I bought eQ-3 MAX! Wireless Radiator Thermostats a while back. I installed a couple to test, and they seemed to work OK, but I found them noisy. When they trigger I find they make enough sudden noise to surprise/frighten a little bit in a quiet room during the day. Not quiet thunder noise, but enough that I don’t want to even try them in my bedroom. That’s a problem as my bedroom is one of the main place I’d like to have one…
There are many options, but I find little information on how noisy they are in real life.
So I thought I would try to ask the community…
My priorities (from highest to lowest) would be:
silent. Very faint noise (in a very quiet bedroom in the night) ok but nothing more.
cost effective
easy to install, configure and operate (e.g. maybe wireless? Ideally continue to work as an independent system even if Openhab is down? – not looking to go heavy on DIY due to lack of time, and experience)
ideally a system that can also control the boiler in addition to each individual radiator
Note I live in the UK, if it makes any difference.
Very quiet, never really notice them, wireless and have their own binding.
Down sides, need their own bridge which means cloud access (not an issue for me), cost could as always be lower but not excessive and last but not a deal breaker for me the need to change battery’s. They use AAx2 last a while shortest 8-9 months in my case, tho super easy to change.
Having looked around further, I get the impression that the noise the TRVs make may depend on the valve too (how easy it is to open or close). I’ve moved to a new house and I will have to get valves fitted (the previous owners had no TRV at all!), so I’ll ask my plumber if he can recommend good ones and I think I will give Max! another chance, you never know.
If that is still too noisy then now I have two interesting alternative options, thanks.
Still interesting to hear from other experiences if someone is happy to share.
Reviving an old thread incase it helps anyone. I’ve been using the Max! TRVs for a few years now and they’ve generally been very reliable, they do occasionally become a bit erratic and require a factory reset but otherwise are pretty good. Regarding the noise they make when the motor is running, this seems very dependent on the radiator they are attached to. I have seven max! TRVs and they are mostly pretty quiet, they don’t cause any problems in the bedroom whereas the click of the old thermostat relay that was in the bedroom prior to installing the Max! System would wake my wife every time.The only noisy one’s are on a couple of large and very old (one has a date of 1969 stamped on the back) single panel steel radiators without fins on the back . I initially thought there was a problem with the TRV, so swapped them around but the noise was only apparent with those particular radiators, all of the valves are Drayton trv4s, so not the valve bodies. Presumably this is due to acoustic coupling into the radiator panel and the panel’s resonant characteristic. The new radiators have their resonant modes broken up by the convection fins welded to the back I believe, this stops the valve noise being amplified. I did try using different grease in the gearboxes but the original grease seems to work best.
The main issue I had with the system was boiler interlock as this isn’t part of the Max system. I solved it by creating a group value for the radiator valve positions and a rule that switches the boiler on when the value exceeded 10 and off when below 9 (I added the hysteresis of 1 to prevent oscillation), this seems to work better than the initial design where I took the average of the valve positions and switched the boiler at 10%, I think because the TRVs try to adapt to the thermal dynamics of the radiator so switching the boiler too early got then confused, the actual switch is based on an esp8266 built into the box from a hearing thermostat so it could sit in place of the original thermostat in the hall.
Future requirements as to be able to read and load schedules into the Max devices. Currently this is done from the Max app and requires opens to be stopped or the max binding set to non exclusive mode for cube control. This makes updates very tricky for anyone but me and is s pain. A decent graphical gui and control of the Max schedule would complete the system nicely.
