TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Posted on
Sun Feb 03, 2019 9:33 am
siclark offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Yes it's a complete different way of controlling heating. Watch out though. Means your boiler is running longer with the valves only open a little. If you have rads without TRVs on them they can end up being on for hours and turn rooms into saunas and kill your gas bill


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Posted on
Sun Feb 03, 2019 9:53 am
Busta999 offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Good point.

I may have to do a hybrid.

Currently I have divided day into 4 time periods, morning, day, evening and night.

Each time period has three rooms that are important and determine whether heating demand is set.

Each room has a set point for an assigned time period.

Each room has another temp sensor, Hue or Oregon.

If any of the three room temps, as per other temp sensor, drop below the set point for each of them than demand is set and the boiler goes on until all three are at setpoint.

There is an override/failover in the hallway, the radiator has no control on it and the whole house thermostat, a zwave one, is set to 17c - if house drops to 17 turn on heating - ie if Mac /indigo goes down while I am away. My wife can then revert to the old single thermostat until I return and control heating that way.

So I could use the plugin to set the radiator and my system to manage the boiler.

Posted on
Sun Feb 03, 2019 9:54 am
autolog offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Busta999 wrote:
Jon

Sent you a PM a couple of hours ago, not too sure how this works as it is still sitting in Outbox and not sent yet so not sure if it has gone through.

Can you add me to the Beta list for this I am using 6 Spirit TRVs right now.

Thanks

Mike

I have PM'd you and explained the delay. :)

Posted on
Sun Feb 03, 2019 9:58 am
autolog offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

The eagle eyed amongst the beta testers will spot that V1.2.0 has been uploaded.

I suggest (other than @Busta99) that you don't install it until I have completed the documentation (which is close now). Thee are a lot of changes in the create CSV area that the documentation will explain. :)

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 2:30 am
Busta999 offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

@autolog

I installed latest version and used it on one of the TRVs.

Experienced some erratic behaviour so disabled the plugin until I go through some documentation and understand what it is doing.

The eractic behaviour was its constant need to change the setpoint to 8 c which was going to make it chilly in the lounge :-)

I’ll have another go next weekend when I am back home.

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 4:13 am
autolog offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Busta999 wrote:
... The eractic behaviour was its constant need to change the setpoint to 8 c which was going to make it chilly in the lounge :-) ....

Sounds like you haven't set a schedule to run?

Setting it to 8 deg C is the off state. If you want to change the temperature manually, you have to alter the Heat Setpoint in the TRV Controller device which controls the Spirit.

How were you changing the Heat Setpoint? :)

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 4:21 am
Busta999 offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Jon

Don't worry about it.

I'll RTFM.

This will be an issue between seat and keyboard.

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 12:31 pm
autolog offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

I am having some difficulty (make that a lot :shock: ) in trying to upload the documentation to the Github Wiki.

As a temporary work-around, I have created a PDF document which is now in the normal BETA download folder.

If you decide to update to version 1.2.0 of the plugin and you are using CSV processing, please make sure that you edit and save the plugin config and do the same for each TRV Controller device settings. Obviously, set the particular CSV options you want to use.

If you are going to use the feature to create CSV files via PostgreSQL then you need to install the psycopg2 python library. Use the command:
Code: Select all
sudo pip install psycopg2

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 3:45 pm
Busta999 offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Reading now.... :-)

It will be the weekend before I get home to work on this though.

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 3:48 pm
siclark offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Busta999 wrote:
Good point.

I may have to do a hybrid.
Currently I have divided day into 4 time periods, morning, day, evening and night.
Each time period has three rooms that are important and determine whether heating demand is set.
Each room has a set point for an assigned time period.
Each room has another temp sensor, Hue or Oregon.
If any of the three room temps, as per other temp sensor, drop below the set point for each of them than demand is set and the boiler goes on until all three are at setpoint.
There is an override/failover in the hallway, the radiator has no control on it and the whole house thermostat, a zwave one, is set to 17c - if house drops to 17 turn on heating - ie if Mac /indigo goes down while I am away. My wife can then revert to the old single thermostat until I return and control heating that way.
So I could use the plugin to set the radiator and my system to manage the boiler.


The issue you may find is that if the TRV in a room wants to be at 20% open for 4 hours to keep constant temp, the boiler will run all that time. Your hallway rad will therefore be hot all that time if the boiler is on. If however you keep the hallway stat at 17, then its going to turn off all the heating, and the room that is calling for heat wont get any.
When I have rooms needing heat, I have a trigger which sets the thermostat on the wall to 28, to ensure heat. However in your case your hallway will then get very warm, especially for someone that sets their thermostat normally to 17! (My wife complains when mine is as "low" as 21!)

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 3:52 pm
siclark offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Hi Jon... The reason I've been quiet is life has got the better of me, and kept me mainly away from Indigo, although still found some time for some light switch tinkering with new fibaro dimmer modules!

However, have another bug report. One of my TRVs stopped responding a few days ago, and it missed 2 schedules. When I reloaded the plugin, it realised it was supposed to be in the middle of the second missed one, and the SP was set, and the valve opened and all good. Not sure what had happened there though.

I'll see if I can find the time it happened on grafana, think it was 3 or 4 days ago, and get you the log.

Before that though, its been great!

Simon

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 4:24 pm
Busta999 offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

I’ll try this keep getting sql general errors while posting here

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 4:25 pm
Busta999 offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Ok that worked....

It seems to be working so far.

I should work through the current models and work how.

The hallway is normally set via Indigo and a external thermometer to not go below 18c.

During the night at about 4am I am seeing the 17c hallway thermostat kick in and start the heating.

Indigo will shut it down if the three rooms it monitors during the night are at setpoint, equally, if the thermostat in the hallway sends a shutdown to boiler while any of the three monitored rooms is below setpoint then Indigo starts back up.

The hallway thermostat is happy as long as it keeps above 17c.

The hallway, because the rooms around it runs between 19-20c during waking hours, just through the unrestricted radiator in the hallway.

But so far it does pretty well, I capture 72 hours of temp for all rooms in the house and graph them so I can see trends.

Really enjoying the multigraphs of the spirit radiators :-) way too geeky?

But gives a real insight as to their behaviour.

Posted on
Mon Feb 04, 2019 4:26 pm
Busta999 offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Took 5 attempts To get that last post up!

It seemed to choke on a {geeky} emoji

Posted on
Tue Feb 05, 2019 6:32 am
autolog offline
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Re: TRV Beta Feedback Thread

Success at last, I have now managed to upload the documentation to the Github WIKI :D

It is available here: TRV Controller Documentation

I will now start work on submitting the plugin to the Indigo Plugin Store. :)

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to everybody who has provided input and feedback during the Alpha and Beta testing. :)

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