New smart wifi radiator valves from Shelly

Hardware
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Well, feel free to suggest it to Nick and Dave - maybe Discourse can be made to assign that badge and I'll wear it with honour! :rofl:

Personally, I'd rather know the worst up front and then decide whether it matters. I hate bad tech!

In reality I'm a very positive person - but also fairly detail oriented. I've a LOT of experience reading between the lines of what suppliers and vendors say :male_detective:

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102

Ah yes, I see what you mean! Would these even work here in the UK?

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I have joined the HomeAssistant community, and I have asked their experiences about those Eurotronic Comet WiFi devices and about the API reverse engineering. I started praying that only the app is crappy, but the hardware and api are acceptable quality...

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I think so but I just can't quite bring myself to believe their hype I'm afraid. It doesn't read right. We need someone with Ā£50 to spare to get one and try it :slight_smile:

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As a native German speaker I can help.

This means that the ā€œwetā€ part of the valve might get stuck in summer. So the valve opens and closes 100% once a week. Yes this helps. I live in an area with a lot of lime in the water and had to get 50% of my valves working in autumn before. Only 2-5 min fix bit take longer than changing some batteries. A feature I will implement for my new zigbee valves too.

Nope! Five star is still the best even in germany. School marks are different 1 = sehr gut = very good to 6 = ungenĆ¼gend = unacceptable

And for all the rest ā€¦ still wifi, unknown api, certainly a rebranded Chinese product, likely even the cloud could be in china or provided by an unknown company in china (like the TuYa cloud) and the app looks really crap. (I think I have seen this valve on AliExpress before)

@BartButenaers donā€™t be afraid of anything other than wifi. I realy got into the zigbee stuff and have to say love it. Before I searched for hackable cheap wifi devices I can flash my own firmware but now the simple stuff simply works, without cloud dependencies. And devices in a lot of flavors and reasonable pricepoints.

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That's what I was thinking of. I lived in Germany for 33 years.

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image
Perhaps a misunderstanding from my side sorry!

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108

Yup my Max! devices do that as I believe do the more modern Homematic valves. Every week, they go from one extreme valve position to the other and then go back to where they were before. As E1cid said, it's to stop the valves gumming up in the summer when they might otherwise go for months without moving. I can set what time of day they do it.

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I am using Eurotronic Z-Wave valves since 2 years. Since 4 month with Zwave-js. It is an ok valve. Only problem is, that the battery stats are not working. Factory support is not very good.
Valve

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110

Good afternoon! I have bought two of these valves, and would like to feed back my experience so far.

First device:

  • I started the valves in AP (access point) mode, and connected to them with an iPad. This presents a clear screen for making changes to the settings. I entered the values for my wifi network, and everything works fine.
  • After a weekend away, I came back to find the device not connected to the wifi, but in station mode. This isn't clarified in the documentation, but basically it disconnects to save battery power (I think this is mentioned above). What I don't know and haven't yet observed is when and how often it re-connects. There is a mention of 5 minutes somewhere in one of the earlier messages, but I can't confirm. In my case, I couldn't get it to reconnect. I have an open ticket to Shelly at the moment where I am trying to get more information.
  • MQTT - I was able to receive and send messages via MQTT once the correct parameters were loaded into the device. Unfortunately there don't appear to be MQTT messages with capability of changing the valve position, either relatively or absolutely (other than by changing the target temperature). I was hoping to use my own control logic together with a second thermostat (not directly linked to the valve). Perhaps this capability will come.

Second device:

  • I set up the AP mode and then set the wifi details as explained in the documentation and experienced with the first valve. Unfortunately it now shows a flashing "01" (or possible 10, depending on which way it should be read). Long pressing the reset button doesn't clear this message, so I am not sure what is wrong. There is no record of this message in the documentation, so I will have to open another ticket with shelly.

With the first valve, I updated the firmware to the latest. I didn't get a chance to do this with the second.
Finally, these valves look well made, and the noise level is quite acceptable for use in the bedroom, in my opinion. The temperature control with the built in thermostat seems to be accurate to less than 1 degree, so no complaints there! I am sure that once my issues are resolved, I will be quite happy to buy some more to change the valves on all the other radiators in the house. The only change I would recommend to shelly - move the reset button to the side or the top - it is very hard to press it with the valve fitted, as the gap to the wall is only about 15mm. I suspect this is different on European continental radiators compared with these in the UK.

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@paulj,
Very nice that you share your experiences with us here!!!
I am curious now how fast your issues will be fixed. Please keep us updated.
Bart

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It looks like my first issue with connection to the device may be my problem. Firefox continues to try to connect over https: even with a IP4 address. This morning everything is as expected when I connected over an iPad. I'll report progress here with the other issue!

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113

Ok - the issue with the second device is straight forward to resolve. It is in factory test mode, and a quick response from the Shelly technical team described how I can reset it back to normal operation mode.

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Thanks for sharing - would you therefore recommend the Shelly TVRs or are you still evaluating before purchasing more?

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I will be buying more - I have no issues at all since resolving these explained earlier. They are well made, and seem to hold the temperature accurately. I haven't yet worked out how to manually set the valve position, but if I can't get that sorted I can use the temperature difference between my room sensor and the reading from the TRV to calculate an offset which I should then be able to set via MQTT. I did notice that if you turn off automatic temperature control, the valve position is shared - with this off, setting the valve position manually may be possible.
I think the documentation from Shelly is terse and could be expanded significantly, but I guess that will happen over time. Either from Shelly, or through the efforts of others in the community! I am quite new to home automation, but I will look to share more information as I learn.

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116

If you work out how to do that then please come back and tell us. I would love to be able to do that to get good radiator temperature control. Once the radiator temperature can be controlled (by measuring the rad temp and controlling the valve position) then cascaded PID loops can be used to control the room temperature by controlling the rad temp setpoint. This can give exceptional room temperature control.

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117

As soon as I get some time to play, I'll give it a go and feedback.

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Just had a quick look in the Support Forum and it seems you can set to any position using the API...

So in a nutshell one has to do the following thorugh API:

  1. set "/settings/thermostats/0/target_t.enabled" to FALSE (disable automatic valve control / "manual override")

  2. set "/thermostats/0/pos" to desired position

  3. set "/settings/thermostats/0/target_t.enabled" to TRUE (enable automatic valve control / return to the state before the "manual override")

I am going to wait until Easter time when they usually have a 'sale' and get a couple.

(Shelly API)

EDIT:
Added thread link HERE

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119

Thanks for that @mudwalker ! :slight_smile:

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For those interested in the Shelly TRV's, EverythingSmartHome release a review on youtube yesterday.

I had some chitchat meanwhile with a friendly HomeAssistant user, but and the end it appears now you need to use the Eurotronic cloud service. But using a cloud service to enable my radiators is not what I am looking for.

The only workaround I found was this (in german...): they setup an mqtt broker and reroute all traffic from the TRV to mqtt.eurotronic.io, to their own mqtt broker. And then you need to figure out how the messages need to look like.

Might be an interesting route, might be not. Unfortunately I don't have time for such an experiment. But if somebody is interested, please be my guest!!