Hello,
I am searching for a radiator valve that can use the input from external temperature from other sensors (not the integrated one). So far I found only Eurotonic ones. I would be happy if you know if any other brands have this function.
Regards
-Jaka.
As far as I know, Eurotronic is the only one.
However, there is a workaround: I you install the VThermo app, and add a VThermo “device” in a room where there is a temperature sensor and a radiator valve, then VThermo will adjust the radiator valve in order to keep the set room temperature. This works with any TRV (thermostatic radiator valve).
I have a couple of rooms where I needed an external temperature sensor, and installed Eurotronics to be able to do this. However, now I use VThermo (and internal temperature sensing on the Eurotronics), and this gives a better temperature regulation than with an external temperature sensor.
I don’t know exactly how the algorithm i VThermo works, but is seem to set the setpoint of the Eurotronics higher and lower that the set room temperature, in order to regulate. It works very well.
Another advantage is that if the Homey should go down for some reason, the Eurotronic will continue to regulate the room temperature based on the last setpoint it received. With an external temperature sensor, the Eurotronic is dependent on having the room temperature pushed to it from Homey
Just for completeness my Siemens SSA955 radiator actuators also can get their room temperature from an external temperature sensor, but they are KNX-RF and how I have connected them to Homey is a whole other story in itself (but the aforementioned element of them being «self-going» (also with an external KNX-RF temperature sensor) if I mess up Homey or some other code, is a definite and valuable feature when it comes to heating in a cold country).
Technically Danfoss Ally radiators can take an external temperature reading. The problem is just that Homey Danfoss app has not implemented that feature. For example Home Assistant can send an external temp reading to Ally thermostats.
This is an unfortunate oversight from the Danfoss app developers. I believe the app is developed by Homey themselves and I don’t really understand why they have left out this important feature.
You can see for example here that Ally thermostat actually exposes the external room sensor as well as “radiator covered” property: Danfoss 014G2461 control via MQTT | Zigbee2MQTT
Just request it: homey.app/support
For several apps I suspect Athom just published it to say “yup, we support that as well”.
Yep, did that. Let’s see how that goes. In my opinion Danfoss Ally support is definitely inadequate and not complete if this is not supported. I’ll post here once I get a reply from them.
Did you get an answer? For my part I can’t even get the vanilla control to work reliably… The TRVs more often than not just get random settings when a flow tries to set temperature…
I could not get them connected to system so I decided to return them back.
Yes support answered, but they basically said they are not able to reproduce the issue and since they can’t reproduce the issue they say it’s not related to Homey. So they say there is nothing they can do. I somehow doubt this, but what do you know.
I changed my setup so that I only had one Danfoss Ally radiator thermostat connected to Homey. I already had moved the others to Smartthings hub, which seems to work reliably. Now the last one also stopped working with Homey. I’m pretty tired of fixing this all the time with Homey so I am now moving even the last thermostat to Smartthings. Homey Pro is 0% reliable with Danfoss. It’s really strange Smartthings works all the time fine with Ally, but Homey always fails with different failures (broken connection, incorrect temperature setting).
Thanks for the answer. I thought I was onto something when I got the Danfoss gateway and it turned out that the TRVs needed firmware updates. So I got them updated and then reincluded in the Homey.
It seemed to work better for a while, a day, then one of them started to get setpoints seriously mixed up…
Now I have set up Home Assistant since I understood they should work there and so far it’s been way easier than I thought it would be.
Got them included straight away without extra apps and things and set up simple automations for the temperature.
So now I’m seriously considering ditching the Homey altogether given the lack of interest they have for solving issues…
Yeah, I too updated the firmwares using Ally Gateway, but to no avail. It didn’t seem to have any impact.
