by ericmark »
Tue Mar 26, 2019 3:07 pm
Well I have got some automation, in fact just starting to remove it ready to move house. It all started to help look after my mother with dementia, broad band installed in her house and a camera fitted.
It helped, it did stop having to do the 15 mile round trip a good few times, it also told me when central heating had gone wrong as it had a thermometer built in, however it also failed far too often, we would get a call from monitoring station that mother was out of bed, we would go to camera and only 70% of the time did it work, when it did we could speak using the camera and often get her back to bed without going there. And one time we could hear mother shouting help so mad dash after she fell, why the monitoring station set up with council social services could not hear her shouting is another question.
After some problems with central heating both too hot and too cold I fitted a pair of TRV heads so I could better control heating, shortly after we had to go and live with mother, she had got too bad.
So next problem was her wandering off in the night, the council came and fitted an alarm, the sounder and controller was out side our bedrooms upstairs, however visitors were a problem, we had to run upstairs to switch off alarm every time we opened the door. Tried both timers and plug in remote controlled sockets, but neither worked well as either not reset after or times wrong, so tried a socket with both timer and remote control so it auto switched back on 3 times a day so even if we did not press remote control button long enough it still switched back on.
So to start with the devices were a god send, however after mothers death we did look at some of the other functions since we already by this time had a double socket, a plug in energy monitor, a light switch, and 4 TRV heads.
The TRV heads were designed to work with Nest and Nest 3 can connect using OpenTherm so it seemed a natural progression. However found Bosch Worcester does not support OpenTherm and our old one did not even support Wave. So either control boiler with return water, or with simple off/on.
So thermostats only job is to turn off boiler when all rooms satisfied, traditionally this means put thermostat in the room kept the coldest, down stairs, with no alternative heating and no door to outside. Well simply put there was no such room. So closest was the hall, which has a huge radiator to re-heat room when front door opened, adjusting the lock shield simply did not work, so did what it says don't do, fitted a TRV in the hall, set to around 17 degs and wall thermostat to 19 degs this actually worked, hall radiator heats hall fast, to 17 then slows down allowing rest of house to catch up, before turning boiler off.
So the TRV heads by now we had 4 have the option of geofencing, and we can have them set so room starts at 20 deg C then drops to 18 then evening at 22 and over night 16 degs. Sounds great, however it simply did not happen.
The eTRV does keep room spot on, two sensors one for air and one for water means the temperature of radiator is compensated for so set to 19 you get 19, however speed of change was the problem, it has anti hysteresis software so room at 16 and set to 20 the room soon heats to 18 degs but then can take 2 hours to settle at 20 degs can cheat and set to 22 for hour then back down to 20 but it means the whole idea of it sensing phone and using geofencing to get house right as we arrive home, is useless, also cooling the same, house well insulated so switch to 14 degs over night and even on coldest night in morning still only cooled to 17 degs.
So the eTRV is set with times from the computer, then not touched, which means instead of £80 a pair (plus hub) could have got non computer linked at £40 a pair to do same job. Like the Terrier i30.
It would be nice to be able to switch heating simply off/on, however pointless being able to set temperature. And off/on relays are quite cheap to work from phone.
The other point is unless the boiler is able to modulate from a wall thermostat, then why have a wall thermostat? As it does modulate with temperature of return water. OK things are about to change gas boiler output 8 kW to 28 kW so modulating boiler makes sense, oil boiler however output 18 kW to 24 kW is there really any point, OK ticks box it is a modulating boiler, but why bother?
The remote energy meter was interesting, watching battery chargers work, freezer work, etc. I have learnt a lot, however once learnt what then?
