Hi folks, Getting cold again, so the wife again starts asking to have some smart radiator control. She has been asking me this already for several years in a row, so should make some time for it. Have been asking already in the past questions about this in the community, but I hope that technology has grown meanwhile... I need to control quite a large number of radiators, so should be a bit affordable. Should work even in rooms where I have bad WIFI signal. So I was thinking about using a Zigbee mesh network, so I can communicate over larger distances. And it should also work when Node-RED should become unavailable for some reason. It should be as low power as possible, to avoid having to replace batteries continously. Of course it should be controllable by Node-RED. Found these Zigbee 3.0 thermostats: [image] Would be nice if anybody could have a look at let me know if they fullfill all my five wishes. Or if anybody has a better idea, then please shoot ... Thanks a lot!! Bart

Hello Bart :wave: Keep in mind that battery operated devices both in Zigbee or Z-wave meshes are not repeaters within the mesh. So your plan will only work if you either already have a zigbee mesh up and running or of you plan to add mains powered devices like plugs and lightbulbs at the same time. Johannes Edit: Ikea also has a standalone Zigbee repeater available I think. And dont forget to check the compatibility of those thermostats if you are planning on using something like zigbee2mqtt.

[image] BartButenaers: But can you explain why there is a danger issue?? If you mess up, you could, for example, ask the boiler to continually apply heat - while the boiler should (and will) have built in safety, do you want to rely on that? The risk might be low - I'm not an expert so I couldn't say - but the impact could be very high. Bottom line, for goodness sake take this thread with a healthy dose of scepticism all round and check with a professional first :smiley: [image] BartButenaers: Is it possible to do this setup in Node-RED It absolutely is. I wouldn't say it is especially easy and I've not yet bothered but it is about this time of year and correspondingly in Spring - when weather conditions are changing - that I most think that it would be nice to have alternate schedules I could simply swap in and out. Not sure what it is like on the Evohome but on the Wiser, schedules are done via the app and it is a bit of a pain to have to go through and change every room for every day. At least you can copy 1 day's schedule to any/all of the other days but you can't copy between rooms in the app. It would be relatively easy to do in Node-RED though once you've got your head around the rather complex schema. [image] BartButenaers: Mine is 17 years old and works fine, so I'm not going to replace it soon ... I have no time yet to study it in detail, but this is from the manual You will see that the connections are the same as the image I shared so it is indeed a standard boiler backplate. The difference with a smart system is that you can ignore the NOTA about the roomstat. You only have a roomstat where you don't have TRV's. We used to have our single roomstat in the hallway near the kitchen which is where the single radiator without a TRV is - you are supposed to have 1 radiator without a TRV so that there is always some outlet for heat if things go a bit awry and the roomstat is supposed to be near that rad. If ever we have to take that rad off, I'll put a TRV on it now though since we have a fancy rad in the bathroom that doesn't have room for a TRV. Actually though, with a smart controller, I don't think you actually do need such a rad anyway any more since the smart TRV's seem to fail open and the controller would fail with the boiler off. [image] BartButenaers: I want to automate this: replace the thermostatic valves on the radiator by wireless ones So if you didn't want the expense of a smart heating system (though really, the main expense is the TRV's anyway, the controllers aren't that expensive). I guess you could add some smarts by replacing the roomstats with Node-RED and sensors. That wouldn't be so bad because you are keeping your other controls fairly vanilla & keeping the whole control system simple. Just make sure that when the system fails (as it inevitably will at some point right?) it does so with the TA connection open not closed so that the boiler turns off. There are certainly benefits to having an integrated smart heating system and I wouldn't want to go back. Having the smart TRV's on each rad is really nice and the house as a whole has a much more balanced temperature now. I know that, for some people, smart systems save money, I don't know that that is the case for us but it certainly makes the house more comfortable. I should say that our house was built around 1900 and we are on a hill with exposure from both north and south and we are in the north of England. 2 of our outer walls are stone, the rest brick. Let's just say that it is a "challenging" and expensive environment to heat to the requirements of SWMBO :smiley: We do now have additional insulation in the breakfast room (north facing and very exposed) and the living room (also north facing with one of the long walls solid stone/rubble) which does really help.

[image] TotallyInformation: Just make sure that when the system fails (as it inevitably will at some point right?) it does so with the TA connection open not closed so that the boiler turns off. Good one!!

[image] TotallyInformation: you are supposed to have 1 radiator without a TRV so that there is always some outlet for heat if things go a bit awry and the roomstat is supposed to be near that rad. Has been noted!!!!

[image] TotallyInformation: you are supposed to have 1 radiator without a TRV I think that depends on the boiler. Mine does not need that. [Edit] I might have to retract that statement. If by TRV you mean the dumb ones that just close the valve without any way of knowing whether they are open or closed, which I think you probably did.

Welcome to my personal hell Bart. I have dreamed of a smart heating system for years and I have made it most of the way there, with some problems along the way. My problem is I live in a reasonably large very old house so I do not want to be heating all of it all the time (my heating bill was huge until I started saving money this way). I especially don't want to be heating bedrooms that are not being used or indeed, when I am working from home in my study, I don't want to be heating most of the rest of the house. Most of the systems on the market seem to fall a long way short of what I want. Many focus on things I am not interested in such as controlling things from my phone. An "automated" system should be one that requires very little input from me on a day to day basis, otherwise it's just remote control, not automation. For example there was a recent Alexa (I think) advert where the family gets back to the house and says "Alexa turn up the heating". Massive Fail! My house has thick walls and stone floors in parts. If it has been allowed to cool down substantially e.g. I've been away at Christmas, it takes several hours to heat back up. If the house is not already warm by the time you get back then your heating system is not doing its job. The other way the commercially available systems fail is not having readily changeable profiles. If you're lucky enough to be able to control individual rooms then you have to go into every room and change temperatures or times using an app. I want to be able to say "I have guests this weekend" and the guest rooms, the dining room etc all change heating profiles to suit. Don't get me onto systems like Nest that a) usually have one thermostat for the whole house. Fine for a small flat; no good for a large house. You are either heating all of it or none of it which is a massive waste of money and b) they also try to "analyse" your schedule, which means they are actually "guessing" when you need heat. My life is not that predictable. Sadly the system I use is not made any more. I use EQ-3 Max! valves and thermostats. Fortunately they still work fine but I will need to plan for the day when one or more components eventually fails. I control them using Homegear through a CUL, which works very reliably (even through the thick walls). Then I control Homegear from Node-Red through MQTT You can achieve the same setup today using Homematic valves and thermostats (not Homematic IP sadly) but I'm not sure how long Homematic will still be available because EQ-3 seems to be moving to their new Homematic IP system, which I don't think is compatible. The advantage of these valves is they store their programs in the valves themselves so they are not reliant on an internet connection. Everything is local and under my direct control. You also don't need to do your complex day-to-day scheduling in Node-Red. Node-Red is just in charge of telling the valves what schedule to follow. I have created Node-Red flows that interpret a human-readable JSON schedule using JSONata with rooms, days, default temperatures and start and end times into the format that Homegear understands and then send it by MQTT. Status can equally be read over MQTT but I actually use openHAB for that because I am using openHAB anyway (although I use Node-Red for all my rules). This way I can have diffferent programs for different rooms all ready set up and just send them when I want. For example my son moved back home for six months yesterday. His room (normally not used and not heated at all) is now on a schedule that heats it during the day (he will be working from home) and into the evening and then drops the temperature at night. Other rooms such as the living room never get used until lunchtime; the kitchen comes on for breakfast, lunch and then in the evening. They are allowed to cool down at other times. Bedrooms are not heated during the day. At the moment, out of the 14 spaces and 16 radiators in my house, only 6 spaces are currently being heated (including two hallways) and because those spaces are mostly up to temperature, a total of only 0.7 of a radiator is open so the boiler has switched itself off. If the total % of radiators open gets over 90% (e.g. one radiator opens fully or say three radiators get to 30%) then the boiler will fire. All triggered by Node-Red flows. [Untitled] Stuff still to do includes a better UI using the Node-Red UI builder to show current status, to quickly apply heating profiles to rooms and to trigger the override functions such as dropping the temperature for a couple of hours if I'm going out. a UI that allows me to create and edit the profiles using a timeline widget rather than editing JSON files directly (which my wife is NOT going to do!) use of defined temperatures and times such as "getting up time" so I can tell the system I will be getting up an hour earlier tomorrow and the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen will come on earlier as a result, and more integration into the house automation so that activity detection will keep the heating on in the bedroom and other parts of the house if it detects we haven't gone to bed yet but then shut it off when when we do (you don't want the house to go cold if you're watching a late night film and you're up later than normal). It's been a fun process and I've achieved most of what I want. In particular the house is just the right temperature when and where it needs to be and I'm not spending a fortune heating all of it.!

This all sounds very like my own motivation for getting into Node-RED and home automation (although I did mess about with X10 lights as a burglar deterrent many moons ago). It was literally "a dark and stormy night" a few years ago when I had to get up at about 4 in the morning to get a taxi to the airport for a work trip. Getting up to a dark, freezing house was no fun, and I had the thought that it should be possible to hook up the heating to the alarm clock to avoid this kind of thing. As with most home projects, things go much more slowly than planned, but I'm developing a whole range of gadgets to make life more comfortable. I have temperature and light sensors in every room, and I'm planning to use Z-Wave TRVs and boiler controller to keep each room at the selected temp. This will be based on a house "mode" schedule, depending on whether I'm sleeping, spending the day in, going out, off on holiday etc. and will set each room's required temp. as needed. And of course, a smart alarm clock which will make sure I never get up to a cold house :wink: Not so much a requirement in these work-from-home times, but a messaging system, possibly SMS or Telegram, would let me check the house status, or change schedules if e.g. we were going to the pub after work for a few hours, or I was planning on heading home earlier than normal. I'm also automating lighting, entertainment, security and a few other things, so it should be quite the system once (if) it's finished :slight_smile:

[image] SimonB27P: a reasonably large very old house That is the same for me. [image] SimonB27P: I especially don't want to be heating bedrooms that are not being used or indeed, when I am working from home in my study, I don't want to be heating most of the rest of the house. Same here. [image] SimonB27P: controlling things from my phone. An "automated" system should be one that requires very little input from me on a day to day basis All of the smart systems are able to do things with almost no day-to-day interaction. I very rarely change anything. Maybe a couple of times a year to set the schedules and this is something that I will eventually do via Node-RED. Otherwise, just to occasionally boost a room. 99% of the time, no interaction is needed at all. Indeed one of the benefits from using a commercial smart heating system is their capability of adjusting to weather and even learning the heating/cooling characteristics of the house so as to change the start/stop times of the heating cycles. [image] SimonB27P: For example there was a recent Alexa (I think) advert where the family gets back to the house and says "Alexa turn up the heating". Massive Fail! My house has thick walls and stone floors in parts. If it has been allowed to cool down substantially That is not what they are illustrating. They are simply illustrating the dynamic way you can change the comfort levels. If we've been away in the winter, we simply hit a button to get the heating going when we are on our way back home. [image] SimonB27P: The other way the commercially available systems fail is not having readily changeable profiles. If you're lucky enough to be able to control individual rooms then you have to go into every room and change temperatures or times using an app. I want to be able to say "I have guests this weekend" and the guest rooms, the dining room etc all change heating profiles to suit. I can only comment on the Wiser system and this is indeed a failing that Node-RED can fix. [image] SimonB27P: reliant on an internet connection The Wiser nor the Evohome systems are dependent on the Internet. [image] SimonB27P: then the boiler will fire Everything you describe is already built in to any smart heating system & optimised by a lot of R&D. [image] SimonB27P: Stuff still to do includes This section looks very much like some of the things I need to do as well. Though I already have some status displays that integrate with the home control dashboard. One of the advantages of a commercial system is the ability for it to bring ML to the system so that it learns when to start heating such that the temperature is correct for when you want it to be regardless of the weather. I'm sure that can be done with Node-RED but it wouldn't be easy. Not suggesting one way is better than another, just putting the other side of the story. The cost of the smart controller is small compared to the TRV's. Using a controller that has an API and is offline capable gives you the best of both worlds.

[image] SimonB27P: a timeline widget Hi Simon, thank you for sharing your ideas. It seems like we both need a similar solution ... Have you ever seen a (commercial or open-source) app that has an easy to use widget to setup/maintain a heating profile. If so, please share it so somebody might create a dashboard ui node that looks alike... [image] TotallyInformation: One of the advantages of a commercial system is the ability for it to bring ML to the system so that it learns when to start heating such that the temperature is correct for when you want it to be regardless of the weather. It is so hard to believe that there is no open source project available that implements such kind of things... [image] TotallyInformation: Using a controller that has an API and is offline capable gives you the best of both worlds. That makes sense, although then you can only buy their TRV's in the future when you want to extend your system. I assume you don't have an extensive list of systems that fullfill your requirements ...

[image] BartButenaers: That makes sense, although then you can only buy their TRV's in the future when you want to extend your system. I assume you don't have an extensive list of systems that fullfill your requirements ... That is mostly true. Though of course, you could still further extend using Node-RED, using a commercial system doesn't block you from that option in the future, it simply gives you a leg up. It would have taken me years probably to get to where I was in minutes with the Wiser system given the amount of available time I would have to spend on it. I only found the two systems that met my needs though both are from vendors with a very long history in the world of heating controls and so not likely to disappear any time soon (another important point of course). Honeywell may well have been the original. Drayton (now owned by Schneider Electric) probably not far behind Honeywell. For the first couple of years, I took advantage of sales to build up a stock of TRV's having originally brought just enough for the key radiators. Since then I have brought enough for the whole house and a couple of spares.

It would have taken me years probably to get to where I was in minutes with the Wiser system given the amount of available time I would have to spend on it. Very true Julian. I actually went ahead and bought a starter kit for the Wiser system. I do like it and I was at the time concerned that I couldn't get my Max! system to work properly and I'd have to replace it. I have since flashed the Cube (transmitter) with CUL software and it works perfectly now so the Wiser system is sitting unused. That's one of the reasons I've stuck with Max! (apart from the expense of changing) I can send new schedules very easily to the thermostats, that then run autonomously, so when my 25 year old son comes home (and operates on a different timetable from me) I can rejig various temperatures around the house quite easily. Just not with a GUI yet. Do you have a method of changing the heating profile easily or do you find you don't need to? I use openHAB as the bridge to my hardware although I do all my rules-based automation in Node-Red and I hadn't found a way to hack about with the Wiser schedules from openHAB. Have you ever seen a (commercial or open-source) app that has an easy to use widget to setup/maintain a heating profile Bart, the Max! system did have one. It worked through a Windows app and it had a graphic interface with bar charts to show the temperatures in different sections of the day (can't post a picture now because I don't use the software any more). Each room had its own schedule but of course what I would like to do is have profiles that affect several rooms at once and that is a pain to do if you have to change every time and temperature for every day for every room (or even some of them). I've never seen a commercial package that can do that. In a perfect world you could overlay profiles on top of each other so a higher priority profile would override a lower priority one, but only in the times when it needed to specify something different. So you activate your guest profile for the weekend and the guest rooms and the dining room heat up at times when they otherwise wouldn't but when you switch off the guest profile it goes back to the lower priority profile and whatever schedule it was following before. That might be with a son at home or it might not. I've done quite a bit of work looking at building a scheduler in NodeRed using the power of JSONata to take JSON data with radiators, rooms, stacked profiles, defined times and temperatures and strip out when the next event will be for any room. This way it only creates events when things need to change. It can also work out what the most recent previous event was so if profile A which required a room to be heated to 21 degrees is deactivated and the next highest profile is Profile C whose most recent event (even if that was before profile A was deactivated) was to have that room at 18 degrees then it will send an event to change it but only that event. It's a work in progress but I've been distracted with other things lately and other projects (and work!) so I've not managed to finish it. It's not straghtforward but it has promise though. The next thing would be to create a GUI to set up the profiles. I've been looking at vis.js, which has a nice interactive timeline widget. there are one or two others.

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Should I buy those Zigbee thermostats

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TotallyInformation 16 November 2020 23:02 36

For anyone interested in or owning a Drayton Wiser system, please see this new thread announcing a Node.js (not Node-RED yet) module for the system.

Topic		Replies	Views
[NEW NODE] node-red-contrib-drayton-wiser v0.0.1 Share Your Nodes node-red-contrib-drayton-wiser	7	985	20 October 2022
Nest-style central heating controller in Node-RED General	21	7707	4 June 2019
My Z-Wave heating solution Share Your Projects	4	1262	15 June 2020
New smart wifi radiator valves from Shelly Hardware	143	10255	31 May 2022
Flexible and decent smart radiator TRV (UK)? Hardware	8	1028	11 April 2022

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Should I buy those Zigbee thermostats

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