Home heating automation

Hi all,

Looking for a bit of advice.

I have a bungalow with 11 rads, heated by an oil burner and a back boiler.
Iv had a plumber in who said the house can't be zoned without ripping up floors etc, my only real option is TRVs.

I was looking at the Tado TRVs (I need a plumber to install normal TRVs first, anyone seen any compatibility issues?).

Currently I use my oil burner to heat up my house to temp, then use my back boiler to keep it warm.

Will the Tado TRV still open / close the valve when I don't want my boiler running (using the back boiler) and the room reaches its desired temp (close the valve)?

Any help would be appreciated.

Chris.

GarIT wrote: »

Tado will run the boiler when any room is below the set temperature. Typicaly if a valve is open the boiler is on.

Thanks GarIT.

If Tado is only set to run the boiler at say 18:00-19:00, will the TRVs still open/close outside of the 'run time' like a normal TRV?

chrismon wrote: »

Thanks GarIT.

If Tado is only set to run the boiler at say 18:00-19:00, will the TRVs still open/close outside of the 'run time' like a normal TRV?

That's like apples and oranges, trying to think in terms of fixed boiler time running, regardless of need, compared to fully programmed time and temperature controlled zones. The latter is how tado operates. If you only want the boiler to fire for a single hour during the day, you set its schedule for each TRV equipped rad, and the open rads governedby the general thermostat. Once you add a solid fuel boiler, you will need to have some rads open at all times and a circulation pump on a stove stat. This will ensure heat is alway diissapated from the stove.if your system has some kind of relay control box to fire the boilers, control pumps, such as a systemlex, you can use one of it's built in relays to disrupt SL power to the oil boiler when the stove stat closes at its target temperature. You can also active this by routing the boiler SL live source to the Tado main stat from the stove thermostat NC terminal, which will be live when the stove is unlit.
Some assumptions, your oil boiler hot flow does not backfeed into the stove jacket, boiler and stove hot flows should be combined in a pressure neutral manifold, with a seperate pump and or zone valves from there to the rads.

If you want your TRVs to open and call for heat, but not actually get any unless the stove is lit, you could have them dissociated from the main stat which fires the boiler on their behalf, but this kind of defeats the purpose of the system. If you program a TRV in a room to say 18° from 7.00 am until 9.00am, breakfast time , then down to 15°thereafter, it's got to be able to fire the boiler, it's unlikely you'll be up at 6.30 stoking the stove.
You have to learn to trust the system to give you the best mix of comfort and savings on an oil/gas only basis, then allow the stove stat to cut the boiler source when it's burning, but only when it's burning.

Jumping on the thread bandwagon but didn't want to start a new thread.

We've gfch fed by a combi boiler which works great for us as we have the heating on thermostat and timer. We manually turn off any rooms that were not using (guest room) at the radiator.

It is looking like I will be working from home on at least a part-time basis for the foreseeable future. When it gets into winter I will be the only one home and working from the small office only. Obviously I could go around and turn off all the other rads each morning and back on on the evening but I want to avoid this? Any options out there where I want to have one rad on and all the others off? If I have to buy smart valves for all rads it could be pretty dear, might be easier / cheaper to just get an electric heater for the office?

chrismon wrote: »

Thank you for the detailed response!

The system in the house is very basic, no dual coil cylinder, no manifold etc.
Back boiler stat controls a pump (separate from oil burner) on rising temperature. There is no control between back boiler and oil burner.

My main reason for looking at a system like this was to give me some sort of zoned control, trying to make the best out of an old system.

The way the house is plumbed, the bedrooms are the last to get heat from the back boiler, would be great to be able to 'turn off all zones except bedrooms' to 'push' heat that direction from say 9pm-10pm.

I might look into only allowing the main oil boiler to fire if the back boiler is not running / lit, having it on a timeclock or something similar.

Thanks for the help.

This will break Tado's "brain". Tado learns over time how long each room takes to heat under various conditions. If it thinks it is turning on the boiler but no heat is provided it will think your house is slow to heat and will develop a heating plan based on that. It's a great system but I don't think the smart thermostat connected to the boiler in a system with a back boiler is compatible.


You could just get the stats on the rads. Which would mean the boiler won't automatically tuern on when it's cold and you lose other features but it would allow you to only heat certain rooms based on a schedule/temperature

Hi guys, just a quick question as I seem to have a brain freeze. I have the Hive System (3 Zone - DS, US & HW). Now that Hive is HomeKit compatible has been a nice improvement albeit small as the HW zone is not HomeKit compatible. Anyway my question is this, with hive can I install TRV's and both work or does one override the other ? I would not be installing TRV on all the rads at once.

Many thanks

GarIT wrote: »

...... I don't think the smart thermostat connected to the boiler in a system with a back boiler is compatible.....

There is no issue with connecting a smart stat as the control element in a system with a stat controlled boiler and a stove/back boiler. If the stove is connected to passively cut the oil boiler when it's heating contribution reaches a certain threshold, e.g, stove temperature reaches say 60°, then the system will work without the smart stat noticing that the heating source has 'handed over'. As the stove burns down, it temperature drops and hands back to the oil. The only uncontrollable situation is to have a very large SF stove, or have one burning fiercely providing more heat than is required by the system, meaning house or zone temperatures will exceed the smart stat setting. This is not likely to confuse the smart stat. It just stays off. In order to dissapate the unneeded heat from the stove in this situation, at least one zone must be activated by the stove stat regardless of the status of the smart stat, so say the living room zone is kept open and receiving heat to the rads from the stove. If it gets too warm, you know what to do.

GarIT wrote: »

I didn't think of it being done automatically with heat or pump activation, a timeclock was mentioned so that's what I was going off. And I guess it still would work even if done manually but it would be defeating many of the features Tado are selling.

All the timing you need is in the smart stats/TRVs. I understand how easy it is to be conditioned to an actual crude timing device, almost like a failsafe, lest you accidentally have the heat on when you should be freezing. The Tado or other stats are perfectly capable of frugality, and Ebenezer mode. Don't forget, a crude timer will turn it on when it's not needed also, say on an unseasonably warm day, or you are working in a hot kitchen with ring/ovens, or when you're out for the day. Smart stats/TRVs take care of all that.
It's similar to our obsession with timing the HW, as if we can somehow 'save' by anticipating the exact moment we'll need some, and trying to heat it just in advance. It's a behaviour born of the expensive electric immersion heating era, and uninsulated cylinders. You might as well have a timer on the fridge door, you wont eat any less even if you did.

Ush1 wrote: »

Need some wiring help.

Replacing a two channel eph programmer with two nest stats with heatlinks.

See attached pics for the old wiring. I've put the live into the NO on the first heatlink and the grey cables for zone 1 to the common, works perfectly for one zone but I can't seem to get the second wiring correct. Ended blowing the fuse switching things round last night. Any help appreciated.

Other pic.

deezell wrote: »

I assume you powered both heatlinks from the live and neutral that originally went to the eph. The heatlink relays are volt free, so you must loop the live from the L terminal generally to common, terminal 2 in the heatlink(s), and connect the zone calls for heat, the grey wires, one each to terminals 3 on each Heatlink. It should make no difference if these are reversed, between 2 and 3, it's just a relay, but make sure you looped the live to the relay terminal, not the neutral. You can check by turning up/down the stats if they are both clicking ON and the little indicator lights up on the heatlink.

Thanks, just a couple of things.

The heatlinks are battery powered believe it or not.

I would have thought exactly the same as you and also that it wouldn't matter which way round the cables would go but when I put the live to the common on the nest and N/O to zone 1, zone 1 heating is on continously! It's very odd but this cables goes back to the wiring centre and the valves are wired to that also, see here:

https://www.ephcontrols.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/CR22_PRF_WD_JW.pdf

EDIT: nevermind, my dodgy cabling, all good now! Cheers deezell.

Hi Folks,


So I've been planning to post the following report here for a while having recently had Tado installed in my home. The purpose of which is 2 fold - 1 to acknowledge those who helped me piece it all together with advice and guidance, and 2, to perhaps help others who may have a similar setup and essentially group all my learning into 1 post. So, here goes!

• My initial setup: Dormer house with a Firebird Heatpac S90 Oil Boiler. Rads split into 2 zones, upstairs and downstairs and of course a hot water tank. I had no thermostats at all, other than regular TRV's on the rads, and a simple on/off timer on the wall to manage my boiler being on/off. So in short, no control of the system really and plenty of oil being guzzled!
• First job was to replace the Heatmerchants electronic zone valves as these were troublesome for controlling the feeds to the 2 zones. After much research, these were replaced with Honeywell V4043 valves, and I also had a 3rd added to the pipe feeding the hotwater tank to allow us to control this going forward.
  
  Note here: About a week before we kicked this work off, we poured a central heating cleaning agent into the system to circulate around the system before we drained it down. Well worth doing.
• Next was to fit a thermostat to the hotwater tank, as originally the only way we had to control the temperature of the water in this tank from the boiler was by adjusting the hotwater feed going into the tank itself. So now that we had a valve on it, we needed a way of telling it when to close.
• Now, Tado isn't the cheapest Smart Heating system on the market, but as has often been said, buy cheap, buy twice. After much research into the various systems, I liked the sound of Tado and came very highly recommended by those who had it. Also, their support seemed to be good (more on that later). I'm by no means rolling in money, so I've been purchasing the parts for this upgrade over the last number of months, and I took advantage of the Tado Black Friday sales, and other random deals they had on Amazon, which in total allowed me to pretty much purchase the entire system, for between 25 & 45% less than the RRP. So while I initially said it's not the cheapest system on the market, buying it this way really did help to challenge that theory.
• My installer had never worked with Tado specifically before, but had installed smart systems which at the base level are all very similar in terms of wiring etc. I'm a tech person, so I was happy to cover the configuration side of things once the kit was installed, linked to the zone valves, firing the boiler etc. This is where I'd like to call out Tado Support for the first of a couple of times. When installing the extension kit (Note: this is required if you want to control your hot water with Tado and/or if you want to run a wireless Smart Thermostat) he had some questions around the wiring. In roughly 5 minutes, we went from dialling the number from Tado support, to getting an engineer on the phone who was instantly able to answer the questions my installer had and we were quickly back under way. Hugely impressive and very re-assuring for both of us.
• Once the system was all installed, it was pretty much working in the basic sense right away. At this point, I had already had some email communication with Tado Support so I had all the info I needed for my installer. They suggest that you send them the details of your environment, and they will send you the instructions to install, which they did and then asked me to let them know once it was installed. This part is really important to note and wasn't obvious initially. Only they can setup the zones properly when it comes to linking in Smart TRV's etc, as they need to configure which rooms link to which circuit (IE: Ground floor or First floor) to ensure the correct valve is opened to send heat.) Again, within 20 minutes, this was all done and we were set.
• I'd say all in all it took maybe a day / day and a half to get it all sorted, as obviously we had some other works to complete such as replacing some radiator valves along with doing some of the above to get the most out of a smart system.
• Finished Setup: I now have a 3 zone system, with Smart Thermostats on each floor (ground floor is a wireless stat linked to the extension kit and the first floor is a hardwired stat back to the boiler. Tado only supports 1 wireless smart stat) and also control of my hot water tank. My hotwater tank stat is just a Honeywell unit and you set the temp manually on the side of it (Tado doesn't offer a smart stat for hot water tanks. So when it's wired up, you either have it on, or off). Once the water in the tank gets to that level, it sends a signal to Tado to close the valve. Similar story with the Smart Thermostats, once they get to their temps, they close the respective valves.
  
  Now I've also gone ahead and fitted Smart TRV's to all my rads, so I essentially have more than just 3 zones, I have all the various rooms setup as their own unique zones. This setup can get tricky and check out note below for a bit of detail on this. However it's well worth doing as these TRV's are very accurate and of course gives you great control. This doesn't have to be done right away I should add.

Some points to note:

• Since the install, we've had plenty of fine tuning to do. Having so may TRV's we did have to repair one or 2 more radiator valves as they weren't closing properly and this heating when they shouldn't, and also we've had to do some additional config on the smart side with them.
• Tado states that you can essentially have 10 zones. However, what they don't tell you is that's actually 10 PER CIRCUIT. A circuit in my case here is upstairs or downstairs - so my house has 2 circuits basically, as will most 2 story homes depending on your plumbing. So you can actually have 20 zones in your home. Now where this is crucial is that this number of 10 is the amount of zones that can call for heat. As I touched on above, this is where Tado support is crucial as while anyone can setup zones (rooms) and assign devices to them, you can't configure them to call for heat, Tado support can only do that. They have to configure the device to call for heat from the correct zone. So the boiler fires and the correct valve opens etc.
  So if you have your bedroom for example, with a smart trv in there on your single radiator, if that's setup as a zone, configured by Tado to the 1st floor circuit, it will be able to fire the boiler, open the 1st floor valve, and then release hot water into your bedroom rad and heat you up. This is probably the biggest thing that I didn't know about, and I had been working hard to get my whole home into the magic number of 10, before I realised that it was 10 per circuit etc.
• Tado support is fantastic. I've dealt with a number of chat agents now and only had 1 bad experience of someone who really didn't know the system that well and tried to send me the wrong way. Outside of that, they've been superb and it makes you realise that Tado is worth the money.
• The App! The app is great, but there has been lots of chat about the subscription and Tado has taken a hard time on that one. I don't have the sub, and to be honest, I don't see myself going for it. The only things it offers you is automation. Now, if you, like me, have Home Assistant in your home, that can do it instead. Additionally, I've found the Open Window detection to be very irratic, to the point that I've now turned it off. Obviously the sub also gives you home/away automation, and if you don't have HA or similar, then that may be handy. But that said, if you setup your smart schedules correctly, your boiler won't fire that often or you can just change it manually anyway. The long and short for me is I don't see it as a deal breaker for choosing Tado or not, as has seemed to be the case for others.
• For those of you that use Home Assistant, the integration has really improved in the recent release, so I'd highly recommend getting that setup. Also the Smart TRV's give temps to .1 of a degree, where the app will only give you whole numbers.

I'm a few weeks in now at this stage and I'm loving it. As I said above, initially it requires fine tuning, as I'm sure they probably all do, but we're well on our way with that now and adjusting it less and less on a daily basis which is the idea. Reading the graphs in the morning for the rare cold nights we've had recently, it's great to see the temp dropping and then Tado firing the boiler and heating the relevant rooms to the correct temps.



Big shout out to everyone on here who has helped with advice and guidance, this forum is really valuable and has so much information that just isn't really out there. In particular to Deezell who has been amazing and I really can't thank enough. This person has so much knowledge and detail and was a huge help to sorting a lot of my queries. I hope the above captures and summarises a lot of what was answered for me and hopefully helps others. In particular I found there was very little info around for people with boilers like mine, so hopefully this helps. Also, I had a very VERY basic setup to start with, so if you've got that too, finishing up with a strong setup is very much achieveable with out tearing the place apart.



Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to try and give as much detail as possible in case anyone else is looking for a summer project!


Best,


Paul.

PS: The following post on the home automation bargains thread is very similar to mine and also contains some great points, some similar to the above. But useful to read if you're also starting out. Link

Good thread here on firmware updates, with yourself Champ as the last contributor.
https://community.tado.com/en-gb/discussion/809/firmware-revisions

44% off with Tado at the moment
https://www.tado.com/ie/store
Code: Tado44




Back to debating the Starter + Extension Kit . €160 for both from the webshop

This always comes at a bad time.


Could do with completing the rest of the rads.


Hopefully it'll be back in November

Shefwedfan wrote: »

Tado not useless now without a subscription?>

If you had it before they brought it in it's free



if not I think it's only 20 odd a year.