logging heat demand in Evohome: no relays

[Solke]

Hello,

I think I asked this question before, but I still haven't an answer.

At the end of 2018 I was using domoticz v4.9700. Until then all went fine. I added the HGI80 via USB and all the devices would show up after a little time.
The components I'm using are the Evohome controller, DTS92 temperature sensors/thermostats (they give their information to the Evohome controller) and the HCE80 wich controls the underfloor heating. For every room I saw the temperature and the relays showing the heat demand. For the HCE80 I could also a relay for the pump. That was just what I want: I could log the behaviour of the Evohome system (when it asked for heat, when it started the pump etc...).

Now I have the latest beta version (but the same problem is with the stable version 4.10717) and now I don't see the relays anymore. Now after a year I gues why. In version v4.9700 there was no field for the controller id by installing the HGI80 hardware. In all the later versions there is a field for the controller id. Although the manual says it is optional, it is not. If I leave this field blank then no devices show up at all. If i enter the id for the Evohome controller then the temperature devices show up but, and that is the problem, not the relay switches. I lived with that for a year.

Suddenly I thought: mayby I should make a second hardware device for the HGI80 and fill in the id for he living room DTS92. Yes, this does work. Now I see the relay. But is that the right way? How should new users do that? I luckily had an old print screen where I could see the ID number for all the relays I saw before, but there is no way to get this normally. I added different hardware devices for every old room I used to log. Ok, for me, this is a workaroud, but I still can't get the relay back for the pump of the underfloor heating. I know the former ID (85ce9) and that is had the unit number 252 but when I make another hardware device for this id, the initial Evohome hardware device (with the id of the evohome controller) stops working...

It is a long story, but I'm still not satisfied. What am I doing wrong? Maybe there can be a repair that the field controller id is really optional as it used to be when there was no field at all....

I hope someone can help.

Hans

[Solke]

In addition to my first post...

What I thought to be a good workaround isn’t working... Adding more hardware devices with different controller id’s results in conflicting information. For example the temperature are update very irregular In the log i see a message like this: too many message ids - possible corrupt message...

Maybe the only solution for me is to downgrade to a previous version. I hope that that isn’t the way to do it.

[DanD]

Hi,

Thanks for all the detailed information it's really helpful, particularly as I don't have one of the HCE80 devices so my work on the Domoticz code for this device involves a lot of guesswork. I have some idea how the introduction of the controller ID might have caused the problem as this filters out messages from devices which it can't confirm are part of the same system. It was necessary to introduce this approach it allows the code to work successfully when there are other nearby Honeywell systems and also prevents issues from occasional corrupted messages. Even if you don't enter a controller ID, the code detects this information and begins to filter messages as you've discovered. However, it sounds like my understanding was incorrect as I thought that the HCE80 only reported a combined heat demand value attached to its first zone and the more detailed information for the other zones wasn't available. I'll take a look at some of the saved logs I have from other users systems to see if I can find a solution.

Dan

[Solke]

Thank you Dan,

That would be very helpful. I hope you will find a solution. I tried to get back to an earlier version of domoticz but that is also very difficult to do and not really what I want. Especially the relay that tells me what the pump of the ufh is doing was helpful for me to analyse and optimise the behaviour of my heating system.

[DanD]

Just a quick question. Have you ever compiled Domoticz from the source code or do you always use the installer/updates?
The reason that I ask is that it would be very helpful to actually have a log of all the messages picked up via the HGI80 from your system over a few days, but you have to recompile Domoticz with a debug switch enabled in the Evohome code. Don't worry about my request if you've not ever compiled Domoticz from source as it can take a while to set-up successfully, I just thought I'd check.