs being controlled. If a wakeup is missed then it warns you . This is important as if you had wanted the TRV setpoint to change and the TRV misses a wakeup, your setpoint change won't happen until the next wakeup.

A couple of observations to date. (Subject to further investigation)

1. Setting the time on the TRV Controller appears problematic.

Setting first timer
06:00 - 22:00 - 20C
22:00 - 06:00 - 18C

I run into a series of error messages.

Even if I set them to :-

06:10 - 22:00 - 20C
22:10 - 6:00 - 18C

Causes issues about the start time must occur before the end time.

Will spend more time over the weekend and nail it down in more detail.

2. Radiator Behaviour.

I have been tracking the Spirit TRV - not under TRV Controller

Graph of TRVs

IMG_1138.jpg (487.66 KiB) Viewed 4532 times

The Valve closes as it gets near the SetPoint, meaning it can take an hour or two to hit the set point to move 1 degree.

This results in non controlled TRVs (i.e. hallway near house thermostat) in massively over running and over heating spaces i.e. running the heating system for an hour or more longer than is required.

Again - not fully into TRV Controller, yet - will it address this issue?

Less of an issue if you have a controlled TRV on every radiator - ( I currently have 8 controlled TRVs, and 20 Radiators all together)

My theory was that the toilets/bathrooms/ensuites can overheat if not on controlled TRVs, but I don't mind as I have never had anyone complain about a warm bathroom and they are usually quite small.

A couple of observations to date. (Subject to further investigation)

1. Setting the time on the TRV Controller appears problematic.

Setting first timer
06:00 - 22:00 - 20C
22:00 - 06:00 - 18C

I run into a series of error messages.

Even if I set them to :-

06:10 - 22:00 - 20C
22:10 - 6:00 - 18C

Causes issues about the start time must occur before the end time.

Will spend more time over the weekend and nail it down in more detail.

2. Radiator Behaviour.

I have been tracking the Spirit TRV - not under TRV Controller

IMG_1138.jpg

The Valve closes as it gets near the SetPoint, meaning it can take an hour or two to hit the set point to move 1 degree.

This results in non controlled TRVs (i.e. hallway near house thermostat) in massively over running and over heating spaces i.e. running the heating system for an hour or more longer than is required.

Again - not fully into TRV Controller, yet - will it address this issue?

Less of an issue if you have a controlled TRV on every radiator - ( I currently have 8 controlled TRVs, and 20 Radiators all together)

My theory was that the toilets/bathrooms/ensuites can overheat if not on controlled TRVs, but I don't mind as I have never had anyone complain about a warm bathroom and they are usually quite small.

The schedules work on a daily basis; that is start at midnight and end at midnight. So if you want to set a schedule from 22:00 -> 06:00 you would have to set one for 22:00 - 23:59 and from 00:00 - 06:00. I worked it this way to make my life simple by avoiding having to work out how to handle multiple days.

The reason you need to leave a 10 minute gap between a schedule end and start is probably a bit of a legacy thing but it stops overloading the TRVs with a lot of messages around the schedule change. I don't think it should cause a problem with your setup.

The plugin is working as designed (which may not be ideally what you want).

When I have a bit more time I might introduce a different scheduling algorithm which is rather than having ONs and OFFs, have scheduled setpoint values which I think would suit your use case better.

Probably not what you want to hear, but if you have a TRV Controlled system you really need to have all the radiators controlled otherwise you are going to be wasting heat on uncontrolled radiators. This control could be via ordinary manual TRVs but this requires manual intervention.

If you are using Remote thermostats to control the rooms than you can set a Delta T value (e.g. +5 deg C) which means that if you set the Remote setpoint to say 21 deg C, the TRV Controller sets the TRV (Spirit) to 26 deg C. This will keep the valve open until it gets switched off when the Remote gets to 21 deg C. The main use of this is to make sure that the Spirit doesn't turn off early because of nearby heat from the radiator even though the room isn't up to temperature.

Hope that helps explain the rationale.