Soldato
So a couple of weeks ago I bought the Drayton Wiser kit. I bought what i thought was the main unit and room stat. What I got was the above and two of the radiator TRV heads as well.
So Sat as er indoors was away I could take my time and install.
So I checked the wiring for my old unit, and compared to the new one. Other than a differing drawing type I came to the conclusion the wiring was standard and other than disconnecting the wired thermostat I would be dandy.
So i collected a few tools and isolated the boiler.
Unscrewed the old face plate and removed, looks good wiring seems to be logical inside.
Disconnect the old wired stat, tape up the ends after taking a couple of photos of the wiring, so should I need to I can put it back.
Go to clip on the new faceplate, after a couple of tries its clearly not going on. Take a much closer look from underneath whilst trying to clip on. Ah! the old faceplate terminals are slightly too wide.
Grrr, means i will need to swap the backplate for the supplied one. Then I notice something unexpected, two of the terminals on the old plate have no wires, these are the middle two of the four, its the central heating off and water off terminals. Clearly the old heating and water worked fine.
So having a quick look and a think, I believed that the installer had bridged these behind the plate, thinking logically I could think of no reason why the new control would not handle this as well, and that probably its an old fashioned thing or something, maybe pre dating the common backplate.
So I label the wires and disconnect. Remove backplate and install the new backplate. Wire them all back up and tuck away the old room stat. Clip on the new faceplate and secure with the two screws.
Flick the isolation switch and it powers up. Phew! good start!
Pressing the water boost and heating boost both indicate they are on, and both will fire up the boiler.
Nice i though, all be sorted in a few mins now, just the app to install and wireless room stat to fire up.
Oh how wrong you can be!
So I go through the install mode, having installed the app on your phone, you connect to the new heating hub, to go through the setup. Now I couldnt work out why I was struggling. I would get so far then stop.
I even factory reset the hub completely, still some grief.
So I am playing around, and manage to complete the setup, yay!
So I now have the hub setup with an account, the room stat setup and linked. I just need to tweak the water and heating timers. Now I realise what my issue is, the hub is losing wifi, despite me having the Ipad, my phone and an Alexa all within feet of the hub its constantly losing the signal where as the other devices are fine. So this I figure was why the setup was so painful as it kept losing signal thats why it seemed to get stuck.
So I spend the rest of the day checking intermittently if the hub has a signal, if it does, I quickly tweak the settings on my phone. Sometimes it updates, sometimes not. Seems if it has no wifi and it cannot update the web settings it wont update locally. Eventually by the evening I have what I consider a good starting point that we can tweak over the next weeks.
So thoughts, install would I believe and been really simple, even considering the backplate issue, had the wifi been fine. The wifi is slightly weak in the Kitchen, but its normally fine for anything in there, Alexa for example will steam music to a dot, so its got a good enough signal for that. I can only assume the close wiring, and the unit itself for the hub shield the signal a fair bit so its too sensitive.
I will address this to follow. There is a wiser smart plug you can get now that acts as a booster, so it claims, but this is 1) expensive and 2) I am unsure exactly how it fuctions, and this is particularly unclear, so I may go for a general one.
Now how does the unit work? Seemingly pretty well.
The whole point of the switch was I wanted a wireless stat, that we could move into the Lounge in the winter when we watch TV, its the coldest room in the house and even with TRVs on the whole house you still ended up with the heating switching off and that room ending up cold.
We have the unit switched to eco mode as this is the default. Seems to work well and be learning how quickly our room (lounge) heats. It is clearly heating less but more frequently which is exactly how that room needs to heat. Its got 3 rads and can get quite hot quickly, but then the temp drops and you need the heating to come on. Its looking good so far!
The minor issue is the rest of the house is pretty much overheating, no real surprise I guess as the temps on the TRVs were set to suit the old system, which came on less frequently but for longer. I need to tweak them a bit, but again over a little time. They need their semi annual up down cycle anyway to keep them from seizing so i will drop them all a bit and go from there.
Overall very impressed, I picked this up for £140 and its money well spent I think.
I will probably add the two rad controllers as well. One in the dining room (knocked through Kitchen/diner). Not sure about the other, it may not be needed. Maybe the main bedroom so I can keep that one lower before we go to bed, but to be honest er indoors wont shut doors, so trying to keep one room lower than the others is mostly a lost cause!
So Sat as er indoors was away I could take my time and install.
So I checked the wiring for my old unit, and compared to the new one. Other than a differing drawing type I came to the conclusion the wiring was standard and other than disconnecting the wired thermostat I would be dandy.
So i collected a few tools and isolated the boiler.
Unscrewed the old face plate and removed, looks good wiring seems to be logical inside.
Disconnect the old wired stat, tape up the ends after taking a couple of photos of the wiring, so should I need to I can put it back.
Go to clip on the new faceplate, after a couple of tries its clearly not going on. Take a much closer look from underneath whilst trying to clip on. Ah! the old faceplate terminals are slightly too wide.
Grrr, means i will need to swap the backplate for the supplied one. Then I notice something unexpected, two of the terminals on the old plate have no wires, these are the middle two of the four, its the central heating off and water off terminals. Clearly the old heating and water worked fine.
So having a quick look and a think, I believed that the installer had bridged these behind the plate, thinking logically I could think of no reason why the new control would not handle this as well, and that probably its an old fashioned thing or something, maybe pre dating the common backplate.
So I label the wires and disconnect. Remove backplate and install the new backplate. Wire them all back up and tuck away the old room stat. Clip on the new faceplate and secure with the two screws.
Flick the isolation switch and it powers up. Phew! good start!
Pressing the water boost and heating boost both indicate they are on, and both will fire up the boiler.
Nice i though, all be sorted in a few mins now, just the app to install and wireless room stat to fire up.
Oh how wrong you can be!
So I go through the install mode, having installed the app on your phone, you connect to the new heating hub, to go through the setup. Now I couldnt work out why I was struggling. I would get so far then stop.
I even factory reset the hub completely, still some grief.
So I am playing around, and manage to complete the setup, yay!
So I now have the hub setup with an account, the room stat setup and linked. I just need to tweak the water and heating timers. Now I realise what my issue is, the hub is losing wifi, despite me having the Ipad, my phone and an Alexa all within feet of the hub its constantly losing the signal where as the other devices are fine. So this I figure was why the setup was so painful as it kept losing signal thats why it seemed to get stuck.
So I spend the rest of the day checking intermittently if the hub has a signal, if it does, I quickly tweak the settings on my phone. Sometimes it updates, sometimes not. Seems if it has no wifi and it cannot update the web settings it wont update locally. Eventually by the evening I have what I consider a good starting point that we can tweak over the next weeks.
So thoughts, install would I believe and been really simple, even considering the backplate issue, had the wifi been fine. The wifi is slightly weak in the Kitchen, but its normally fine for anything in there, Alexa for example will steam music to a dot, so its got a good enough signal for that. I can only assume the close wiring, and the unit itself for the hub shield the signal a fair bit so its too sensitive.
I will address this to follow. There is a wiser smart plug you can get now that acts as a booster, so it claims, but this is 1) expensive and 2) I am unsure exactly how it fuctions, and this is particularly unclear, so I may go for a general one.
Now how does the unit work? Seemingly pretty well.
The whole point of the switch was I wanted a wireless stat, that we could move into the Lounge in the winter when we watch TV, its the coldest room in the house and even with TRVs on the whole house you still ended up with the heating switching off and that room ending up cold.
We have the unit switched to eco mode as this is the default. Seems to work well and be learning how quickly our room (lounge) heats. It is clearly heating less but more frequently which is exactly how that room needs to heat. Its got 3 rads and can get quite hot quickly, but then the temp drops and you need the heating to come on. Its looking good so far!
The minor issue is the rest of the house is pretty much overheating, no real surprise I guess as the temps on the TRVs were set to suit the old system, which came on less frequently but for longer. I need to tweak them a bit, but again over a little time. They need their semi annual up down cycle anyway to keep them from seizing so i will drop them all a bit and go from there.
Overall very impressed, I picked this up for £140 and its money well spent I think.
I will probably add the two rad controllers as well. One in the dining room (knocked through Kitchen/diner). Not sure about the other, it may not be needed. Maybe the main bedroom so I can keep that one lower before we go to bed, but to be honest er indoors wont shut doors, so trying to keep one room lower than the others is mostly a lost cause!
