Offline radiator valves

[nelson.aponte]

Hi.

I’ve been using Netatmo radiator valves for 4+ years, and my only big complaint is that they cannot be controlled when the Internet connection goes down.

Does anyone have experience with valves that work offline (locally)?

I’m wondering which ones and what other problems they have.

So far, I’ve only found these related threads, but they are old or don’t fully address what I’m looking for:

What radiator valves to buy

I use the EQ3 Max thermostats. They’re older technology than what’s around today, but work very well and reliably enough. With openhab2, and buying new today, I’d be looking at the EQ-3 Homematic IP valves. You need to buy a controller, but you can run one on a Raspberry Pi with an antenna. They run IP over 433MHz, and that means they’re both more reliable, more battery efficient, and better at reporting current temp and valve position than the Max ones that I have. I’ve considered upgradin…

Best smart thermostat Advice Needed, Help me Decide

I have been using the Netatmo radiator valves for a little over 4 years. These are my takeaways: They cannot be controlled locally/offline from OH without the Internet, only manually on the valves. They use AA batteries. The binding has had outstanding support and constant development. The valves operate on 2 schedules (Night, Comfort) defined in the Netatmo app, which can be overridden by sending “manual” temperature updates. They have integrated temperature sensors and some logic to detect o…

[polychronov (Konstantin Polychronov)]

I installed on my radiators Shelly TRV version 1 but I see they’re now discontinued. They used to be with very good pricing when I ordered them but it’s going to be my first year and I’ll collect experience hopefully soon. The integration to the network and the software of the Shelly itself is quite good and you have all the required settings through their IP web interface if you don’t want to use the cloud app. The binding had one bug which I had to fix but so far the integration looks smooth.

I use the COIOT for callbacks from shelly to OH which seems to be implemented in the binding.

I purchased this: https://www.shelly.com/products/shelly-trv?_pos=2&_psq=TRV&_psid=d50b2bf22&_ss=e

From what I see now they replaced it with TRV bluetooth + wifi but I’m not sure how the new ones perform. Probably OK

[nelson.aponte]

Unfortunately, I purchased the Shelly TRVs only to find a few minutes ago that the binding doesn’t support them because of architectural constraints.

Any other suggestion?

[polychronov (Konstantin Polychronov)]

Strange. It works for me… Here an example configuration using files:

\[

// Shelly TRV — Living Room (floor 1)
Thing shelly:shellytrv:shellytrv_livingroom “Description” @ “location”
deviceIp=“192.168.250.134”,
updateInterval=60
\]

[nelson.aponte]

You use the old, discontinued one, not the new one, but thanks a lot for the info, and reminding me of Shelly.

[dk8pn (Willi Konrath)]

Did you consider to apply MQTT, but i don’t know if these valves support this?

[polychronov (Konstantin Polychronov)]

Yes. Wondering if they moved completely to ZigBee, that would be a pity.

[dk8pn (Willi Konrath)]

The Bluetooth gateway for the TRVs seems to support MQTT.

Next step could be to expose the TRVs to Alexa using Matter and the Matter bridge. I have successfully done this for my 12 years old RWE/Innogy/Livisi thermostats.

[mikaelkorhonen (Mikael)]

Since you already have the new Shelly TRVs, I’d try the MQTT route before swapping them — the Bluetooth gateway exposes the valves over MQTT, and the MQTT binding works completely locally with no cloud account needed. You’d set up a generic MQTT thing pointing at the gateway’s topics and get full temperature and valve control. If that proves too fiddly, Zigbee TRVs such as the Sonoff TRVZB paired via the Zigbee binding are cheap and fully offline, though you’d need a Zigbee coordinator stick.

[nelson.aponte]

I’ve always dreaded MQTT, but I’ll take a look, find a way to implement it, and test. How reliable is it? Any package drop issues, or anything like that?