Actually, this would make an interesting topic. What features of the WiFi model are actually worth upgrading for? A lot of the new features could easily be implemented via an external programme. But the per zone optimisation is such a brilliant feature that was dropped in the WiFi model.
@mikey I'm interested to know what makes optimisation something you would want in one room but not in another, I have heard the request before but i dont think ever the use reasons?Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey8156
It was taken out on the insistence of a UI usability 'expert' because it is simpler for people to program times and removes the confusion of what time to enter, either the start or 'at temperature' time. We did however ask users if any actually used different setting for different rooms and we had a few discussions but didnt get a strong argument for it other than - it used to be possible.
Just to be clear optimisation is not a single heatup time, there is one for every zone, and each calculates its own heatup rate after installation and constantly re-learns this over the heating season. The actual time a zone heats for is based on individual measured temperature and the zones next scheduled temperature.
Regards AtM
Perhaps it is no more than a user wants a room up to temperature by the time it is to be used but then as said one simply adjusts the schedule. Alternatively some rooms may warm up at different rates and optimisation could be useful for that to compensate for each room.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy the Minion
As I have said before I have found optimisation is not worth it. Tried it several times but it burns more fuel and never did seem to learn the time it takes to warm up.
For me the use case was very simple. I needed Optimisation only in the rooms that we were in overnight. The rest of the house could heat up more slowly/variably and that was acceptable. To have optimisation running on all the zone was both unnecessary and a waste.
Thanks, your explanation made it must easier for me to understand. Will be happy to upgrade now.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy the Minion
I have an office/workshop that's in an exposed part of my house. The schedule is set to heat at 9:00am without optimisation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy the Minion
I can walk in and simply turn on a convector heater to bring the temperature up and it's maintained throughout the day as I'm in and out. Optimisation would start to heat ridiculously early in winter.
I'm effectively running this room in a different way to the rest of the house and I find that a useful facility.
I know that I could achieve a similar effect by having optimisation on and deferring the start to 10:00am or so, but that would work in winter but be less appropriate when things got warmer.
For me I have a few rads that are oversized and only need to start up to produce a comfortable warmth and so i don't want optimisation, and then have a few rooms that take longer to heat (Mainly bathrooms with towel rads) and so benefit from optimisation. When I had the non-wifi version with individual optimisation that supported the scenario. Now with the "upgraded" wifi version I effectively have to mentally alter the oversized rads schedule to compensate for the optimisation I need for the undersized !! I would love individual optimisation to be brought back :)Quote:
Originally Posted by G4RHL
I can't understand this being a UX problem - the option was (if I remember correctly) buried deep inside the installer menus, rather than being exposed to the great unwashed in the normal settings screens.
There's all kinds of "your gran wouldn't understand it" stuff in there.
P.
Installation menu>Zone Settings>edit Zone>Next Page>Application Setting>OptimisationQuote:
Originally Posted by paulockenden
Ok, good to hear.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy the Minion
Yes I did notice a slow integral action but it still wasn't enough to allow the boiler to actually come on. Don't get me wrong, I understand what the algorithm is trying to do, I agree with the basic premise of it, but in testing the changes/features of the beta firmware I try to look at it both with my propeller hat on (nerdy analysis and derivation of the underlying algorithms) and also through the eyes of a "normal" end user such as my spouse...Quote:
Load scaling is complex and it is difficult to both scale what I suspect will be a zone with a low learned fuzzy demand and that is also a very small part of the system. We saw this happening in our internal testing, however it is also hard to then decide that a zone cannot go below a certain heat demand % because that will override temperature control if we are not careful. [note there is a massive difference between rooms in the total population, for one zone in one house 2% might be the fuzzy value for a given temperature while another it is 90% and we can only discover this after installation]
What we have done to overcome this was to build some slow integral action into the zone scaling control. It won’t be perfect if you are watching the zone closely based on a single manual action, but because load scaling is also an adaptive process in addition to a feedback response it will also modify behaviour slowly for this zone and the zones scale will increase.
And a normal end user who turns their bathroom radiator up to 22C when the room is 18C who finds the radiator stone cold and boiler still completely off 30 minutes later is going to be phoning their installer to come in and fix the system or take it away. This might not be what you want to hear but it is the cold hard truth. People will think the system is broken when it starts behaving like this.
There needs to be some realistic limit to how far the system is willing to scale down the load of a zone. Scaling a 100% load down to 1% or 3% is taking things far too far when the boiler won't even fire until a load of 11% is requested. Under these conditions the zone can never meet it's target. If it had a scaling limit of say 4x or 5x (100% load scaled down to 20-25%) that would be far more reasonable.
I've set my system to partial load scaling now, however while it reduces the scaling for a given situation it still seems to come up with some rediculously high scaling factors and once again I was in the situation today where I turned the bathroom radiator up from 20C to 23C (ambient 20C) had a shower, by the time I came out of the shower the radiator was still stone cold and the boiler flow temperature was about 38C as it had barely fired. (Although strangely the boiler heat demand was shown as 42%)
I want to like load scaling and it does definitely reduce overshoots and improve temperature regulation when multiple zones have some demand, unfortunately it has pathalogical behaviour when only a single zone is demanding heat where even turning up a radiator several degrees won't bring on the boiler, something that could be easily solved by setting a more realistic limit to the maximum scaling factor. Sadly I think I'll ultimately end up turning load scaling off due to this pathalogical behaviour with single zones, partly because I don't want grief from my spouse over it. :D
BTW I'm trying to reply to your PM about logs but your inbox is full and won't take any more messages. :)