“If this than that” (IFTTT) and eTRV what does it really mean being "Smart"?

[ericmark]

My eTRV it seems has two temperature senders so it can compensate for the heat from the central heating water when measuring air temperature. It also does not seem to turn fully on when under the target temperature, but gradually increases over around 3°C so it is better than a simple mechanical TRV at controlling room temperature.

However there is no reason why it can't use weather forecast to also adjust what it does, however I would guess the IFTTT is limited to if Nest temperature is adjusted then also adjust the eTRV temperature to match? Since I don't have Nest I don't know how it works with Nest.

I don't think I need to alter my eTRV any more, it seems to have settled down, and I can now forget it and let it do its job. However out of interest I would like to know more about this IFTTT and how items in the heating system "talk" to each other.

 

[ericmark]

This was Jan 2017 and since then moved out of mother's house and sold it, also sold my old house, and now have a new to me house in Mid-Wales, but still not got my head around IFTTT.

I now do know how it works with Nest, it doesn't, the Energenie app would control both, but any link between Nest and Energenie failed. The anti-hysteresis software on the Energenie TRV heads, was OTT. This resulted in any attempt at geo-fencing, was not really going to work. I did, nevertheless, try it with Nest Gen 3. It turns up the heat far too late to be of any use. It did work turning down the heating when leaving the house. The failure of the local EE mast in high winds, did the same, but because Nest also has a built-in PIR, it took some time to work out why the house was cold.

I am not sure that IFTTT would really work? The issue is the time it takes to re-heat a room. I can speed this up, by programming a sequence, so rooms are heated up in the order they will be used in. It is a bit of a balancing act, the oil boiler does not modulate, it will, with no radiators turned on, switch off after approx 20 minutes, it is during that time heating the DHW.

So we want all radiators required turned on in 20 minutes. And a 5 minutes delay between each, is enough to get really hot water to the first radiators faster.

I note Tado has the option to set distance. But in the main I travel less than 10 mile from home, so not far enough away for geo-fencing to work. I now have Drayton Wiser as well, that also uses IFTTT, but not tried to set it up.

I had another look in 2018 the answer is something I now do. I use Google Nest Mini's, similar to the Alexis unit. But as far as heating goes, not sure if I trust it, maybe my lack of teeth, but turn on landing light sometimes gets reply turning on 17 things. One then needs to get the phone out to see what it has turned on.

The heating has been a problem since we moved in. We have 6 doors to outside, and an open fire, so the hall is not really ideal, the main difficulty is the hall cools too slowly.

So the way around the issue, is to have multi-thermostatic devices able to fire the boiler. Heart of winter this works well, but Spring and Autumn we find the heating firing up when not required, as the radiator on a North external wall so the TRV head is cooler than the room in general. Hindsight, should have used a wall thermostat.