I have used one Fibaro eTRV last winter and beside the fact that it is unable to report the valve opening percentage, it worked very well . Will be able to check it with the latest HE version tomorrow, it is time to prepare for the new heating season now..
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Hello to all Inhubitants,
first of all thank you so much for launching and maintaining this awesome community - actually one of the reasons I chose hubitat over the competitors.
Unfortunately I also run into problems concerning the fibaro fgt-001 devices; I actually bought them because they are on the compatible list. Will there be an update to the driver? As of now it doesn't work at all. Or will the device be deleted from the c-list? It's a quite frustrating experience.
Thx once again for everything.
BR
Solo (Germany)
Hallo @solomono ,
Can you give us some more details on the Fibaro FGT-001 issue?
Are you able to successfully finish the Inclusion procedure with HE?
Make sure the battery is fully charged first. Add it using the option "without security".
Is it automatically assigned the "Fibaro Heat Controller Thermostat Head" driver?
Any update on these Fibaro Heat Controllers? I have many of them and I’m considering to replace my Fibaro HC3 with a Hubitat. I have many of these devices so it’s a blocker for me if they don’t work at all. Anyone made them work?
I'm in the process of trying to replace HC3 with Hubitat. I've found the HC3 to be totally unreliable, I'm hoping Hubitat will be better but this post doesn't give me much confidence.
Read this. It will help with some of the gotchas you may run into. Are you new to home automation or Hubitat or coming from a different platform such as Wink, SmartThings or Vera? This may help!
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Yes same one, just so many mixed comments here about how they are working. Getting flashbacks to when I tried getting them to work on Homey and it never really worked. Sounds like I should give Hubitat a try then!
I've just migrated 19 of these TRV/Heat Controllers from Fibaro Home Centre 3 to Hubitat. So far it's going ok-ish.
The Hubitat driver was written by someone who, I would guess, had limited or no access to the actual device. It's written as if this is a generic HVAC controller so has options for heating, cooling and an air circulation fan which annoyingly show up in any dashboards and on Apple Home Center. This is really annoying for what's very obviously a purpose-designed radiator valve that will never control cooling and certainly not a fan.
The driver does not detect and reveal the separate temperature sensor, although as far as I can tell the actual thermostatic control is being done based on that temperature sensor.
The actual Fibaro devices aren't fantastic, and I regret spending so much money on them! They look good but don't seem to have the best firmware and frequently become unresponsive. What I've found with Habitat (so far, only 28 hours into the migration) is that I get a lot more information back from the controller, unlike the HC3 which would just silently fail and leave radiators blasting out heat in the middle of the night. I've just setup a 15 minute periodic rule to refresh every TRV which I'm hoping will mean that the dashboard shows accurate information and the scheduler rules will work correctly, as when I got up this morning half the TRVs hadn't responded to the scheduler rules.
You might want to wait a few more days and see how I get on before committing to the change! It's useful to hear that the Homey doesn't work so well with these TRVs, I did consider that hub as another option.
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Another update, I've found a custom driver for the Fibaro TRV that has a lot more options, I'm going to trial it with one radiator.
The driver is here: https://bitbucket.org/ge4d/hubitat-code/src/main/
This is because the firmware on the fibaro outputs those attributes in their firmware. The generic driver simply reads what's available. It doesn't put anything there itself. If you wanna double check if it's not a hold over from something else, switch the TRV driver to DEVICE and click save. Click all delete buttons at the top. Change driver back to the previous driver, click save then click configure (always click configure)
Well, whatever the reason, when the Hubitat claims to specifically support a certain device, the driver shouldn't reveal parameters that are irrelevant to the type of device. There will always be variations in how manufacturers implement things, and the whole point of a device-specific driver is to sort out this kind of thing. It makes for a very messy UI when it's littered with controls that don't apply to the device.
Having said all that, are you sure it's isn't a Hubitat thing to put all these controls in when the driver declares "Thermostat" capability?
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No it only reveals what is available. A good example is my Honeywell T6 Pro z-wave. If I turn off ICU 300 on the thermostat, auto disappears from available attributes. Turn it back on and it's there. The available attributes are determined by the device. The other option is for you to write your own driver and limit what's available. The problem is you are a very small subset of users using that TRV whereas Hubitat has to cater to a broader range of devices. So it's simply easier to expose everything. Now one thing you may be able to do is edit your CSS to make those options disappear. Is that possible @sburke781 ??
Thanks, that's helpful information.
I still can't really understand why an officially supported device hasn't had the device driver written to avoid exposing nonsense information. It's obvious there's no "fan" just by looking at a picture of the device.
Since there's a community driver available as well, maybe I can edit that to get rid of the fan options.
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Short answer is yes, @chad.andrews and @WMarcolin worked on doing this, but also removed the thermostat mode selection, not sure if you still need that or not...
If you want to just mess with the listing in the pop-up you can use this CSS, but I expect you want to remove the Fan Mode option from the tile altogether.
If you are going to play around with the driver, you may want to look at the supported fan modes method, I think it works they way I expect, where you can pass in a list. You could add a command to the Device page to set them how you want, or just add the call into the code to set it through values you include in the driver code.
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Thanks, yes I'm keen to remove the fans entirely as it breaks integration with Apple HomeKit - or at least makes it confusing to the point of not wanting to use it. I'm probably an edge case in having 19 radiators to control, maybe if it was a much smaller number I wouldn't mind the extra cruft quite so much.
To balance out the moans, I have to say it's a pleasure to be using a platform that exposes all of the information I need to get my system working and optimised.
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+1
@gopher.ny is it possible to optionally filter the thermostatFanMode capabilities in the Homkit integration? (in a similar way that we can filter battery status as example)
Although I know and understand why the standard Thermostat capability in HE historically includes also attributes related to fans, for TRVs these are not relevant and I agree with @lpcollier that the fans that we see on Apple Home app are annoying...
Current/target fan state are a part of base HomeKit thermostat implementation.
That said, what exactly are you looking for? I'm sure these attributes can be fixed in some way.
The question was whether it is possible that TRVs are exposed to Apple Home without the Fan component:
Fibaro TRVs look like this and they have no fans:
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@Toumal i have the same problem, i added fibaro heat thermostat and after some time i could notice
that radiator is warm and the temperature in the room is much higher then it should be.
Once a few minutes thermostate blinks read two times. And thats it.
