Spirit Eurotronic Z-Wave Plus Configuration

wiewior · February 2, 2020, 6:16pm

Dear Forum,
I recently bough the SPIRIT Thermostat. It is generally working but unfortunately few parameters are not. Just wanted to ask if someone experienced similar issue and if the observation I have, could be the reason of the broken device or my wrong configuration?

1. Thing configuration

a) setting parameter 3: “Backlight to enabled” - does not switch the LCD light ON, on the thermostat on
b) whenever I try to change parameter 2: LCD Timeout to: “No Timeout LCD always ON” and save thing update, it is simply not reacting. Backlight is always OFF

Changing manually highlights LCD as expected

2. External Temperature Channel
What does it do? My understanding is it that external temp. is being sent to SPIRIT Thermostat. Base on that value it knows the reference. Correct? In my case the parameter is not active “-” (maybe set temp difference 0,5 was not achieved yet?)

Platform information:
- Hardware: _Raspberry Pi 3.0
- openHAB version: 2.5.1

ljsquare · February 2, 2020, 10:59pm

This channel is for connection an external channel that the spirit can use to calculate the percentage of the valve.
It can also be done with zwave associations, but that requires a zwave thermometer (on the other hand, it’s independent of OH). With this channel use can connect a thermometer channel of any kind.
Just link a channel or update it with a rule (eg to calculate and average temperature and let the device use that temperature)

stefan.oh · February 3, 2020, 6:33pm

I did not check the functionality of the external temperature channel myself, hence cannot say anything about it. Had no time to check this out yet
As for the LCD backlight: I checked the description in the users guide and it says “0x00 No Timeout LCD always on” for parameter 2. But I doubt that is really the case, because it would “eat up” your battery in no time.
I use a configuration of “Backlight disabled” to keep the load on battery usage as light as possible. Normally there is enough light to see the display content without using the backlight anyway in my case. Being it natural light from outside or a switched on lamp in the room. It might be different in your case though, but keep in mind that the backlight uses a lot of energy and thus stresses the battery. You might want to keep the backlight switched on as short as possible.

stefan.oh · February 3, 2020, 6:37pm

And seeing you use PaperUI for the ZWAVE thing configuration: my perception is, that it should be done in HABmin rather than in PaperUI. It proved to be more stable/reliable in HABmin for me.

wiewior · February 3, 2020, 7:35pm

Thank you Laurens for your hint. I do have Fibaro Sensor with Temperature channel located in this room. If I understand you well I could use this channel for more precize controll of the room temperature. If i set parameter 8-Temperature offset to “Use external temp. sensor” how should i proceed further on? Sorry for this silly question but I am just eterring details of Z-Wave functionality. I’ve never assosiated sensors before. Could you provide an example?

wiewior · February 3, 2020, 7:42pm

Thanks Stefan,
You are right. Backlight consumes a lot and I will finaly switch it off as you did. I am just wondering seting this parameter the Thermostat does not react at all. LCD is ON only when I manualy change the temp.
Maybe my understanding of the parameters is wrong and backlight as well as dimming refers only to manual changes… Can you change this parameter remotelz and dimm the light from your controller?

I had a try with Habmin but it is not too much intuitive to mee. Will give try again…

ljsquare · February 3, 2020, 8:11pm

Of course I’ll give you an example.

Unfortunately all Fibaro devices don’t have a temperature association group, so you can’t do it “the zwave way” with associations.
Lucky, with the openhab and the spirit there is the other way. You link both the channel of the spirit and the channel of the temperature of your Fibaro device to one item.
Example:

Number		Bathroom_Radiator_SensorReport		"Badkamer externe temperatuur [%.1f °C]"			{ channel="zwave:device:512:nodeYY:sensor_report,zwave:device:512:nodeXX:sensor_temperature" }

Where nodeYY is your spirit device and nodeXX is your Fibaro device.

wiewior · February 3, 2020, 8:39pm

Great. This is what I did:

Set up parameter 8 for “Use ext. temp. sensor”
Changed the line:

Number	BS_Office_Thermostat_ExtTemp	  "Thermostat Ext. Temp. [%.1f °C]"  <temperature> (BS_Office, gTemperature)    ["Themostat Ext Temp."]	channel="zwave:device:8985008e:node6:sensor_report,zwave:device:8985008e:node2:sensor_temperature"}

How can I see it works? Fibaro Sens. temp is 20.1 and SPIRIT reads 19,3.
Shall I now see the Temperature report value the same as Fibaro sensor? What SPIRIT does with the valve exactly?`

Update:
I see the Fibaro Temp is the Temperature report:

now I need to understand why the light and the dimmer slider does not work as expected:
Light is not ON and changing dimmer it comes always back…

2020-02-03 21:56:59.865 [ome.event.ItemCommandEvent] - Item 'BS_Office_Thermostat_Dimmer' received command 48
2020-02-03 21:56:59.903 [nt.ItemStatePredictedEvent] - BS_Office_Thermostat_Dimmer predicted to become 48
2020-02-03 21:56:59.941 [vent.ItemStateChangedEvent] - BS_Office_Thermostat_Dimmer changed from 6 to 48
2020-02-03 21:57:01.525 [vent.ItemStateChangedEvent] - BS_Office_Thermostat_Dimmer changed from 48 to 5

chris4789 · February 4, 2020, 9:29am

I guess you are mixing up some things.
The “dimmer” channel of the spirit has nothing to do with a light.
OH has no channel for “valve opening in percent” so it is always a “dimmer” which is also measured in percent.

The valve opening is controlled by the internal PID controller of the Spirit.
So you should not change it manually, see it just as additional information.

The Fibaro sends the temp to your Spirit and the PID controller takes care of proper opening and closing of valve.

As you have defined the target temp to 19°C and the Fibaro measures 20,1° the valve is of course fully closed.

Flynxify · February 4, 2020, 9:30am

@ljsquare What exactly do you achieve by linking a channel in Openhab? Does it automatically feed the temperature-channel with a value from another device? I thought you’d have to set up a rule to just forward temperatures every so often … do both of these linked channels need to be z-wave? I have some zigbee-devices lying around.

@wiewior The “dimming”-channel is just a visual representation of the valve opening.

wiewior · February 4, 2020, 9:45am

Thanks Christian!

OH has no channel for “valve opening in percent” so it is always a “dimmer” which is also measured in percent.

Now it explains everything. I was thinking the dimming is related to the light of LCD. No quetions more on dimming the light

wiewior · February 4, 2020, 9:47am

@Flynxify
it was always my assumption it works this way. No rule required. Just pass the value of the temp. this way Laurens suggested. It’s working.
Dimming is clear now. My mistake in interpretation.

Flynxify · February 4, 2020, 9:50am

Is it really? That’s not my understanding of multi channel binding at all - I thought you’d need something like a follow-profile for this: https://www.openhab.org/docs/configuration/items.html

wiewior · February 4, 2020, 9:56am

follow-profile does not match to me. Cou can not follow the temperature. It depends on conditions. You can follow the light or something you can execute and control, not sth. you depend on

Flynxify · February 4, 2020, 10:00am

I guess I’ll have to tinker around with this at home. Question is, there seems to be a primary source for your temperature and a secondary slave that temperature-value gets written to. What’s the correct order to write them in? Can you pass over the temperature-value to multiple recipients?

This seems like a really powerful tool, why is there so little documentation for it?

Bruce_Osborne · February 4, 2020, 10:42am

If you are referring to the thermostat that is a Eurotronic question.
If you are referring to how openHAB can use the thermostat we rely on the same documentation from the manufacturer.

Flynxify · February 4, 2020, 10:50am

This was more in regards to linking up item-states by appending another channel on an item. I googled around some and found threads like these (Example for item with profile) which sum this behaviour up quite well; I am still not perfectly knowledgeable about this though

wiewior · February 4, 2020, 10:55am

Yes. Why not? It is the same source, only different executors.

Flynxify · February 4, 2020, 11:04am

I think I’m just not knowledgeable enough about this and will just have to trial and error it. Thanks for the effort though.

druciak · February 4, 2020, 1:41pm

I guess @Flynxify is referring to this item definition example with two channels separated by comma in channel config. This is something new also to me and I also can not find this in the documentation.

As far as I know, you can define multiple channels in one item, each starting with channel=“xxxx”. You can also pass values from one channel to another using profiles. Everything is documented here. But there is nothing about putting two channel IDs into one channel config.

Can somebody confirm such configuration is working properly?