I have 60m2 apartment which I plan renovate completely. I want to make my project cost estimation before I buy anything, I will create separate topic for my project as a whole. Now I stumbled upon TRV. My Initial plan is to control 4 TRV units with OH using internal TRV temperature and external wall sensor as a measure. I have central heating for whole apartment building. I found information in other topics that it is not advisable to control heating with OH, but I hope that it is possible to set limits on TRV which can not be exceeded by OH. Also climate in Europe is getting mild.
Danfoss LC-13 Living ConnectZ-Wave Radiator Thermostat
StellaZ Z-Wave Radiator Thermostat
And that’s enough, If I missed something important, tell me. In my opinion cheapest Bluetooth valves Eqiva, Eurotronic comet blue, Sygonix looks best, but I am not sure about connection stability through walls. Second cheapest option would be MAX! Radiator Thermostat. Does anybody had Bluetooth range issues? Maybe it is easier to work with MAX?
I use in my 36m2 apartment three eq3 BT thermostats with OpenHab running on RaspberryPi3. I control the thermostats over http. I write a small php-extension (https://github.com/artpetro/eQ-3-radiator-thermostat) for an expect script, so, OH can control my thermostats with http-binding.
Don’t go with Bluetooth if you still have the chance to select. It’s not a suitable protocol for point-to-multipoint connectivity as you’ll have with a couple of thermostats and OH to control them. Same is true for DECT.
MAX!, although not flawless, are known to work well with OH, there’s quite a number of happy users.
I’m currently using StellaZ and LC-13 TRV’s. If your looking for something pleasing to the eye then I’d say the LC-13 is the better choice, it also has local controls. However if you want loads of functionality then it’s the StellaZ, but there are no local controls. Both work great and battery life is quite good. I’m polling @ 1800 seconds.
The StellaZ have a temperature sensor that reports back to OH, so you can use that to help control the heating. This is not something available to the LC-13’s, so an additional temperature sensor is needed. For me this isn’t a problem as the wall mounted thermostat’s I’m using have inbuilt temperature sensors.
I’m in a similar boat here. I’m looking for cheap radiator mountable units, and I would really love if the thermal actuator/sonoff solution were wireless. I don’t have power at all of my radiators and laying cable would look bad. I’m probably going to end up with the HomeMatic models but I wish there were versions without local controls. Several rooms have multiple radiators and I don’t want the users to be able to mess with them individually.
as much as I do like automation, I’m still strongly convinced that radiator valves are the most wrong things to do automation with and it’s because three main issues:
battery
battery
reliability
I can kind of understand that they are working in small places (but then it does not make much sense to have one). But in quite normal bigger house with like 10-20 radiators it’s nonsense, just simply because changing battery is pain and reliability in connection is very discutable.
I would love to see some valves with tasmota and some sort of wired power tho
I cannot really agree to this
I think the truth lies in between
I have about 15 radiatores and an old heating system more than 20 years old but still working fine.
I had to exchange one of the thermostat heads, price was about 22 Euro, the Devolos I have now installed (beside an LC-13 and some Eurotronic Spirit) were at about 32.- from Amazon.
I have installed the Devolos in rooms where I can make a heating plan, rooms which are not so often used.
In my case I installed five or six zwave thermostats, exchange of all 15 would make no sense at all.
I took the batteries out in late spring and will activate in early autumn again.
Since more than 1,5 years no battery exchanged.
So for me it is okay so, really happy with this.
But this is of course just my point of view …
You actually can deploy thermic actuators (which are usually used as underfloor heating valves) on radiators at ~12 € each, then attach any sort of actuator (Tasmota, ZWave, KNX, RPi hats, whatever is cheapest/most reliable/whatever you feel the most important thing in your environment).
But it means to write the control software yourself.
I did for my underfloor heating and still use battery powered radiator thermostats. It’s really not that bad, it’s more than a year since I had to exchange batteries.
Reliability, well. It’s more dependant on your setup/deployment than on the thermostat hardware.
I’m happy your setups works, not arguing about that.
I’ve been playing with some many years ago and they were really not that great. But to be honest, there wasnt openhab or homeassistant at all, so it was dependand on some proprietary sw from manufacturer which was uterly terrible.
I just hate batteries as it is something you have to have in mind to care about.
Im thinking about to put a usb wall mount With shelly contacts under the fibaro trv. If the battery status is low the shelly switch the power on till the battery is full.
So the trv is always plugged in into the wall and only get recharged when it is empty.
Or another trv with rechargeable batterys
