Problem Eurotronic Spirit.

[gielie]

I bought a pair of eurotronic spirit z-wave valves and i experience a lot of problems.
The first one was broken after a week, motor didn't work anymore and was replaced.
The batteries of the valves drains in 4-7 days is this normal?
1 valve resets itself every night, not usable.

Is anyone using these valves with succes?
Can someone advice me a other/better working brand of heating valves?

[EddyG]

I have 3 of those and normal battery live is 0.5 till 1 year, depends how much it has to regulate.
They are running for 2 years now, without any problem.
Do you see anything in the log file OZW_Log.txt.
Enable Debug logging on the ZWave controller and see if you can find out more.
Did you check the hardware valve itself? Does it actuate smoothly?
It can be that the valve is stuck and the Eurosprint want to move it further, but cannot.
That could explain the battery live.

[rrozema]

I also use the SpiritZ. I have 7 of them, 2 installed for at least a year now (for the remaining 5 I still need to get the valves installed). One hasn't had its batteries replaced yet, in the other I had to replace them twice after a few weeks, but after I improved my network it's been running for at least 6 months now on the same pair of batteries. The first is close to my controller, the other is on the 1st floor, further away from the controller.

Battery usage depends greatly on how you use the device: are you using them "autonomously", i.e. you set a temperature and then let it control the valve itself or do you have it in 'manufacturer specific"-mode and then control the valve from Domoticz? I see a lot of people trying the latter, but this tends to drain the batteries very quickly, plus it completely ignores the ingenuity put into building these devices... I think it's much wiser to use them as intended: set a temperature and let the thermostat regulate the water-flow autonomously.

Another thing to keep in mind is not so much related to these specific devices, but more to the fact that they're z-wave. Make sure your thermostat is close enough to your controller or that you've got sufficient other mains-powered devices between your controller and the thermostat. If the distance is too big, the thermostat may have to retry very often sending and receiving the controller's information, resulting in the batteries draining too. Not all mains-powered devices route as well. For example, I've found that neo coolcam's power plugs are poor routers. They work, but their range seems to be very limited. I have some in-wall fibaro FGS-223 double switches that are in my stairway, once I installed these performance of my entire z-wave network was improved significantly (the routes-screen in domoticz illustrates this very well: the fibaro switches have lots of lines going from and to them, most coolcam power plugs have far less lines). The fibaro switches can be hard to get to work correctly, but if they work, their routing is much better.

I'm using these thermostats to change my home's central heating system into a zone-heating system, where every room has their own temperature control. I'm still in the experimenting phase with this and I put my script-attempts on the forum. I think my example shouldn't be hard to reproduce. You're welcome to follow my example