You might get bored quite quickly of manually adjusting valves when you find you can automate all of them! A guest room with a manual valve at a comfortable 21°C when your guests go to bed is a guest room set at 21°C at 3:00 in the morning, which is both too warm and unnecessarily expensive or relying on your heating going off completely in the night.
I'd be interested to hear how the control systems manage both OpenTherm and per-room TRVs. I don't know how much the TRVs learn their response based on existing temperature and setpoint because if they are suddenly presented with water at 80°C as opposed to 50°C or vice versa they are going to be delivering the wrong valve settings... or perhaps they can take that into account too. Or perhaps the modulation is only based on outside temperatures. I can see a logic for water at 50°C when it's 19°C outside but I can't afford to have water at 50°C trying to heat up the living room when it's freezing outside just because other parts of the house are warm.
I can't heat my house with water at 55°C in winter and my boiler is too old for OpenTherm too. I'm waiting for a decent (and affordable) heat pump system that will circulate water at between 70-80 degrees for rapid response times and sensible radiator sizes powered by cheap electricity from solar / wind. Even condensing gas boilers will be looked on as archaic and unacceptably enivornmentally unfriendly. Modulating water temperature down will not be necessary and will be counter-productive as that will just slow responsiveness which will be key to anyone with a fully zoned system on intelligent schedules. The best way to save energy is not to heat things you don't need to.
I'll have to have another look at how far you've got with your node. Last time I looked it was early stage and I don't need it yet anyway because my system ain't broke so I have no need to fix it. One day one of my valves will break down though and I'll lose control in a room. At that point I'll need a new controller because I can't get the old EQ-3 system any more. I had assumed I would need to go for the newer EQ-3 system but Wiser does look good. So long as I can flip new schedules into it easily.
So would I Truth is that as mine is a commercial system, I mostly just rely on it working well since I don't personally have the time (though I DO have the inclination) to work it all out myself.
I imagine that the TRV responds quite simplistically, at least to begin with. It knows heat is needed and so opens then slows down the flow as the right temp is being approached. However, I know that the Wiser system DOES have some ML built in that lets it learn the characteristics of the room and how quickly it heats/cools. Beyond that, I don't know much I'm afraid. I've tried plotting out the various data which is accessible quite easily from the system but there are too many variables for me to easily work out the actual pattern.
Hmm, well one thing (several actually) I can say about heat pumps is that (1) they don't work with much of the housing stock in the UK. (2) It will be a nightmare in a street like mine if people start to put air recovery heat pumps in because the noise will be appalling. Most of the housing in Sheffield, as with most of the Midlands and North, still consists of tightly packed houses - terraced near us, we are the end of a terrace. So there is no room for ground-based systems (most gardens are tiny, ours is larger but lower down so often in shadow) and so air-recovery pumps will have to be mounted on walls - inevitably near other people's bedrooms. In addition, trying to insulate 100yo terraced housing to a level that makes heat pumps workable is also nearly impossible, certainly very expensive and intrusive.
So in much of the UK's towns and cities, they just don't make sense. District heating and hydrogen is far more sensible here.
PS: Sorry for the rant - this is a subject close to my heart! I've been in "robust discussion" with our energy supplier about this as well since they are already trying to push heat pumps (which is a test that hasn't gone at all well by the way).
You're very welcome. It's a subject close to my heart too. I've been railing against the pre-historic heating systems we have in this country for years and I've been trying to bring my 300 year old house into the 21st century. Trying to insulate this place is not easy and is not cheap and it's almost certainly not possible to get it to the point that I can use water at 50° without half the room being radiators.
You're right, hydrogen and electricity will be the fuels of the future but I might not live to see it!
Truth is that as mine is a commercial system, I mostly just rely on it working well since I don't personally have the time (though I DO have the inclination) to work it all out myself.