Home heating automation

Do. I've just realised what you meant about the fuse spur in the way. Your sideways picture threw me. The Horstmann needs 100mm clearance on the left of its base, the Drayton on the right, hence the problem. Upside down as you say, or else swap the spur fuse and Drayton over, they both use identical wall boxes, you'd just need to drag cables around.

Just so I am sure, initially when you suggested that a Tado stat could be wired into the existing heatmiser in the master bedroom, I was of the belief that these could work simultaneously. That the Tado would control the smart TRV's and the heatmiser would still control the master bedroom. From reading this reply it seems that is not the case as the master bedroom does not have a TRV, so when the Tado's are calling for heat the master bedroom will just continue to heat until the Tado's have reached temperature? Or have I totally misunderstood!?

That essay was an interesting read, good to have some understanding as to the way things work. It's also good to know that the Tado is very compatible with the UFH.

Of course that all makes sense, I had mixed up what you had said about the wireless receiver and the wired stat from the first response.

Last question I think, it seems that the radiator in the master bedroom is the only one without a TRV, which appears to be the recommendation when having a wall mounted stat the radiator in the same room does not have a TRV. If I put a smart TRV on this radiator will it be essential to take one off another room? Obviously can just do as suggested and leave it as is and use the lockshield to prevent over heating, but this somewhat prevents the whole zone being 'smart' which would be the ideal scenario of going to do it at all.

I managed to sucessfully wire up the Drayton Wiser and it 's on the network. Trusting the isolation switch and phase tester was hardest part :-D

It seems to be stuck on the app registering the system online for cloud access. Has anybody had this issue? or does it just take a long time?

Turns out the wiring was the easy part...having a very frustrating time with drayton wiser hub

1. The Set up LED doesn't flash for some reason. It doesn't seem to impact the set up as i can still connect to the hub wifi network
2. I set it up on my home network but it's not stable, keeps dropping. I think this is related to the issue why I can't get it to connect to cloud.

I've power cycled it, created a guest wifi network with no password, but no use. The system remains connected to the network but the app doesn't find it.

I use decco mesh system at home but googling i can't see of anybody having issues for that reason, only with 4G routers manufactured by huawei. I have a TP link 4g router. Others have used a wifi extender to circumvent the 4g router issue which seems specific to huawei so I don't think that could be the issue due to different brand and using a mesh system.

EDIT: I'll call it a day, currently on network so hopefully a firmware upgrade overnight will sort it all! Least i have 5 months before i need to use heating to get this sorted...i hope!

You do make a very valid point that I could have been over engineering the whole thing and the simplest solution would be changing the heatmiser stat and adding the smart TRV to the coldest room, but I do like the idea of individual room control for all the bedrooms.

There are a total of 8 radiators in the upstairs zone, explored leaving some on manual TRVs and leave them open and have the smart TRVs in the bedrooms, or could swap out the lockshield to the radiator in the landing and add the smart TRV to the master bedroom.

A lot to consider and good to have a clearer idea of the ins and outs. The financial outlay to all of this will also need to be be considered. Is there any particular site or source that would be considered better value than others or is direct from Tado the best route?

I've just had an email for this offer valid for a few weeks, but its more or less always available. Starter kit for £100. (€117). These are 'refurbished' but seem brand new out of the box last two I installed. TRVS are £45.49 each (€53) or £84.49 for a pair (€99). Additional wired stats for your UFH are £78 each (€92). So Starter kit stat, 2 extra wired stats and 2 trvs, £349 or €400, free delivery, Irish Vat included and that's Tado.com/ie site despite the pricing in Sterling, which they promised to rectify but still haven’t. Thats a lot of kit for €400, I've had zero problems with 'refurbished' bought for myself and family. I think they are mostly amazon returns, often unopened.

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What sort of ballpark figure would a trv valve install be?

I had wanted to keep thermostat in kitchen for the "living area" zone and then have the living room unheated during the day, and the office unheated in the evening. I think it's the most efficient strategy, that doesn't involve moving the stat from the office to the living room at evening time The valves in the older part of the house were updated but strangely the extension ones weren't!

do any plumber or heating company provide installation service for replacing regular heating controls with a drayton wiser?

i dont have the skills to do it hence trying to find someone who can do it for me if i purchase all the required kit - controller and trvs

You'll find that even an electrician might only couple up the wires to the new hub or wired stat, but you'll have to do the device configuration yourself, usually straightforward but you can have issues of mesh networks as described earlier, or existing smart device hubs/dect phones causing interference if too close physically or in frequency to the devices own wireless spectrum (smart TRVs/wireless wall stats don't use WiFi, they use much lower power and bitrate connections to their hub, which is mains powered and can support the power demand of a WiFi connection to the router). A sparks is not going to want to get involved in this. Its no surprise that brands of 'not so smart' heating controls popular with the trade in new builds and upgrades are simple ready paired devices, or ones which will work manually with app connection a later add on for the owner to play with. EPH and Heatmiser are a bit like that.

As for installation of TRVs, a plumber will change the valve body of your rad if it doesn't already have manual TRVs, but again adding the smart TRV head is a trivial task, by screwing down a knurled ring nut to the valve. Once firmly fitted, the configuration and calibration is something you usually do yourself, the plumber may not be familiar with the brand or have ever set them up. Youll need a certain familiarity as you will have to replace batteries from time to time, which is usuallly a twist off of the smart TRV Head in the case of Tado, a little side panel on Drayton.

Churchfield home services are a company who would have the expertise for Honeywell, Nest, EPH and Climote. The latter two are not particularly versatile or smart. The Nest was a leader on it's introduction, but it doesn't have a TRV option. I remember back a long time ago a Nest installation from this company was 4 multiples of the cost of the Nest stat itself, 11 or 12 hundred euro, so they obviously considered it tedious, time consuming and fraught with problems. It was the first smart install I ever did, abroad, and to an attic gas boiler. Nest have their own unique method of wiring the stat to the receiver over a low voltage isolated pair, or wirelessly with a power adapter to the stat.

The hardware is so cheap! The heating guy who fixed the boiler when it wasn't firing up seems to offer this and do BER reports. I've to get a BER report in august after solar panels are fitted also have a leaking tap and a loose tap that i coudln't figure out so maybe if I get a few things done at once it'll be better value...I'll take the hit! Freezing the water is a clever idea.

thanks guys for the input. i will be having a new radiator fitted in next few weeks. may be i will ask the guy to help me in replacing the panel. i will then work myself on configuration. lets see

It's a thermostat only, it is designed for the US market to interface with HVAC systems, (heating, ventilation and a/c.) None of its connections (and there are many) are designed to work directly with mains switched boiler or wireless TRV valve controls. To give you a flavour of this, here are the wiring connections for the Ecobee and the Nest (US version).

ECOBEE

NEST

As you can see, this is a standard connection scheme over there, but alien here, in UK or Europe. The first Nest I was asked to install years ago was the US version, and had to be returned and replaced with the European version, which came with receiver box and mains switching relays. I'm not aware that Ecobee intend devising a version for the European Market. If they did, it would be similar to the UK/EU Nest, capable of measuring and controlling the heating in the zone in which it sensed the temperature, with all the other bells and whistles of a smart stat, scheduling, geofencing, learning etc.

Additional sensors to measure temperature in other zones or locations are only really effective if that zone has a controllable switched heat source, such as a separate zone valve, or TRVs on its radiators. I'm always amused by declarations from users of certain brands of single stat that somehow a single electric switch responding to the temperature of a single room can somehow magically divert the heating independently to required area, without overheating an other area. I've had some heated (!) arguments on other fora and here over the zealous beliefs of some users. Hub controller and Climote come to mind.

So, in short, it won't work here, unless you have a fully integrated and zoned low voltage HVAC system and controls, with multiple zones, and even then, its still only a single stat. You can add as many Tados, Nests, Hives as you want all over your house, but if your heating plumbing is whole house, unzoned, then any sensor will turn on the heat to the entire house. At best an extra stat will keep the heating running for the coldest room, but will overheat the others unless they at least have mechanical TRVs on the rads.

There is no magic bullet to replace plumbed zoning, despite all the marketing hype (rhymes with tripe) put out by proponents of so called smart one stat solutions. They even conned the DOE and the EU with dodgy stats, the net result of which was the installation of grant approved single stats turning manual stat 2 zone heating systems back to single zone, with claims that it was more efficient.

The Ecobee site reads a bit like that tbh, lots of claims, no mention of how your existing system is configured or installed.

I'm assuming before you got Hive it was always the case that heating hot water required the radiators to be heated also. Or did you have a system with a rotary timer beside the boiler and a manual wall stat for the heating? I've seen this arrangement, and it works simply enough in that the timer operates the gas boiler which will always heat the HW cylinder when it fires, pumped flow from the gas boiler going directly to it. Flow to the radiators on the other hand is controlled by a single motorised valve in the CH circuit, controlled by the wall stat. Set the timer on and you have HW only, turn up the thermostat and you have both. In warmer weather the CH will remain off, or can be forced off by turning down the stat. It was simple and it worked. It's considered to be a two zone system, (or a zone and a half, as you always heat the HW when operating the CH, not necessarily inefficient if the HW cylinder is insulated, it will only take what it needs from the flow).

Replacing the manual stat and the timer with a single zone combined stat and timer such as the Hive removes the independent heating of HW, as the Hive will now fire the boiler as a timer, only when it opens the CH valve as a thermostat.

IF your system was as described above, you should have had a Hive receiver with separate HW timer relay fitted, with the HW relay wired to the old timer position, and the CH relay wired to the CH valve. The Hive receiver is then configured in 'Gravity' mode (10 second press of HW button followed by three blue light flashes). This allows a CH timing event fire the boiler via the HW terminal, while opening the CH valve via the CH terminal.

If you always had only HW and CH on together, the addition of a zone valve and a hive 2 channel receiver will allow the above HW only operation. If you already have a Hive receiver with both HW and CH buttons, then someone made a bags of your installation.

It sounds like I have a similar set up.

Originally I had a mechanical clock on the (system) boiler which was replaced with a Hive dual channel receiver.

In the hall I had a manual wall stat which I understand is not wired back to the boiler at all but rather is wired to and opens a valve in my hot press to direct water to the radiators if the wall stat temperature drops below the set temperature.

As originally installed this only allowed me crude separation of heating and hot water as the heating schedules on Hive don't interact well with the mechanical stat. The installer (who was under the auspices of Bord Gais their partner at the time) just shrugged at my wife when queried (unfortunately I wasnt home at the time of install) and said to turn the wall stat all the way down in the summer to turn off the rads and all the way up in winter to turn them on.

I actually hacked together a workaround a few years ago where I replaced the wall stat with a Z Wave on/off switch controlled by a Raspberry Pi running Domoticz (could do similar with Home Assistant). It has a plugin that can read the Hive status (and also control it) so I set up routines to open/close the radiator valve in the Hot Press depending on whether it is reading various combinations of Hive heating & Hot water on or off. This worked well for a time but it is community developed by reverse engineering the Hive API which is not officially supported so has broken a number of times (and has for me again recently).

Therefore I am looking again at whether I can put a better fix in place. I am not familiar with Hive HW and CH relay's are those alternative terms for the receivers? I am only aware of dual channel (for heat and hot water which I have) and single channel (for heat only or maybe also additional zones?).

By my boiler I have a dual channel receiver (see pics below). This appears to be wired Neutral / Live / HW OFF & CH OFF not connected and HW ON and CH ON bridged and connected to a black wire I assume goes to the boiler to switch it on.

Is there a relay or receiver I could use to replace my Z wave switch in order to control the hot press valve directly with Hive? One thought I have had is could I use an additional single channel receiver for this (probably set as an additional zone) and have my heating schedule use this zone.

Would that have the first receiver fire the boiler when needed? How would I wire it? I am pretty sure I have a Neutral / Live and switched Live where the stat was (now wired to my Z wave switch). If this is feasible would I wire the switched live to CH On and would I need to leave or remove the bridge on the receiver at the boiler?

If removing the bridge on the dual channel would I switch it to Gravity mode (and have the second zone on normal).

I have seen some wiring diagrams that bridge the Live to Common on heat only, would I do that?

I realise this still won't give me totally independent control of heat and hot water (which would be the ideal) it would at least allow me to have the hot water on without heating radiators unless the house was also cold enough to require it (which is the minimum I want).

Also I presume I could possibly achieve similar by having a sparks run wiring between the boiler receiver and hot press valve but I don't really want to punch holes in ceilings and upstairs floors at the moment.