Evohome range

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
  • bodtwo
    Automated Home Lurker
    • Sep 2016
    • 4

    Evohome range

    Hi All,

    looking at evohome but wondering about the range in house. House has three floors, normal sized 10 year old detached. Combi boiler is in kitchen on ground floor. There will be four evohome TVR's on each floor (other radiators will be left as is) and the thermostat/controller will be kept in living room on ground floor.

    One other issue is that we have a combi boiler combined with a Gledhill systemate 2000 thermal storage. If anyone has any direct experience of connecting evohome to that i'd be interested in hearing how they've gone about it.

    Thanks all and thanks for help.
  • DBMandrake
    Automated Home Legend
    • Sep 2014
    • 2361

    #2
    If you're concerned about range, the thing to remember is that the Evohome wireless communication is of a "star" configuration with the evotouch controller as the hub. This means that all the other devices (HR92's, wall stats, BDR relays etc) must be within communication range of the controller, however they need not be in range of each other.

    For example if it turned out that you can't get a reliable signal all the way from the top floor to the bottom floor, you could solve the issue by locating the controller on the middle floor. Of course that might not be convenient for you but it is an option if it came to that, and remember you can control most functions with the smart phone app.

    I have no experience with a three floor house, so hopefully someone who does can chime in. Wireless signals are affected very differently by different building materials, so before anyone can answer your question about range we'd really need to know what the construction of the interior walls and floors are, and how many rooms are on each floor to get an idea of the horizontal size of the house. Is your proposed living room location near the middle of the bottom floor or at one far corner ?

    Our house is only a 2 floor converted bungalow, all interior walls on the ground floor are solid brick and plaster, (which is worst case for wireless signals) our controller is located fairly centrally on the ground floor on a wall mount in the hall way where the old thermostat used to be, I get full 5/5 signal strength to all devices in the house on ground floor and in the converted loft, so no problems for me, however there have been a few reported cases on the forum from people with large houses, typically of a stretched out L configuration where communication from one end of the house to the other (which would pass through two exterior walls) is not possible.

    It might be worth having someone come in and do a signal test from bottom to top floor for you to see if your bottom floor location for the controller is feasible.

    Something else to keep in mind with a living room location is that the controller screen is always lit up - there is a night mode that makes the user interface darker, and you can also set the display to auto-dim where the brightness is reduced somewhat, but personally I still find the display too bright to live in the living room as we like the room quite dark while watching TV in the evening with just a small amount of mood lighting. In that situation the display is very distracting and will actually partially light up the room!

    For this reason it is mounted on a wall mount in the hallway just outside the living room. When coming down stairs during the night there is enough light from the controller to navigate the hallway without turning on the light...

    You talk about using 12 HR92's with the rest of the radiators presumably left on manual TRV's - do you actually have more than 12 rooms ? Or just more than 12 radiators ?

    Just FYI, although you are limited to 12 zones, you are not limited to 12 HR92's. There is actually no limit that I'm aware of to how many HR92's can be used per zone. So for example if you have 12 rooms and 18 radiators because some rooms have more than one radiator you are fine - you can put HR92's onto all 18 radiators and set them up in 12 zones.

    Typically a "zone" would be a room, regardless of whether it had one or more radiators. There is a way to conserve zones if you do have more than 12 rooms but would still like all rooms to be controlled - you can group rooms together into what is called a "multi-room zone".

    A typical example of this is say you had 3 children's bedrooms, and you are happy with all three bedrooms following the same temperature/timing schedule, and don't need independent control over them - you would add the HR92's in all three bedrooms to the same zone "kids rooms", and configure that zone to be a "multi-room" zone.

    What now happens is that you have one schedule that is applied to all three rooms, but each HR92 in each bedroom measures its temperature independently and adjusts its own radiator to achieve that goal. You'll only see the reported temperature of the first room on the controller however.

    Hope that gives you some ideas.
    Last edited by DBMandrake; 23 September 2016, 09:30 AM.

    Comment

    • bodtwo
      Automated Home Lurker
      • Sep 2016
      • 4

      #3
      Excellent response, thank you for taking the time to compile that.

      We have about about 24 rooms, but there are only 12 that i want more control over. The rest are hallways, landings, underfloor heating etc. I really want to have flexibility when kids are here and finer control over our bedroom, ensuite etc.

      Ideally i'll link the kids iPhones to some sort of presence sensors, probably use the samsung smarthings hub we have for the hue lights and wemo stuff.

      The idea of putting the controller on the middle floor is a good one. We'll likely leave it there and use the iPads we use at the moment for smarthings as controllers on each floor.

      Thanks again.

      Comment

      Working...
      X