[OpenTRV-interest] Honeywell EvoHome review

[Marko Cosic]

We (COHEAT) have been playing with EvoHome for a while in kid brother's
house. He owes us a writeup of the trials and tribulations involved in
setting it up to do sensible things. Dusan?


-The radiator actuator hardware is well made. The best made out there, and
probably the quietest out there too.

-The control sophistication of boiler and room temperature is basic,
reliable and predictable* once you turn off any Honeywell attempt at
intelligence.

-The control hardware/hub feels like something you'd order from Shenzhen
for $39, not something you buy for £149, and is certainly not something
you'd stick on a wall in a house. The battery life of the portable unit is
a joke and the power consumption is excessive.

-The user interfaces - all of them - are atrocious. The time delays between
interaction and action are excessive too. It's fair to say that Honeywell
still can't do user interfaces, unless they happen to be a single knob on
the wall.

-Their internet connection is as flaky as they come. Forget doing anything
that relies on timely/reliable internet connectivity. The web portal is
also worthless: you can't set the system up online (instead you must endure
tedious menus on the local controller, and there's no way to export the
settings or back them up, and they're lost when the battery runs flat in a
power cut, and and and...) and you can't export data from it.

-You also can't do anything fun with the system, like control radiator
valve positions or read room temperature directly, because Honeywell think
they're the Gods of everything and save you from yourself by preventing
access to such features.


*You need to turn off window detection and self-learning. Opening doors and
wafts of air confuse the living daylights out of it. Fine if all zones are
set to 21C, but the moment you try implement any real temperature
differential between rooms you set off the window detection and introducing
solar gain to the equation mucks about with the self-learning.


Good eRVs if they eliminate all screens/buttons from them and gave you
access to the RF API. The rest is a complete hackjob.


On 19 May 2015 at 22:10, Alasdair Macdonald <alasdairgmacdonald at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I don't know if google selected this for me based on my history, or if
> it will have equal prominence for all. But google news page had a link
> to this review of Honeywell's EvoHome system:
>
>
> http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/digital-home/3612265/honeywell-evohome-review
> _______________________________________________
> OpenTRV-interest mailing list
> OpenTRV-interest at lists.opentrv.org.uk
> http://lists.opentrv.org.uk/listinfo/opentrv-interest
>



-- 
Marko Cosic
Technical Director

COHEAT
+44 7774 524 114
marko at coheat.co.uk

www.coheat.co.uk
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