Drayton Wiser (heater/water smart controller), my install log/issues

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

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!

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

I don't understand the statement about the TRVs being set up for the old system, you set them to a comfortable temperature and they automatically restrict flow into the radiator when the wax or whatever they use expands.

Its because of the location of the old room stat vs the new, and how the old system tended to put the heating on for longer periods less frequently (i assume the controller did this), where as the wiser system will turn it on and off far more frequently as it tries to stop overheating in the room. which I must say is really apparent, it does a really good job of seeming to learn the speed the room heats up and cools down. I found it was basically keeping the rads luke warm, so trickling in heat, where as the old system would turn the heating on for longer, you would have 3 scorching hot rads, then they would go cold, and the room would cool down before the rads would kick in again. Made particularly bad by the fact the main stat was i the hall right in the middle of the house.

But this seems to have thrown the level we set the old TRVs at, as they are getting more opportunity to heat they are seeming to now overheat the areas we want heated well. I know they just sort the heat in the local area. They were probably in reality under heating in some areas compared to what they were set at, now they are hitting that. They just need some tweaking thats all

I was unconvinced on the need for the wiser TRVs (that also control the heat in that area), I suspect now I will probably use them as well.

Going back to my original issues with the wifi. Still playing up, but the system is working fine, its just getting it setup thats the issue if you keep losing the coverage. I think I will contact them and see what they say.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

I haven't noticed mine not connecting to the system, will maybe check that a bit.

A couple of mornings I have found its not felt warm, but I think thats because of the new duvet more than anything, Silly hot!

I also notice that if we leave the thero downstairs (we specifially move it down there to get over the issue of the cold lounge) and leave it in there as the heating comes on a lot more to power those rads it is warmer upstairs.
If we move the stat to just about anywhere other than the lounge its cooler. Its just heat convection from downstairs to up.

I have been meaning to spend some time on the phone and challenge them over the wifi issue, but its been low priority at home with other stuff going on

I need some proper cold weather in order to see how it functions, but other than the issues listed above for me its working out well.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

No you swap the new controller onto the old controller plate (if it fits or wire the new supplied one in), disconnect any thermostats and your done

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Hmm looks diff to what I remember with mine

You may need to speak to their support

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

I think from memory you will struggle without the internet.

IIRC you get to a certain point but without the internet it basically stops. This was again IIRC when trying to override the settings (ie on off etc)

To be honest I was going to tweak mine more, but never did (I was the OP btw)

This is the relevant part from my post I think
"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."

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

Forgot about this thread

I recently changed provider to BT from Sky and the new home hub is way mroe powerful wifi, once connected (you do a semi install in effect) wiser unit has been 100% stable and fully connected at all times.
Amazing how different a router can be.

Changed the battery in the thermostat recently as it was low.

Still really impressed with wiser actually. I did turn on then off the pre heating and the one to stop heating towards the end of the evening (forget the names) but I may switch them on later in the winter, but I need to adjust the schedules as I set the schedules based on the heating being on and allowing the temp to drop before we would go to bed.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

I'm unfamiliar with the way the home mini works, are they different IDs to connect to, or all the same ID? Could be its picking up the wrong one somehow?

It could be worth doing the install again, there is a guide on how to do this if you change provider / newwork, I found it worked very well, very quick to do. You basically delink the wifi and start the setup again, enter new codes and your done.

The wiser system does seem to be quite poor reception, was talk of the antenna being shielded by the system itself, certainly I knew if I placed an alexa, iphone, or ipad by the wiser all would have a far better signal than the wiser so its definately the unit itself, which is frustrating as of course you cannot move it. Equally once you get a decent signal to it, it seems rock solid so its worth finding a solution.

 

[Mercenary Keyboard Warrior]

To be honest i found that just a better wifi signal fixed my issues.
For me the backbox is a metal one and i am pretty convinced this is a lot of the issue, typically boilers are on outside walls and hence are likely to have the controls situated close by and using a metal back box.
Metal back boxes of course being great for blocking wifi signals!