Day 5.
We're really starting to get into the bones of the system now and everything is mostly positive but of course the more we ask from the system the more we find the odd little niggle that's in there. That said it's already starting to melt into the background and be forgotten which is exactly what you want from a system, if you have to keep thinking about it I'd suggest it's not doing it's job properly. Most of our home automation is "invisible" because it just works and we never think about the clever stuff going on, but oh boy does it become instantly visible the odd time it stops working (normally I'm made aware of this by lots of shouting which is of course the universal system warning shared by anyone running a home automation system).
Anyway, back to the niggles, looking on the web we're certainly not the first to find these however in most cases people don't seem to have tested things a little further to find out the potential cause. I understand that, after all we are all consumers not Beta testers, remember the days when you purchased something and plugged it in and it worked before doing a huge update ?. Of course updates are a good thing as they improve products but in some instances (and I'm talking generally here rather than about Evohome) we're sold devices that probably needed another 6 months testing before being given to the public.....but that's a post for another day.
Back to Evohome then, generally it's all positive, very positive, we're still fine tuning the schedules and temperatures. We made the same fine tuning to our old Hive system when that was first installed in our old house, it's just easy to forget we spent the first week making small changes to make that perfect. The small tweaks here are partly due to the new system and partly due to us really working out how we use the rooms as we're still getting used to the place itself. In our old house things were very much based around the living room, in the new house with a kitchen that's a little bigger than the old one (the cat was never in danger of being swung in the old one but is at risk of dizziness in the new one) we find we spend a lot more time in the kitchen and the lounge only gets used later in the day.
Wait............we have a cat ?!?!., the only thing I've ever swung is a compass (that might make sense to some readers).
We're not the only ones doing the learning, Eveohome is learning about the zones (each zone is a room in our system) and how long they take to warm up / cool down so it can make the heating more energy efficient.
The "optimum start" and "optimum stop" features mean the system will ensure rooms are at the required temperatures for the times set in the schedule. In the image below the play room is set to be at 18.5 degrees C @ 15:30, knowing this the system kicked in at 14:50 to start warming the room up. As it learns how long this takes it will either reduce or increase the lead in time. That makes setting schedules easier as you are working with the times you want to be in the room rather than having to add in the warm up time yourself. There is a setting for the maximum lead in time the system will use, ours is set to one hour but I don't think it's ever started that far in advance yet.
A point to note here is this only applies to zones, it does not apply to the hot water so don't set your hot water timer for 07:00 expecting the system to get it ready for then as it would only come on at 07:00. This is where you need to work out the warm up time yourself, it does seem a little strange this works differently so I'm not sure if this is a feature or a fault, I'll ask the Honeywell support team when I call them with a couple of other things.
You'll also note from the screenshot below that Evohome shows which rooms are using the optimum start feature, indicated by the white arrow in the orange box, a nice touch.
Optimum start feature pre warming a room.
So that's the good, what about those niggles ?.
Evohome has Alexa integration and this is where there is a little niggle, I say niggle as we've found the work around but it took a little bit of figuring out to start with. Not a show stopper but just one of those things that anyone into home automation feels they should fix.
Overall I've found the integration with Alexa to be very good, unlike some skills where you need to ask "Alexa, ask (insert device / system name here)......" with Eveohome you just ask for what you want without having to mention Evohome.
For example, want to know the temperature in lounge?, simply ask "Alexa, what's the temperature in the lounge"....she comes back with the answer straight away. It's not something you use all the time but it's nice, we've not been able to get it to work for the hot water though. I've asked the Honeywell support team if this is a fault or if hot water temperature reporting via Alexa is not supported, in all of my emails they have manged to ignore that question 4 times so far..... I'm not sure what that tells me.
Want to turn on the hot water ?. "Alexa, turn on hot water"....done, turning off the hot water is as simple.
Want to change the temperature in a room ? "Alex, set lounge to 22 degrees".....Done. The response is "the heat's set to 22"......it might be nice if the room name was added to the response to acknowledge the command was heard correctly. That said it's not gone wrong yet and the answer is probably the way it should be, we just need to have more confidence in the voice control.
If you do change the temperature in a room via Alexa it will be in place until the next schedule change so be aware of that. If you did it last thing at night for example whilst watching some late night TV after the heating had gone off, the new setting would be in place until your next schedule change in the morning meaning your heating would be on all night. It's not possible to "boost" the temperature with Alexa for an hour like it was with the Hive System. No big deal just something to be aware of.
Finally I'm getting the to the niggle.
Asking Alex the temperature in every room gave an error for two rooms. For some reason Lounge would work every now and then and Play Room was just a no go, Alexa would say "that command does not work on that device". To fully test we ran through all of the rooms ensuring our question was exactly the same, yes we're not going mad there is a fault on two of them.
Being aware that Lounge is a name used throughout the various systems we have running together I thought it might be a conflict (Alexa has a group called lounge as does our Zwave network). However just on a whim I retyped the name into the Honeywell system and it seems to have resolved the issue. The same trick did not work with Play Room and there is nothing else in our system with such a name. I also considered if the issue was due to there being two words in the room name, however Bedroom 1, Bedroom 2 etc all have more than a single word and work fine.
More testing and we found out it's how you phrase the question, for some reason the Play room response will only come if we ask in a certain way (as shown below).
Screen shot of email sent to Honeywell with the fault finding information.
Overall the voice control is very good (if we ask as above) and reliable for those odd times you need it but the issue above will drive some people crazy. It's certainly an inconsistency and an error.
I did raise the issue with the Honeywell support team (to be fair to them I noted it on Twitter and they were very quick to get in touch). The team firstly logged into my controller and did a firmware update, that did not resolve the issue but did remove the hot water error I've had showing....happy days, at least until 3 hours later when it came back (the same amount of time it took to show in the first place when the system was installed). After no joy with the firmware update the Honeywell team advised I should contact the Amzon Echo team without delay and have the issue fixed as it's an Echo problem.
Given it's the Honeywell skill I feel this is something that sits with them rather than me, as reading some comments I'm not the only person with the issue. I might do it at some point but it does not feel like a priority given we know how to phrase the question to get the answer we want and can share that with other users here.
So overall other than the little niggle things are working exactly as hoped and the system looks like a good investment. Here's hoping that continues. Oh and no cats were harmed during the making of this blog, we don't have one.
If you have any questions about the system you'd like me to specifically cover then please leave a comment and I'll try and answer where I can.
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