Installation day, finally.
We can at last wave goodbye to the much loathed 24 hour programmer that has been driving the heating system and at the same time everyone nuts, whilst making far more profit for our gas supplier than is reasonable from a single household.
As we move out of the dark ages we've decided to welcome the modern age in the safe hands of a Honeywell approved installer. This seemed like the most sensible option as we're the second owners of this house and the previous owners left something of a puzzle regarding how the underfloor heating links into the rest of the system. I'm no heating expert and having someone with the right tools, experience and knowledge setting things up just makes sense. He also gets a good deal on the hardware so the whole install was less than we had imagined.
Just a note about approved installers here based on the experience I had. Having got the list of Honeywell installers from their website, the first approved installer I spoke to suggested he was not really a fan of the system, advised he'd seen TRV's magically change between rooms in the controller (sounds like home owners fiddling to me) and said he was recommending people installed Tado these days. Interesting view point from an "approved" installer and a little worrying, I decided to go back to the list and find another one (who was actually more local). If the second guy had the same view I'd have looked again at our system choice, however this time the installer was a fan of the system and actually really seemed to know his stuff, giving examples of various install's he's done. A little more research and a few more discussions later and here we are.
Armed with a pile of boxes for everything we'd need our installer (Lee) was ready to go, of course before anything can be unpacked the kettle needs to be on and hot beverages issued. Included in the small stash of goodies were the TRV's (11), central controller, hot water controller, wireless thermostat (for the under floor heating zone) and an extra relay box due to how our heating system is put together.
Whilst the airing cupboard was being opened up for surgery I naturally took the opportunity to shoot a few unboxing vidoes (at this point Lee thinks I'm crazy), I'll get those edited and posted on youtube as soon as I can.
We've planned our system so all main rooms are their own zones, rooms with two radiators will have them paired to create a single zone, easy to do and gives very granular control. Bathrooms and the landing radiator will be left as they are, running on traditional TRV's they will just come on when the rest of the system is running (unless the TRV's turn them off in the traditional way). This seems to make the most sense for us given the number of zones we will be using and ensures the bathrooms get a nice blast every now and then keeping towels toasty in the winter. We will see how well it works, we can always juggle things around a little if we need to but it seems a good place to start.
So on to the install, or should I say watching the install.
Airing cupboard ready and the hot water valve controller and thermostat can be fitted. A nice feature of the system is that you can actually see the temperature of the hot water. I had convinced myself the existing thermostat was faulty as despite being set to 60 degrees (or any other temperature) the water would still be red hot at the taps and the boiler would seemingly be running forever to heat it up. That will hopefully be a thing of the past.
The airing cupboard will also be home to the boiler control which will kick the boiler in and out as needed when it's called for by any of the zones.
A short while later the airing cupboard work is done and the hot water controls are in. Each of these boxes has a button for manual override (should it ever be needed) and a green light to show when it's running. The Green lights are useful for checking operating during install.
Hot water done it's onto the under floor heating. Our manifold was custom built and has an interesting set up to give it it's own circuit as this was added after the house was built. Some detective work was needed to work out how the existing thermostat was firing the boiler and how that in turn was operating the two pumps in the circuit. After 15 mins Lee had things sussed and was figuring out how to best configure the Evohome. A quick call to the Honeywell technical support (who seemed very knowledgeable about all things heating (seems odd to say but not all support services are experts so this was good to see) and the plan was hatched.
They key to getting this to work is to control the bits we need to and leave the rest to do it's thing as designed (including the TRV you may be able to spot in the picture below which has been modified). No point in disturbing things that don't need to be.
With all of the valve controllers set up it was time to pair everything with the controller and do some testing. Due to how our system needed to be set up this is where the decision to have an expert really paid off. After some head scratching, programming, resetting, muttering and a few more calls to Honeywell everything was working as planned. All credit to Lee his experience shone through. That said the system units all pair together really easily and zones are quite simple to add so my impression was that most people will do this very easily if they don't have the complications we had.
With the valve controllers all working it was onto programming the TRV's. This is best done in one place as it makes testing easy and saves a lot of running around between rooms. When you change a zone setting it can take up to four mins for the TRV to react depending on where in the communication cycle you issue the command (comms are every 4 mins to save battery power). Therefore testing 11 TRVs can take a little while, but having them all on the worktop in one place makes the whole process a lot easier.
Once all done it was literally a five minute job to fit 11 TRV's, a matter of unscrewing the old ones and fitting the new, 30 seconds each. Once fitted each TRV will run its own calibration on the radiator which takes it a few mins. This is also your first chance to see how much noise they make on radiators.
On to the fine tuning process, I'll keep the diary updated as we go.
If you have any questions or anything specific you'd like to know them please let me know and in the comments and I'll try and answer your questions.
We can at last wave goodbye to the much loathed 24 hour programmer that has been driving the heating system and at the same time everyone nuts, whilst making far more profit for our gas supplier than is reasonable from a single household.
As we move out of the dark ages we've decided to welcome the modern age in the safe hands of a Honeywell approved installer. This seemed like the most sensible option as we're the second owners of this house and the previous owners left something of a puzzle regarding how the underfloor heating links into the rest of the system. I'm no heating expert and having someone with the right tools, experience and knowledge setting things up just makes sense. He also gets a good deal on the hardware so the whole install was less than we had imagined.
Just a note about approved installers here based on the experience I had. Having got the list of Honeywell installers from their website, the first approved installer I spoke to suggested he was not really a fan of the system, advised he'd seen TRV's magically change between rooms in the controller (sounds like home owners fiddling to me) and said he was recommending people installed Tado these days. Interesting view point from an "approved" installer and a little worrying, I decided to go back to the list and find another one (who was actually more local). If the second guy had the same view I'd have looked again at our system choice, however this time the installer was a fan of the system and actually really seemed to know his stuff, giving examples of various install's he's done. A little more research and a few more discussions later and here we are.
Armed with a pile of boxes for everything we'd need our installer (Lee) was ready to go, of course before anything can be unpacked the kettle needs to be on and hot beverages issued. Included in the small stash of goodies were the TRV's (11), central controller, hot water controller, wireless thermostat (for the under floor heating zone) and an extra relay box due to how our heating system is put together.
Unboxing heaven!
We've planned our system so all main rooms are their own zones, rooms with two radiators will have them paired to create a single zone, easy to do and gives very granular control. Bathrooms and the landing radiator will be left as they are, running on traditional TRV's they will just come on when the rest of the system is running (unless the TRV's turn them off in the traditional way). This seems to make the most sense for us given the number of zones we will be using and ensures the bathrooms get a nice blast every now and then keeping towels toasty in the winter. We will see how well it works, we can always juggle things around a little if we need to but it seems a good place to start.
So on to the install, or should I say watching the install.
Airing cupboard ready and the hot water valve controller and thermostat can be fitted. A nice feature of the system is that you can actually see the temperature of the hot water. I had convinced myself the existing thermostat was faulty as despite being set to 60 degrees (or any other temperature) the water would still be red hot at the taps and the boiler would seemingly be running forever to heat it up. That will hopefully be a thing of the past.
The airing cupboard will also be home to the boiler control which will kick the boiler in and out as needed when it's called for by any of the zones.
Airing Cupboard install
A short while later the airing cupboard work is done and the hot water controls are in. Each of these boxes has a button for manual override (should it ever be needed) and a green light to show when it's running. The Green lights are useful for checking operating during install.
Hot water controls in, top box monitors temperature, bottom box is the valve control.
Hot water done it's onto the under floor heating. Our manifold was custom built and has an interesting set up to give it it's own circuit as this was added after the house was built. Some detective work was needed to work out how the existing thermostat was firing the boiler and how that in turn was operating the two pumps in the circuit. After 15 mins Lee had things sussed and was figuring out how to best configure the Evohome. A quick call to the Honeywell technical support (who seemed very knowledgeable about all things heating (seems odd to say but not all support services are experts so this was good to see) and the plan was hatched.
They key to getting this to work is to control the bits we need to and leave the rest to do it's thing as designed (including the TRV you may be able to spot in the picture below which has been modified). No point in disturbing things that don't need to be.
Underfloor Heating Manifold, getting control of the pumps needed some figuring out.
With all of the valve controllers set up it was time to pair everything with the controller and do some testing. Due to how our system needed to be set up this is where the decision to have an expert really paid off. After some head scratching, programming, resetting, muttering and a few more calls to Honeywell everything was working as planned. All credit to Lee his experience shone through. That said the system units all pair together really easily and zones are quite simple to add so my impression was that most people will do this very easily if they don't have the complications we had.
With the valve controllers all working it was onto programming the TRV's. This is best done in one place as it makes testing easy and saves a lot of running around between rooms. When you change a zone setting it can take up to four mins for the TRV to react depending on where in the communication cycle you issue the command (comms are every 4 mins to save battery power). Therefore testing 11 TRVs can take a little while, but having them all on the worktop in one place makes the whole process a lot easier.
TRV Programming
Pressing the front mounted button on a TRV will illuminate the screen making it easier to read, this will revert to it's normal state after a few seconds so it does not drain the battery.
So that's it, job done. The physical install took around 3 hours, over coming the programming issues (due to the way our underfloor heating was set up) and talking to Honeywell support used up another couple of hours as there were a couple of resets along the way. That said everything was done in the day. All we need to do now is set up the schedules for each zone so that we have a starting point with which to do the fine tuning. The installer has also set everything up in a non destructive way
Now what shall we do with this little lot.....TRV's, get your TRV's here.
The old TRVs, maybe we'll keep these for a little while just in case.
On to the fine tuning process, I'll keep the diary updated as we go.
If you have any questions or anything specific you'd like to know them please let me know and in the comments and I'll try and answer your questions.
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