Honeywell Evohome - Off, but on

In May we had a (brief) period where the weather was fantastic, and I decided to turn the central heating off using the Quick Action on the Evohome controller. It was then a bit of a surprise to feel that a couple of radiators were still being turned on, confirmed by the green light on the BDR91 wireless relay in the airing cupboard.

After a bit of internet searching I came across this Knowledge Article from 2018 on the Honeywell Support website:

https://ensupport.getconnected.honeywellhome.com/s/article/The-evohome-controller-and-radiators-are-in-off-setting-but-the-boiler-continues-to-fire?language=en_US

It appears the two main reasons in the list that applied to us were a) weak batteries and b) loose adaptors. A couple of the HR92 TRVs had been knocked, and so weren't tight to their valve adaptors, which meant that they couldn't completely shut the valve. And my experiment using rechargeable batteries in the HR92s was causing me more work in comms faults and recharging them than it was saving me in money.

So I've gone around and changed all of the HR92 batteries back to non-rechargeable alkaline batteries, as well as the two AA batteries in the CS92 storage cylinder water temperature sensor. I bought a pack of 50 Duracell Industrial AA batteries from Amazon, working out at less than 32p per battery. There's no mAh capacity rating on the batteries or packaging, so we'll have to see how long they last.

Home Automation - Installation

An Amazon Echo Dot has arrived in the house. We're still in the find-out-if-it-is-useful period, but to help us through that there's plenty of party tricks to keep us entertained.

After we'd played with asking Alexa trivia questions, and to play specific music or radio stations, it was time to hook it up to our Philips Hue lighting and Honeywell Evohome heating systems.

First step is to download the Alexa app, and go to the Smart Home menu option. Amazon calls the integrations into Alexa 'skills', presumably for trademark reasons. The Hue skill is called Hue, but the Evohome skill is called Honeywell Total Connect Comfort, and both require linking to your cloud accounts for those systems. Once the skills are enabled I hit the 'Discover devices' button, and the Evohome devices were found straight away. For the Hue devices I need to press the button on the Hue hub first, but then Alexa was able to find them.

Alexa enables you to control your Evohome system through both activating modes ("Alexa, turn on Economy mode") and through setting individual zones ("Alexa, set Kitchen to 21 degrees"). You can also nudge a zone up or down ("Alexa, raise Lounge by 2 degrees"), and turn the hot water on and off ("Alexa, turn off hot water"). The zones and modes you've set up in Evohome are automatically brought into Alexa as groups.

What you can't do with Alexa and Evohome is monitor the current status of the system. For example you can't ask what temperature a zone is currently, and you can't ask if a mode is activated or not.

Alexa enables you to control your Hue system through both activating scenes ("Alexa turn on scene Movies") and through setting individual lights or rooms ("Alexa, turn Dining light on"). Any collections of lights that you've put into a Room in your Hue system are automatically brought into Alexa as groups.

What you can't do with Alexa and Hue is set lights to specific colours. For example you can't tell Alexa to turn a light to Red, you can to pre-set a scene with that light as Red and activate that scene.