Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

Is this the right place for doofus Alexa questions? I accidentally linked my parents' (new, being set up by me) Alexa to my iplayer account and I can't find any way to unlink it again. What obvious thing am I missing?

ETA: Found it, the Alexa app was being a dick. Restarted the app and was able to open the necessary settings.

Anyone else's Tado schedule gone fucky? I have two rooms which should be set to 17 overnight, but even though the schedule is set correctly, "resume schedule" sees them both set to 13.2

I can set them manually ok and tell it to resume schedule (go back to off) at the next schedule change time. But this is not ideal. I've contacted Tado but it will be tomorrow until I hear back. And I'm in Lanzarote still trying to troubleshoot with ms_com while she's home alone with mini_com. Also, one of the other TRVs has dead batteries, so hoping/assuming that fails open so I can just tell her to turn another room on or use the wall stat in the hallway to get that rad warm until I get back.

@TW

Just tested by increasing the scheduled temp to 19, that bumped what it is trying to set it to up to 15.2.

Hmmmmm

Schedule setting and what it is doing if I try to use said schedule (time now being 21:18). If I change the scheduled temp to 19, the fucked temp also increases by 2

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Ours seems fine - I've not seen this happen before, so can't help I'm afraid.

I hate to suggest it as they are a bit shit, but have you tried the tado forum?

I have been holding off the forums as there is still an ok workaround. I'll see what Tado say tomorrow. Just very weird.

Also, one of the other TRVs has dead batteries, so hoping/assuming that fails open so I can just tell her to turn another room on or use the wall stat in the hallway to get that rad warm until I get back.

The TRVs seem fairly easy to remove if you want it open. Easier than changing the battery.

I think it fails open, based on on what ms_com was saying. Plus, if she can remove it, she can change the fucking batteries.

Speaking of, picked up Tado’s today after being bothered with various heating shanenigans past few weeks. Toolstation had a slightly better deal than Amazon, ordered Programmer with hot water (we’re a “Y plan” apparently) + wireless thermo and 8x smart TRVs. Will DIY the install but still need somebody to replace some valves later on (probably next week) as rooms upstairs plus my office are all dumb valves. Can’t be sure how well my current TRVs work, might need some fiddling. Hope it goes ok.

The pin-headed(?) adjustable valves that had existing dumb TRVs fitted required some extensive percussive maintenance and plusgas prior to fitting the tado TRVs (just to get everything moving smoothly again). Fitting a new adjustable valve in my office took very little time and cost ~£80 (from memory).

Thanks. It all went swimmingly for some reason, TRV pins were alright. And apparently Toolstation is now out of stock on the 4-pack Smart TRVs so they sent me 4, not 8... (Had to order a 3-pack from amazon, which is fine)

The programmer install part took about an hour, luckily the wiring diagram was spot-on with our old Honeywell (just the wires were swapped L-R, and bottom-up entry...) I resisted the urge to install the device upside-down and installed it slightly on top of the old "hole". I now have a third-covered 1-gang-sized hole (single core cables come from there, construction vibes) on which I will get and cut a blanking plate to fit, tomorrow.

TRV install was a bit faffy to begin with but got the hang of it after the first two.

Not to be off topic: Home Assistant immediately detected both the cloudy-Tado and the Homekit-tado, setup was easy. Didn't like the Tado UI but it'll do I guess. Still have to convince my SO to install the app.

I need to relocate my thermostat as the hallway it's currently in doesn't have any radiators so temperature doesn't really follow the rest of the house. Need to work out how to wire it into the boiler to work wirelessly but should be simple enough.

It means I'll have a spare blanking plate in the hallway and I was thinking of putting a PiW and small touchscreen in there so can still control the temperature via Home Assistant.

Just pondering how to get power to it. There are two wires (probably 1.5mm I think) running back to the boiler cupboard where there is also a plug so should be able to do something but not sure what. I'm thinking USB power supply in the cupboard to a USB plug where only the power pins are connected and then these soldered to a micro USB at the other end to connect to Pi which then powers screen through GPIO.

Does that all sound reasonable? Not sure what kind of length run you can have with USB power.

USB power is just 5v DC and a standard USB power block will be fine. If you have significant transmission losses that cause the voltage to drop between your boiler and the thermostat, maybe consider using a 9v or 12v power supply (or an old 19v laptop power brick) at the boiler end, with a 'buck converter' inline. You can then adjust until you get 5v at the thermostat.

Also, I would just feed the power directly into the pi via the gpio, as described here: https://thepihut.com/blogs/raspberry-pi-tutorials/how-do-i-power-my-raspberry-pi

On second thoughts, my suggestion is probably terrible since you need +5v and ground rather than+/-5v 😳

You're completely correct that GND is distinct from negative, but you should be fine connecting GND directly to the negative terminal of a 5v power supply because weirdly, the neg terminal on a power supply is GND if my understanding is correct. GND is just a reference node/point really.

USB is 5V, which drops pretty drastically after a few meters on even chunky wires.

Its really not that bad.

5v at half an amp across a 1mm thick conductor (17/18AWG) only loses about 4% voltage for every ten meters. Much less for thicker.

Been waiting for a discount at PiHut, it's 20% off today.

We may or may not have a damp problem in this flat so as an exercise I bought a couple of M5 ESP32s and some temperature/humidity sensors. Probably could have got something off the shelf but that's no fun. I'd like to connect it all up, I guess with HomeAssistant running on an old Pi, so I can see the temperature and humidity in each room.

Will it work? Not really dabbled with this stuff much yet (apart from the original Arduino like 12 years ago)

Ah - I was working on the basis of 20A (using a 100W switching power supply) - Forgot that it was powering 300 LEDs as well as the Pi Zero...

The drop for that is over 50%, bu obvs not very relevant...

Cheers everyone. I've no idea how long the wires are. Probably a minimum of 5m but may be much longer. I guess the thing to do is connect up and test them before deciding if I need to do any different.

Hadn't thought about power over the GPIO although I think something like this may block that
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hyperpixel-4-square?variant=30138251444307

I got it wrong too...a half amp rating is not relevant to a pi that can draw more than an amp! Efficiency drops with higher current. Either way, it's not the best solution to run long cables to a 5v device!

I had one of them. Lovely displays but you're right that they block power pins.

I need to relocate my thermostat as the hallway it's currently in doesn't have any radiators so temperature doesn't really follow the rest of the house

Ditch the thermostat and get smart TRVs

Ha, it's been discussed elsewhere but smart trvs involves draining the system, fitting a dozen new valves and spending well upwards of £400.

It may well pay back over the course of a year or two.