I will be moving to a new apartment (2 bedrooms) at some point and I’ve been thinking how to setup heating.
My current solution includes eTRVs (Z-Wave) on each room heater, a few temperature sensors (Z-Wave) and a Shelly1 to toggle the boiler. I’m not particularly happy with this and I am looking for suggestions how to have something better.
Right now I plan to get ecobee thermostats and a smart boiler. I am also thinking of switching to Zigbee-based eTRVs since my lights will be Zigbee too so they should be able to mesh nicely around the house.
Does this sound like a good plan or is there room for improvement? What do you use and what would you change if you could start from scratch?
This topic is aging and no one seems to have answers here, have you found any answers elsewhere? As a general note: if no one has answered your questions within 24 hours or so, feel free to bump it, we don’t mind such behavior here when done in moderation
No, I don’t have any answer/suggestion from anywhere yet. This being a small community I figured someone will stumble upon this and add their opinion at some point so I didn’t feel the need for a bump.
Maybe if people would share their setups we can start exchanging some ideas.
I have no idea where to start with any recommendations as I do not know the type of heating in your apartment.
Is it a central heating cooling “normal” HVAC system or will you have baseboard electric heating or is this using portable heaters or radiator wall heaters… more information needed.
What sounds “simple” can often be more complex than necessary.
So there’s a central boiler… that delivers hot water? Oil? to each room heater? which are radiator type heaters? Guessing based on previous info of using TRV’s. So you have something in place to turn on/off the boiler and then use TRV to adjust temperature in each room? The simplicity of this actually makes it more complex as there’s many more pieces.
You mentioned getting an Ecobee thermostat… how is that going to actually work and connect? Does the boiler accept a standard thermostat connection (RWC)? Ecobee does provide remote temp sensors which could make it easier but there’s still the issue of the actual heater in each room and controlling the TRV.
If the system is being replaced then what kind of system is being installed? It does not sound like a traditional HVAC hence the use of the radiators in each room.
I’m in Romania and this type of system is standard in most homes (central water boiler + radiator floor heating in every room).
My current setup is like I described in the first post: eTRVs on each wall heater and a Shelly1 switch to turn the heating on when needed. All logic of when to turn on heating was handled by Hubitat and each TRV individually. So if a room was colder then the TRV thermostat was detecting the heater would turn on until the room was at or above the expected temperature.
What I’m hoping to do with the ecobee thermostat (and additional room sensors) is to not look at the temperature detected by the TRVs since they are not very reliable being right at the heat source and instead let ecobee control the whole system. Another thing I want to do is replace the boiler with something smart so I don’t have to rely on the Shelly switch to control everything (this has been the most unreliable part of the whole system last winter).
I know very little about proper heating systems hence I created this topic Maybe my expectations are way off.
TRV’s and this type of boiler setup is definitely common in the Europe. Unfortunately I have no direct experience with this type of setup.
What info I can provide… I do not see how the Ecobee will help. Unless there’s a special Euro model that works with boiler setups. IF so that’s great. If the point of the Ecobee was the remote sensors you may want to look into Ecowitt temp/humidity sensors and their small gateway. It integrates with Home Assistant.
Gen1 Shelly devices have reliability issues. I was told this was fixed in a firmware update but I don’t know for sure. Perhaps Gen2 devices are better? Again I don’t know. If the purpose of the Shelly was simple on/off switch you should be able to use a z-wave or zigbee switch for this. It will be more expensive but they are available.
To bring it all together as you’re using Core which is Home Assistant there’s a nice component called ‘Generic Thermostat’ it allows you to select a temp sensor device and a relay device (switch) and make them into a thermostat. Same as the Virtual Thermostat from Hubitat.
