Phantom Overrides - Can anyone help?

[AndyP]

You may have nailed the root cause SteveP. The comms protocol is a simply 'fire and forget', and if two fire at the same time then probably neither get their messages. Low batteries may cause a device to go rogue and restart their timed message clock or simple mis read a message for another device and respond . You know you don't have a plug and play system when you find yourself loading up Domoticz on a Pi with a receiver so you can see the heat demands from your tablet such that you can find out why the boiler has fired up unexpectedly! Given the somewhat fragile design of the battery connectors , every time you replace you may in for another round and 'hide and seek' the problem.

[therealfronty]

So I soldier on but am conscious that no one else in my family has a clue how to maintain the system and also very few plumbers would know either should they be called out 🤔

I feel your pain, my wife has zero interest in anything IT or gadget related, having Evohome has definitely improved our comfort levels but I am solely responsible for adjusting schedules, changing batteries and troubleshooting the odd problem when it arises. It's the same with the wifi/netflix/sky box, the wife and kids are the first to complain if anything goes wrong - I do wonder how they would all cope if I wasn't around any longer!

[Jemster]

Ahhh I love spam filters. Turns out the notification from the 25th went in the spam bin so I hadn’t seen the last few replies. Technology is wonderful…. when it works. And yeah I’m a software developer, amongst other things so I feel qualified to moan about these things

SteveP, you’re in exactly the same situation with the same battery observations. I am not sure why a battery dying causes such havoc with the entire system. Why the firmware can’t deduce this fact (given that we know it monitors battery levels) and handle it cleanly escapes me. The dts92 I have trashes at least half a dozen zones when it dies.

Oh and just to add to the ever changing scenery, yesterday for the very first time ever in 3 years, the heating bdr91 started flashing the red light at 2.5 second intervals. It recovered after half an hour or so, but I’ve never ever seen that before. And nope, nothing has been relocated and nothing has been placed in ‘line of sight’ of the controller. So another total mystery. It hasn’t even got a battery and no other controllers are reporting low batteries.

Wonder if there’s a gap in the market for a reliable, easy to use, multi-zone system… this hardware may do the job if we just put new firmware on all the devices

[Jemster]

I'd been monitoring this for a while and, through the power of disabling overrides, it has all been good.

Last weekend I noticed it was a fairly normal temperature in there but the system was showing 15 degrees, so I thought I'd try and work out which HR92 it's taking as the temperature monitor (there's 4 in the room) and I'd adjust its offset.

So to do this, I thought I would swap over all the HR92 displays to show current temperature instead of the set-point... but to do this I had to disable override (I didn't realise disabling override actually disables you doing anything at all with the hr92, but there ya go now...).

After a bit of faffing around not getting far, I had a better idea and thought I'd swap over to using the EvoHome controller as the temperature sensor as it's located in a sensible place in that room. All was well, except I forgot to disable the local override capability. A couple of days later I remembered and re-enabled it.

I've just had a look at my domoticz graph and every single night it's been doing this stupid phantom override:

Screenshot 2022-04-29 at 10.36.47.jpg

The schedule for the zone is set at 20.5 degrees until 22:30 when it's set to 10.0 degrees. The Eco mode is turned on (hence the 17.5 set point) and evidently the system thinks it can go off at 21:30 as it drops to 10.0, but at 21:40 it then decides to ramp it back up to 17.5 until the full 22:30.

So now I've got the same problem with override disabled, and using the EvoHome controller as the temperature sensor.

I... I... well... I don't know. I've no idea what to try now besides a total delete and re-add of the zone and all the schedules.

Edit: Well, I've now removed all the hr92 batteries and am going to put them back one by one. But interestingly, even though Local Overrides is most certainly set to off, as soon as I turn on an hr92, the zone overrides to 20 degrees. For the first few minutes, overrides are possible - so if a battery connection was intermittent, this could still cause an issue.

Hey here's an even better one - after a day running the zone with 2 missing HR92s, the controller has flagged them as actuator communication failures... and what's it done? Turned the frickin boiler on. So despite EVERY single zone showing 0% heat demand, all I can assume is the one zone that shows a warning triangle is forcing the boiler to start up and our non-thermostat bathroom radiator to be full blast.

Wow. Just wow.

[G4RHL]

I had a phantom override yesterday. Getting up at 05:00 I heard the boiler firing up. Nothing was set to be on and I don’t use Eco mode on the boiler. The app showed me that in one room the temperature was configured to 19.5 C until 07:30. The room was set to 10C from 22:00, it had not been used during the day, other than 2 hours in the morning. No reason for a manual override nor could there be an accidental one. No fault showed in the log. I cancelled the override and all has been fine since. I have no idea what could have triggered this. I have discounted human error as to have this override manually it could only be configured in the app or via the Control Panel and only I use those and know I did not change the setting.

Perhaps we have a ghost?!

[Jemster]

You and me both!

I completely re-built the zone from scratch. And, as it's been warm enough, Eco has been on a fair bit of the week and only had the heating running a couple of evenings. Friday night being one of them, and finally it looked like it was working - heat went off at 9:35pm and stayed off! Victory!

Errr... then came Saturday. I was in Eco mode, but Domoticz shows the heat went off at 9:45... and then came back up again at 9:50.
Last night (Sunday) also Eco mode, it went off at 9:45 and stayed off.

So, basically ITS STILL DOING IT! Despite totally wiping the Zone out, rebuilding it from scratch, swapping the heat sensor from an HR92 to the EvoHome controller and disabling manual overrides... The system is totally unreliable.

I'm all out of ideas. At some stage in the future (we're refurbishing the house) we will be dropping from four radiators to, hopefully, two. If I'm really lucky, that might resolve the problem. I just don't get it. I'm 99.99% sure my problem is to do with the Eco-Off mode, but I really like that mode for every other room in the house. Will I have to add it to the ever-growing list of features that must be disabled to get a stable system?

[G4RHL]

Fortunately it was only the one zone. No further problems. Eco mode I avoid as it seemed to fire things up when not needed. Hence not really eco.