Wishlist:
1) Per zone boiler demand display on the controller and phone app. Now that display of local HR92 override has been adressed this is the most glaring remaining omission in the user interface/experience. There is still no way to see on the controller or phone app which zones are currently calling for heat, or indeed whether *any* zone is calling for heat. The only way to be aware of a heat demand is to watch the LED on the BDR91 or OpenTherm bridge. Sure, you can guess by looking at the set point versus the measured temperature for each zone, but if you are in the +/- 1.5 degree TPI proportional band the conclusion you can draw is very murky indeed as it bases the heat demand not just on temperature difference but also temperature trends etc. Also secondary HR92's in multiroom zones cannot be evaluated this way - they may be calling for heat when the temperature reading of the master HR92 in the zone causes the controller to indicate that they would not be.
The reason per zone heat demand is so important is that without it many users will find it difficult to "trust" the system completely when they see their boiler coming on for "unexplained" reasons. Sometimes there is a genuine issue such as a binding error, or it could be a syncronisation error with an HR92 (bug #1 above can lead to "unexplained" boiler firing) but in all cases there is absolutely no practical way for the end user to troubleshoot the issue, because the controller simply does not provide the necessary information to diagnose the problem. This leads to lots of trial and error and hocus pocus rebinding incantations in an attempt to solve the issue. The only true way to debug inexplicable boiler firing down to an individual zone at the moment other than very long winded trial and error is with an HCI80 and custom software, or the latest domoticz plugin - which is really not acceptable.
We know the controller has access to the boiler demand from each zone because the HR92's send that demand to the controller which then aggregates the demand and sends it to the boiler relay - so *please* just display this information on the display and in the phone app. Even something like a small flame in the corner of the set point line for each zone with say 3 sizes based on low, medium or high demand would be an order of magnitude better than the complete lack of information we have now. I think it would greatly reassure those users who are a little bit "iffy" about the inscruitable boiler control of the Evohome, and allow any problems with spurious boiler demand to be tracked down and solved in minutes instead of hours or days.
2) Make the Heating OFF action really be heating off! In Heating OFF mode HR92's can still be turned back up manually to call for heat and thus turn the boiler on, but there is no way from the control panel to either prevent this or know that it has even happened, because not only is there no heat demand indicator for zones (item #1 above) the word OFF also replaces the set point so you can't see that the set point has been changed. For those that don't know how the OFF action works behind the scenes, it simply suspends the normal scheduled set point changes and then "politely" asks all HR92's to change their set points to 5 degrees (or whatever your OFF mode is configured to) at the next scheduled 4 minute communication window, and then relies on all HR92's in the house to do so and individually cease calling for heat. So it can be several minutes before the boiler goes off for the last time. If you turn one of the HR92's up manually this is not indicated on the controller but it calls for heat and the controller passes that call for heat through to the boiler relay despite clearly saying OFF for every zone displayed. It's no wonder users get confused about phantom boiler firing when the user interface is basically lying to them in this scenario.
I can think of two potential solutions to this problem, although I'm unsure which might be best:
a) Because the controller must forward on heat demand requests from HR92 zones to the boiler relay, if the controller is in Heating OFF mode, it should simply ignore the heat requests from the zones and directly tell the boiler relay to stay off. To ensure that frost protection continues to work, an exception should be made for any zones with an indicated temperature equal to or lower than the OFF temperature setting. EG if a zone reports 10 degrees and is calling for heat when the heating is "OFF", ignore it, however if it reports 4 degrees allow its heat demand to be passed through to the boiler. An advantage of this approach is that when you turn the heating OFF it will go off immediately instead of with some random delay up to 4 minutes and the user can be very confident that off means off and no antagonists like small children can turn the boiler back on by twiddling with a radiator valve... A disadvantage is that I sometimes find it useful to turn on an individual zone manually when the rest of the heating is ostensibly in OFF mode. It would no longer be possible to do this.
b) Send the 5 degree heating off set point to HR92's as now, however if any zone is later turned up and starts calling for heat, replace the word OFF in that zone with the actual set point (and heat demand per wishlist #1) on the screen to make it very clear that although the rest of the heating is off, someone has turned that zone back on. In effect that zone is no longer in OFF mode and will function and be displayed normally.
3) Advance mode. Conventional timers have an Advance button that will fast forward the schedule to the next on/off change and then resume from there. Extremely handy for situations like getting up early, going to bed early, leaving for work early or arriving home early. In short its an indispensible feature that people use all the time. One of the biggest culture shocks switching to an Evohome system is the complete absense of such a feature. Arriving home early for example means manually and tediously turning up every individual zone, with the only possible alternatives being to use the Day off or Custom quick actions, neither of which may be suitable for what you want. (I sometimes use Day Off mode as a workaround but Custom is more or less useless as it is too limited)
Obviously because every zone has its own schedule and that schedule is set points not just on/off, a simple advance to next on/off schedule button can't be done, however a function to advance to a user specified time most definitely could be. For example say you had the downstairs rooms configured to go off at 11pm and you wanted to go to bed at 10am. You could just choose to "Advance schedule to 11pm". All the set points would then change to what they normally would be at 11pm and then hold there until 11pm actually came and passed, then it would resume the normal schedule. The time which the schedule advanced to would need to be intelligently chosen in relation to your schedule of course, but that is not difficult and could be done as part of the schedule programming. There could be the option to set the time with the standard time adjustment controls on an as needed basis, or perhaps some user customisable preset times, (at least 4 to 6 of them) so that when you press the advance button, the default is to advance to the next time among the presets that you have defined but the time can then be overridden with the time adjustment control. If you had advance time presets for early bed, early rise, early leave for work and early return home you could basically get the exact same functionality of a conventional advance button.
4) Quicker ways to override temperatures of one or more zones. Making a significant override to a zone via the controller using the little up down arrows is very tedious, lets face it. If you're changing a single zone from 20 to 21 degrees its quick and easy enough, however if you're changing a zone from 20 to 5 degrees before going to bed that's 30 presses of the down arrow or about 15 seconds holding it down for it to slowly step down which is rather painful. Multiply that by several zones and you have a very un-userfriendly experience. An HR92 can be turned down from 20 to 5 in about 2 seconds with a twist of the knob (but careful not to accidentally set it to OFF) and a DT92 can be set to 5 degrees by holding the power button for a second, but there is no quick way to do this on the controller, and no way to do a batch change of temperature on multiple zones.
The custom quick action can sort of be used to solve the "going to bed early" problem by setting the custom schedule to 5 degrees before your earliest bed time and enabling it for all non-bedroom rooms, but because you can only specify the custom action to stop at midnight its no use if you go to bed after midnight. A better solution would be to have the temperature control bring up a pop up overlay that shows the current temperature, up and down arrows end time, and a row of about 6 preset temperature buttons. These could be commonly used temperatures such as 5, 12, 16, 18, 20 and so on which you have configured in settings previously. So if you are just wanting to turn the zone off you can hit temperature, hit the 5 degree button then OK, all in about a second instead of 30 tedious presses on the down arrow. Furthermore, instead of simply an OK button to press after selecting the temperature and override time, there could also be a "Multiple Zones" button that you can press that will then bring up a list of all zones (like the zone list in the custom quick action) where you can very quickly tap multiple additional zones to apply the change to before pressing OK. This would *greatly* speed up the process of getting multiple zones turned off or on to the same temperature manually.
Continued...
1) Per zone boiler demand display on the controller and phone app. Now that display of local HR92 override has been adressed this is the most glaring remaining omission in the user interface/experience. There is still no way to see on the controller or phone app which zones are currently calling for heat, or indeed whether *any* zone is calling for heat. The only way to be aware of a heat demand is to watch the LED on the BDR91 or OpenTherm bridge. Sure, you can guess by looking at the set point versus the measured temperature for each zone, but if you are in the +/- 1.5 degree TPI proportional band the conclusion you can draw is very murky indeed as it bases the heat demand not just on temperature difference but also temperature trends etc. Also secondary HR92's in multiroom zones cannot be evaluated this way - they may be calling for heat when the temperature reading of the master HR92 in the zone causes the controller to indicate that they would not be.
The reason per zone heat demand is so important is that without it many users will find it difficult to "trust" the system completely when they see their boiler coming on for "unexplained" reasons. Sometimes there is a genuine issue such as a binding error, or it could be a syncronisation error with an HR92 (bug #1 above can lead to "unexplained" boiler firing) but in all cases there is absolutely no practical way for the end user to troubleshoot the issue, because the controller simply does not provide the necessary information to diagnose the problem. This leads to lots of trial and error and hocus pocus rebinding incantations in an attempt to solve the issue. The only true way to debug inexplicable boiler firing down to an individual zone at the moment other than very long winded trial and error is with an HCI80 and custom software, or the latest domoticz plugin - which is really not acceptable.
We know the controller has access to the boiler demand from each zone because the HR92's send that demand to the controller which then aggregates the demand and sends it to the boiler relay - so *please* just display this information on the display and in the phone app. Even something like a small flame in the corner of the set point line for each zone with say 3 sizes based on low, medium or high demand would be an order of magnitude better than the complete lack of information we have now. I think it would greatly reassure those users who are a little bit "iffy" about the inscruitable boiler control of the Evohome, and allow any problems with spurious boiler demand to be tracked down and solved in minutes instead of hours or days.
2) Make the Heating OFF action really be heating off! In Heating OFF mode HR92's can still be turned back up manually to call for heat and thus turn the boiler on, but there is no way from the control panel to either prevent this or know that it has even happened, because not only is there no heat demand indicator for zones (item #1 above) the word OFF also replaces the set point so you can't see that the set point has been changed. For those that don't know how the OFF action works behind the scenes, it simply suspends the normal scheduled set point changes and then "politely" asks all HR92's to change their set points to 5 degrees (or whatever your OFF mode is configured to) at the next scheduled 4 minute communication window, and then relies on all HR92's in the house to do so and individually cease calling for heat. So it can be several minutes before the boiler goes off for the last time. If you turn one of the HR92's up manually this is not indicated on the controller but it calls for heat and the controller passes that call for heat through to the boiler relay despite clearly saying OFF for every zone displayed. It's no wonder users get confused about phantom boiler firing when the user interface is basically lying to them in this scenario.
I can think of two potential solutions to this problem, although I'm unsure which might be best:
a) Because the controller must forward on heat demand requests from HR92 zones to the boiler relay, if the controller is in Heating OFF mode, it should simply ignore the heat requests from the zones and directly tell the boiler relay to stay off. To ensure that frost protection continues to work, an exception should be made for any zones with an indicated temperature equal to or lower than the OFF temperature setting. EG if a zone reports 10 degrees and is calling for heat when the heating is "OFF", ignore it, however if it reports 4 degrees allow its heat demand to be passed through to the boiler. An advantage of this approach is that when you turn the heating OFF it will go off immediately instead of with some random delay up to 4 minutes and the user can be very confident that off means off and no antagonists like small children can turn the boiler back on by twiddling with a radiator valve... A disadvantage is that I sometimes find it useful to turn on an individual zone manually when the rest of the heating is ostensibly in OFF mode. It would no longer be possible to do this.
b) Send the 5 degree heating off set point to HR92's as now, however if any zone is later turned up and starts calling for heat, replace the word OFF in that zone with the actual set point (and heat demand per wishlist #1) on the screen to make it very clear that although the rest of the heating is off, someone has turned that zone back on. In effect that zone is no longer in OFF mode and will function and be displayed normally.
3) Advance mode. Conventional timers have an Advance button that will fast forward the schedule to the next on/off change and then resume from there. Extremely handy for situations like getting up early, going to bed early, leaving for work early or arriving home early. In short its an indispensible feature that people use all the time. One of the biggest culture shocks switching to an Evohome system is the complete absense of such a feature. Arriving home early for example means manually and tediously turning up every individual zone, with the only possible alternatives being to use the Day off or Custom quick actions, neither of which may be suitable for what you want. (I sometimes use Day Off mode as a workaround but Custom is more or less useless as it is too limited)
Obviously because every zone has its own schedule and that schedule is set points not just on/off, a simple advance to next on/off schedule button can't be done, however a function to advance to a user specified time most definitely could be. For example say you had the downstairs rooms configured to go off at 11pm and you wanted to go to bed at 10am. You could just choose to "Advance schedule to 11pm". All the set points would then change to what they normally would be at 11pm and then hold there until 11pm actually came and passed, then it would resume the normal schedule. The time which the schedule advanced to would need to be intelligently chosen in relation to your schedule of course, but that is not difficult and could be done as part of the schedule programming. There could be the option to set the time with the standard time adjustment controls on an as needed basis, or perhaps some user customisable preset times, (at least 4 to 6 of them) so that when you press the advance button, the default is to advance to the next time among the presets that you have defined but the time can then be overridden with the time adjustment control. If you had advance time presets for early bed, early rise, early leave for work and early return home you could basically get the exact same functionality of a conventional advance button.
4) Quicker ways to override temperatures of one or more zones. Making a significant override to a zone via the controller using the little up down arrows is very tedious, lets face it. If you're changing a single zone from 20 to 21 degrees its quick and easy enough, however if you're changing a zone from 20 to 5 degrees before going to bed that's 30 presses of the down arrow or about 15 seconds holding it down for it to slowly step down which is rather painful. Multiply that by several zones and you have a very un-userfriendly experience. An HR92 can be turned down from 20 to 5 in about 2 seconds with a twist of the knob (but careful not to accidentally set it to OFF) and a DT92 can be set to 5 degrees by holding the power button for a second, but there is no quick way to do this on the controller, and no way to do a batch change of temperature on multiple zones.
The custom quick action can sort of be used to solve the "going to bed early" problem by setting the custom schedule to 5 degrees before your earliest bed time and enabling it for all non-bedroom rooms, but because you can only specify the custom action to stop at midnight its no use if you go to bed after midnight. A better solution would be to have the temperature control bring up a pop up overlay that shows the current temperature, up and down arrows end time, and a row of about 6 preset temperature buttons. These could be commonly used temperatures such as 5, 12, 16, 18, 20 and so on which you have configured in settings previously. So if you are just wanting to turn the zone off you can hit temperature, hit the 5 degree button then OK, all in about a second instead of 30 tedious presses on the down arrow. Furthermore, instead of simply an OK button to press after selecting the temperature and override time, there could also be a "Multiple Zones" button that you can press that will then bring up a list of all zones (like the zone list in the custom quick action) where you can very quickly tap multiple additional zones to apply the change to before pressing OK. This would *greatly* speed up the process of getting multiple zones turned off or on to the same temperature manually.
Continued...
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