TRV experiences

[wtom]

Hi, i always wanted to start a collecting thread for real TRV experiences, so we can help others to make a decision for a purchase.

So i start with mine.

HAMA TS0601

I'm using it with ZHA. If i use it without BT, then it's basically because it has a deadzone of 1 to 1.5 degrees. Means it won't start heating if your target is 20 degrees until the temperature goes below 18.5 degrees of the internal temerpature. Which is very bad. Also it doesn't give any information about the valve position.
Summary: Very bad, no recommendation. - Edit: Recommended if used with BT and target temperature - AI Calibration

Homematic IP eTRV-2 I9F

I got one recently, to test it out. (Running for 1 day). Downside, you can't really use external sensors, that are not Homematic IP devices. But the internal algorithm of the TRV is very good, for example yesterday at night. It was just holding the temperature just above the target temperature by opening the valve 2%. Which is the next plus, it shows the valve position as an entitiy. For now i'm using it with BT but with no calibration.
Summary: Recommendation Negative: "Stuck" in the HMIP system - Edit: After testing more in detail, no recommendation if used with BT, also very expansive.

What TRVs do you have, and what are your experiences. Are there even some TRVs where you can set the valve position manually? (We could implement that feature in BT, to refine the algorithm)

Edit: After now testing the Homematic IP for a little more than 1 month, i have to say, they are hard to calibrate. With the Hama and BT, i get the target temperature in some rooms exact on 0.1 degrees. With the homematic, i couldn't find a working way with BT, so i ended up using the "no calibration mode" and then trying to adjust manually with the offset. But the result i have to say, i'm not happy with. It would change, if i would invest another 50-60 Euro for the Homematic IP Wallthermostat, but for each room, it's a little too much. Another problem i had, sometimes they were going in Err Mode, 3 times a day and i couldn't react fast, because i was in the office. Then it was freezing cold at home in the living room, when the childs came home.... So i sent them back, i kept one to try to implement the offset calibration mode in BT.
So i would now recommend more the Hama TRV. I will now order another Zigbee TRV to, test another one. I'm trying to find one, that also reports the valve position.

[Peviox]

i have bought some TS0601s used because i always liked the idea of scheduling my thermostat behaviour AND have auto pause the heating while opening a window. Here are my experiences so far:

i started using the thermostats in only one room, the bathroom, because its very small heats up and cools down fast, nice place to test it out. very fast i figured out, that the thermostat itself is almost unusable the temperatureoffset is way to aggressive and the actuall temperature in the room varies too much for my liking.

i found BT and read through the instructions on how to use it and watched YT videos to educate myself and to this day i still have no idea what settings i should use.

i stumbled uppon many different problems and i am close to giving up:
a) the ai based learning is a cool gimmick, but it either does not heat at all or too much even after some learning.
b) no matter what settings on the thermostat i use nothing seems to fix the problem of overshooting by 3-4C oder undershooting, or just randomly turning off the heating entirely

a lot of variations of settings and nerves later, i will soon give up trying, because i dont want to waste more time on this. i just wanted to have scheduling and actuall usable window detection (not the crap the trvs have internally) on my heaters.

maybe im too stupid to set all of this up properly but it shouldnt be that frustrating to screw on a thermostat and heating to a specified temperature.

edit:
its very hard to find proper documentation on the trvs i have, because i have read, that there are some with settings 1-9+A some have also +b and mine even do have +C but there is no manual out there stating exactly what they do and everyone on the forums have a different opinion that those settings do but to my understanding:
A: 0=PID 1=25% steps 2=ON/OFF
B: reset device or reset display
C: 0=soft close (0% valve is not really shut) 1=hard close(fully shuts the valve)

you can all correct me but i work with A1 and C1 because A0 only changes 5% valve possition every 15min it takes infinitely long to open and heat the room (maybe this setting is used, when you keep the room at a constant temp throughout the day and the valve is always partially open)

edit2:
the best settings for now are A0 and C1 also i changed the BT calibration to targettemp based not offsetbase this works almost flawless.

[wtom]

Which TRV do you have? Because there are a lot of differences in the TS0601. Also which temperature sensors do you use? Sometimes they are reporting too slow, and then BT also reacts slow.

[carlnrtn]

I'm using the Wiser Heat Hub connected ot the boiler, and Wiser TRVs in each room. Seems to be working very nicely for me paired with Sonoff Zigbee Temp/Humidity sensors.

I've basically removed all heat schedules from the Wiser app and let Scheduler integration manage my heating schedules and temperatures, with the Better Thermostat cards on my dashboard if I want manual control (and added some toggle switches and helpers to boost for an hour).

Works very nicely so far. Without Better Thermostat, my boiler was cycling regularly. I am in the process of renovating the house, and a couple fo the rooms have very poor insulation. The bathroom is a prime example. The Wiser app alone, I would set to 19c, heating would switch off, 10 minutes later it would go down to 18.9C and the boiler would kick in again. Using Better Thermostat I have configured the bathroom TRV to have a 1C tolerance so it's not cycling so much any more.

I am also finding that paired with the temperature sensors in the room, I am actually heating the house accurately now. TRVs internal temp sensor, low down on the wall would never accurately reflect the actual room temperature so it heated throughout the whole schedule. Now with BT, using the Sonoff sensors, the heating is actually switching off at appropriate times.

Wiser itself is pretty good. I haven't used any other vendors so nothing to compare to, but so far I'm pretty happy. There are a couple of nuances which came up whilst initially setting this up, which caused a bit of a headache until I finally discovered the cause. There is some kind of internal health check built into the Heat Hub where it sends 1 ping every minute to 1.1.1.1 and to it's local gateway. I had the local gateway firewalled off so the WebGUI of my router was not accessible. This caused the Wiser to reset it's TCP/IP stack every 6 minutes after 5 failed attempts to ping the gateway. I guess this is a handy "reset" feature, but it took me a LONG time to find what was going on and involved running packet captures to see what was happening.

The other issue I seem to be having right now is all the default schedules re-appearing on the Wiser app which then confuses things with my HAOS schedules. I THINK this is happening during a power failure. A couple of times recently I have isolated power in the house to do some electrical work, and when it all comes back up the Wiser has taken back control of the heating. This isn't just bad for HAOS users, but any user that has spent time building schedules within the Wiser app. I'm going to switch off the power again this week and see what happens. I can't find any similar complains online, but I do see that they say it can take up to 15 minutes for the system to settle back to normal after a power cut, so I'm going to sit and wait and see if the schedules go back to their configured values after a period of time. If not, I will raise this with Wiser as it's not ideal to reset to defaults after power failure - the Hub remembers my TRVs, account and other settings so it obviously has the flash memory capable of remembering the configured schedules as well.

EDIT: The other thing I don't like, is there is no way to tell it what kind of batteries you are using. I try to run all my devices on rechargable batteries to save me keep buying and disposing of regular batteries. The Li-ION batteries I use run at a lower voltage than normal batteries, so even fully charged the Wiser complains about low battery, therefore I can't set up accurate notifications to tell me when it's time to recharge. I'm going to raise this to Wiser as well as hopefully they can introduce a feature to select battery type :)