[OpenTRV-interest] Explaining OpenTRV

[Adam Baylis]

Great work Hamish, I like your thinking on this. The more I played with the
page you created the more it made sense.

A couple thoughts from me:

I agree with others, it's a lot of information at first glance. The mobile
view / smaller screen version with just one house is much easier to digest.
But I'd like to be able to choose which diagram I view when I do that
rather than being limited just the no radiator valves option.

The description for the top left room should say that it "heats up at the
same rate as" the thermostat room, not it is "the same as" the thermostat
room.

You might need to tweak the energy wasted amounts. I found that it
suggested that the energy saved is much more than the 50% you claim on the
website.

It's great to see the person saying too hot, too cold, just right. But I'd
like to see a visual representation of how that accumulates over time. I
can imagine that with radbot they're just right 95% of the time but with no
controls it's only 50% of the time. Comfort is as big a selling point as
efficiency for many people.

The bar charts at the bottom are simple to understand, but the scientist in
me would love to see them as cumulative time series data e.g. something a
bit like this
<https://toxics.usgs.gov/bib/graphs/graph_pngs/bar_year_cumul_all.png>.
Then you can see when the wasted energy is generated. You'd probably need
to be able to skip backwards and forwards along the timeline to make this
useful though. So perhaps it's adding more complexity than is helpful.

Could the energy wasted description (shown when you hover over the bars) be
the same height for all controller options? Do you need to include it at
all for the radbot + boiler controller option?

One feature of radbot that's not shown on this is that it is a learning
thermostat. So it will heat the house before you wake up in the morning and
before you get home from work. Any ideas on how to show that feature?

Finally, I think you might need something extra for the new scientist show.
I imagine that people there will be more interested in how you do it,
rather than what the benefits are. So perhaps your tool there should let
you do something like turn a light on at the same time every day for a few
(sped up) days and then see how radbot starts to pre-empt you being at
home. You could do something similar with making noise, moving around and
pushing the boost button.

Hope that helps,


Adam Baylis
adam at castrads.com | 07779 235644
Castrads Ltd
0161 439 9350 <01614399350> | www.castrads.com

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On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 11:24 AM, Simon Hobson <linux at thehobsons.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hamish Findlay <hif2k1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > If you look at it on a smaller screen or shrink the browser window size
> it will switch to only showing one house to give you an idea of what that
> might look like.
>
> Ah, that's a lot better.
>
> There's a niggle about the energy bars. Surely the green "energy heating
> occupied rooms" bar should be shorter (or at least different) as you go
> down the list no TRVs > TRVs > radbot > Radbot + boiler controller ?
> Tricky one as it'll depend on which room the man is stood in. So if the
> man is stood in the "cold" room, the radbot options will actually use more
> energy heating the occupied room - but if he's stood in the "hot" room then
> they'll use less.
>
> Also, the shading behind the text makes it look like the radbot+controller
> has a lot of wasted energy when in fact there's next to nothing there -
> perhaps not show the "Wasted energy" block at all when hovering over that
> one ?
>
> Also, it might help to animate the thermostat or radbot to indicate that
> it's controlling the boiler.
>
> Lastly, I'm wondering if the room descriptions should be different for
> each mode - with radbots, saying the lower left room "will never get warm
> enough ..." seems a bit odd.
>
>
>
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