Horstmann Channel Plus H37xl Reset

[Marketta Filipovich]

Forthose that want to know, they are a re-badged Saswell TRV and Gateway, sold in the UK under a different brand name. Possibly many. I purchased them at the beginning of October last year thinking I was going to do great things with them, but they turned out to be as much use as a raffia paper kettle, so I spoke with the CS department of the well know internet purveyor of things from which they came, and even though the return window closed at the beginning of December, they have approved the return for a full refund. From my perspective a very lucky escape!

Buy a system like the Tado Smart Radiator Starter Kit v3+ which would allow me to add on TRVs via the included hub. This is more expensive relatively speaking. The starter kit retails for 120 and the valves are 70 and I need 16 of them. Ouch!

control both CH zones independently. A possibility would be to ditch wall stats being the entitys that call for heat and instead use each TRV (possibly in a defined logical zone) to call for heat. Although with our monster condensing system boiler, the ability to get heat away from the boiler via the flow probably makes this a sticking point as the boiler would have the potential to enter lock-out due to insufficient flow.

I would prefer to be able to push the temp schedule to the valves a-la-energenie method, rather than have to set everything up manually on the valves individually. An ability to copy between valves (for example: setup 1st valve in a room then copy the schedule to the other three radiators in the same room - perhaps via an app or web interface) would be good.

When I did have the TRVs functioning, I had their setpoints at least a degree higher than the repsective Hive thermostat setpoint to prevent the boiler lockout situation. When it worked it worked well, but automation should for the most part be set-and-forget and that it most definitely was not with the addition of these useless TRVs!

Had I been able to integrate the TRVs into HA in some form (via api, ZigBee or z-wave), I would probably have been able to take complete control of them and prevent most of the bad stuff from happening.

Come on British Gas when are you going to introduce wireless individual radiator valves allowing control of individual radiator temperatures. Now that would be full control of our water and heating system!

That effectively rules out Drayton at the moment unless I can figure how to extend control of the second zone valve to the downstairs backplate. I might have a poke around in the ceiling void above the boiler .

I know there are some hoops to jump through (with respect to the dev branch of OpenZwave and the respective Python wrapper) but having read every article I can find - on this forum and a couple of others - I am reasonably comfortable that I should be able to do everything I want and more.

I now have 16 x Eurotronic Spirit TRVs installed all functioning perfectly. One of (if not the only) the drawbacks of these TRVs is that you cannot use them without a Z-Wave controller. The first part of the installation of each valve involves including it in your Z-Wave network - without a Z-Wave network they are useless!!!

As we have three floors, I splashed out on 4 x Aeotec Z-Wave repeaters bought from Vesternet and spread them around the house, but they are only belt and braces and not really necessary. The TRVs all have a direct connection to the USB stick - they are really good on range, though that may be down to our house being of new construction (2011). The repeaters were 40 each, but there are much cheaper alternatives, like the everspring Z-Wave sockets for around 10 each new on eBay.

There is no API control. I control them directly from HA. There is also no hub other than the Raspberry Pi that runs hassbian. To control them from outside the home, I VPN in to my VPN server and use the app on my iPhone or iPad as if I were at home - again, simple!

Full disclosure: At some point in the next 3 months, I will most likely be AB testing a new home automation platform and if that proves successful, I will be progressively migrating heating and hot water control to that new platform. That will utilise my Spirit TRVs, a new RPi3, a new Z-Wave USB stick and a new Zigbee USB stick.

I find the fidelity good - the room temp tracks the setpoint well without huge overshoots and they are all still running on the batteries that came with them - lowest battery level is 45%. I also find them to be quiet - though that is subjective as we all have a different tolerance to noise.

My next phase (summer) will involve putting both of the Hive thermostats back in their boxes and performing a factory reset on the Hive Zigbee receivers. At this point, I will use the Elelabs USB Zigbee stick I have to control the Hive receivers as if they are dumb on/off relays

1 and 3 are pre-cursors to moving away from Hive cloud altogether - I have been testing the Xiaomi Aqara battery powered temperature sensors to establish if they are a valid choice for room temp sensing in place of the hive thermostats. So far so good!

My own path is similar, though behind, yours. I have a zigbee net, no Traadfi but a few Xiaomi bitsBut a zigbee2mqtt instance to put everything in to a common platform. All my sonoffs (20?) run tasmota and so are already on mqtt.

I have a stainless steel pressurised indirect DHW cylinder (from memory 210L) which already has an in-set tube approximately 1/3 of the way up from the bottom. Imagine someone has taken a 25mm s/s test tube, drilled a 25mm hole in the side of the cylinder and brazed/welded that test tube into the hole so that around 20mm is proud of the outside surface of the cylinder. The rim of the test tube is swaged out (a bit like the end of a trumpet!), which allowed the original DHW stat to fit over the end of it and was prevented from falling off the end by one or more tiny screws, which sit behind the swaged rim of the tube - if that makes sense. The new digital thermostat uses the same attachment method.

The only modification I have made to the new digital stat (which I linked to) is to drill a small hole on the bottom front left edge of the white casing to allow the TH16 sensor to be inserted through the body of the stat and out through the hole in the back (which is obviously over the test tube/hole) along with the two sensor probes that are part of the digital stat. All three probes sit inside that tube.

In terms of DHW control, the Hive Heating control is very arbitrary: The heating zone is either ON, SCHEDULED or OFF. Obviously there is no temperature control other than that provided by the cylinder stat, so at the moment, my Hive DHW zone is running a schedule like this:

If I had my time again I would not have fallen in love with the solid, beautiful (IMHO) Hive thermostats and instead would have gone for the cheapo plasticy-looking Danfoss RXZ stuff. I would probably have bought 2 x 2 channel receivers and not connected the second channel on one of them, giving me two heating channels and one DHW channel (plus one spare).

The plan if I modify the Hive control is to use each hive zigbee receiver as a dumb receiver (therefore maintaining control over the zone valves and boiler/pump etc as is), which is dictated to either by the setpoint/temp sensor in each TRV, or by the Xiaomi temperature sensors I would deploy in each room.

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