Shelly wifi TRV - Discontinued

Hardware
1

Hi folks,

I am quite a big Shelly fan already a couple of years. So at the time being I shared in another discussion that Shelly started selling a TRV (Thermostatic Radiator Valve). And like all other Shelly devices, those TRV's included:

  • A web interface
  • An MQTT client
  • A REST API
  • Wifi based
  • ...

The TRV was a very nice WIFI device, because it worked via WIFI ,without me having to setup and maintain a separate Zigbee or ZWave network. A no cloud access, no hub/gateway, no monthly subscription, ... Just my cup of tea.

But I read today that their WIFI TRV device is end of life and will not be produced anymore:

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I knew that they had some issues with connectivity, battery life, ... But I had hoped they would try to solve those problems. But it seems they have worked around it by using bluetooth for the successor Shelly Blu TRV. I have to admit that the new design is much nicer and the price is much lower. But you need to install dongles all over the place, which is not an option for me. So again game over for me :frowning_face:

As a true Shelly fan it hurts me to say, but companies that suddenly drop products are not really trustworthy imho. Customers spend a lot of money and time in a solution, and from one day to another you end up with an obsolete setup. What a pity...

If anybody knows a decent/affordable WIFI TRV without hub/cloud, I would appreciate if you could share it here. I am not sure if TRV's for Matter can also be used via standard WIFI?

Thanks !!
Bart

2

Hmmm...does end of production mean, that shelly cloud services will stop for these as well?
For someone who only uses local interfaces and does not rely on the cloud, I actually don't see a future that is so bad as you depicted it.
These are still being sold, so why not grab a bunch and stay happy for many, many years?

What am I missing?

2 Likes
3

They had good reasons to discontinue if it had connectivity issues, kind of important for a wireless device, same for battery life. Zigbee is great and super efficient. I have yet to find a zigbee based TRV that accepts an external temperature sensor (value) however. I have zwave based trv's that do, while technically it is solid, zwave is not as straight forward as zigbee, or mqtt for that matter.

dongles all over the place

This is greatly exaggerated, you only need one and if you get the SMLIGHT SLZB-06, it is not even a 'dongle' as it can be sitting anywhere you have ethernet or power (poe even better)

4

But for each room!

5

No. Put a zigbee lightbulb in each room and you have a mesh, that is the whole point of it.
There is a single coordinator (the dongle), bulbs for example will act as routers to build the mesh, battery powered devices are nodes and don't route.

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Bart was actually referring to the Shelly BT TRV and not a Zigbee one when he said that. And it would be true, BT is short-range and you absolutely would need more receivers - even the latest BT standards can be relatively limited in area of effect.

You are right about Zigbee, though you need powered units (like lightbulbs as you say) to create a mesh, I'm not aware of any battery only mesh devices, they are typically only leaf devices not branch. Regarding external temperature sensors for Zigbee TRV's - well, that's what Node-RED is for! :slight_smile:

I'm really not surprised they gave up Wi-Fi on battery-only compact devices isn't easy (due to the power requirements) and putting a Wi-Fi point right next to a motor would likely create lots of noise.

I'm a bit surprised that Shelly have bothered with a BT TRV though, that seems very limiting indeed.

Sorry Bart, I don't know of any decent Wi-Fi TRV's.

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7

It certainly does not need one in each room. I have the coordinator near one end of the house and a repeater towards the other end. For me the range seems slightly better than wifi.

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8

Well you have a very fair point.
Indeed with local access, these devices are still usable.

But - allthough your proposal really makes sense - I am not tempted to go down that road, for a couple of reasons:

  • The v1 devices contain some problems, which I had hoped would be solved in a v2 wifi version.
  • The lady of the house doesn't really like the look and feel of the ones that I already bought. Because they are quite large and have a primitive plastic look. And I can't say she is wrong unfortunately... The v2 devices are smaller and have a much nicer design.
  • The batteries are not replacable. I know that there are battery issues with some of them, so when batteries start failing then I am stuck.
  • You could indeed buy a couple of those as spare parts, but I need quite a lot of them. And I find them rather expensive. To buy some extras in case some of them start failing, that is not really an option for me...

Well that assumption might be correct for a lot of homes. It all depends on the cases (size, materials, ...). But when I look at the "maximum" range of 10 meters indoor, then I am very sure that I need a lot of dongles. Not going to explain that in further detail, because I already published a bit too much information about my house and setup during the years on the www :wink:

And yes indeed you could starting to create a mesh network of Zigbee devices. But last year I managed to replace most of my old electronics by Shelly devices. And I installed a few extra wifi access points, so I have now in most places good wifi range. It is now all running smooth over my wifi network. That way I have a rather simple setup, which is really important for me personally.

So the Shelly wifi TRV's would have been the perfect fit for my personal use case, because they would allow me to keep my setup very consistent all over the place. However installing and maintaining a second wireless (Zigbee or Bluetooth) network, would be completely perpendicular to what I wanted to achieve.

But of course for other folks such Zigbee/ZWave/Bluetooth networks will be perfect. I am not going to argue about that at all.

TRV's based on wifi would be the cherry on the pie. That is why I hoped somebody else would have found another brand that produces such devices.

BTW thanks for sharing the info about SMLIGHT SLZB-06. Looks like a very interesting device!

Yes I am afraid that will become the party stopper, which is why I didn't find any other brands producing such devices :frowning_face: And as a result you will see me arriving here every two years or so, asking if nobody meanwhile found such devices :yum:

I learned from @Paul-Reed recently that Matter devices can also communicate via wifi. So I assume that TRV's with Matter support could also be controllable via WIFI? I have no idea wheather such devices exist, or whether I am talking nononsense...

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9

I agree, SMLIGHT SLZB-06 is very interesting. However, in your case it would be useless, because it's a Zigbee device.

I use a Zigbee lan adapter in my house, and it makes a very reliable network. Fortunately NodeRed is very capable of combining Wifi and Zigbee. By using MQTT for both they integrate seamlessly.

2 Likes
10

It sounds like a lot of misconceptions about zigbee.

There is a reason why smart home devices are using zigbee or bt instead of wifi, especially battery powered: they are more efficient and reliable in their communications.

A zigbee 'network' is much simpler to maintain than a multi-AP wifi network - as it is a single dongle - the rest is done via routers (mains powered devices) and the user does not have to do anything for it. End devices connect to the closest routers, range is not an issue if you place a router device (like a bulb) somewhere in between, it automagically becomes part of the network.

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11

No I don't have any negative feedback against zigbee at all. And I also don't think wifi is better than Zigbee. Zigbee might even be way better than wifi.

However I need to have a good wifi network anyway, so the wifi Shelly devices are a perfect fit. But a Zigbee network is simply an extra second wireless network to setup and maintain. That is all...

12

Unfortunately, you probably don't have many options I'm afraid. Thankfully, as others have said, you don't really need to "maintain" a Zigbee network. As you build it out, if you are using something like Zigbee2MQTT, you just check the signal levels to make sure you have a solid mesh. It then seems to be very stable.

But yes, a bit of a pain to maintain multiple networks. I have Wired, Wi-Fi, Zigbee (x2, one is my custom network and the other is for the Wiser heating system) and old-school 433MHz. Would never have been worth it without Node-RED.

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13

I just received one of this devices: https://gateway.theengs.io/ I bought a month ago or so.

Getting ready for the Xmas holiday season... :slight_smile: