I managed to get onto the beta after pestering the UK support team by email (FYI, UK support are very helpful, whereas US support are a blackhole). Bearing in mind that I didn’t receive any documentation or instructions, here’s my thoughts to far:
General operation / GUI:
Overall, setup was easy and day-to-day operation works and is reliable. However, the EvoHome thermostat device handler is a bit clunky to say the least.
Modes:
- Cycling through the modes is not really usable as it’s too slow (it’s quicker to use the native Evohome app).
Temperature Setpoints:
- If you change the temperature setpoint it’s permanent, which is annoying as this is different to the behaviour of the native Honeywell app. I would prefer this to be changed so that a manual setpoint is temporary by default (i.e. is overridden by the next scheduled setpoint), or it this is not possible, offer a setting to specify a default amount of time that a manual temperature setpoint should apply for (this could be a setting on the thermostat devices or the SmartApp).
- There is no visual indication when a setpoint has been overridden. If I manually raise the setpoint, the status in the bottom left still says “Heat Auto” which is misleading (possibly it should say something like “Manual Override”). Same goes for displaying when the setpoint has been adjusted by the ‘optimisation’ logic, or when the ‘open window’ function is active. The native EvoHome controller will display a little icon next to the temperature setpoint to indicate these states, so something similar would be appreciated.
- It would be wonderful if the temperatures were displayed with consistent precision, although this is a general SmartThings issue and not specific to EvoHome (SmartThings developers, please, please, please allow better control of display formats for smarttiles!!).
SmartApp development:
General:
- The EvoHome SmartApp and thermostat device handler code is currently hidden, it would be great if we can see the code (most of the issues I’ve raised I could fix myself very quickly if I could edit the code).
Modes:
- thermostatMode can be “auto” / “off” / “autoWithEco” / “away” / “dayOff” which is great, but setThermostatMode() does not appear to support setting all these modes! This is really annoying and means it’s not practical to set the thermostatMode from my own SmartApp or Rule Machine (see my post above, it’s actually easier at the moment to use a flag to control via IFTTT, which is plain silly).
- There is a bug in the switchMode() method which means it sometimes ignores the current thermostatMode, or at least it doesn’t cycle in a consistent order.
- When thermostatMode is changed the updated state cascades to all EvoHome thermostat devices (as there is effectively only one thermostat mode for the whole EvoHome system) however there can be a significant delay (2-20s) for all devices to update, it should be possible to improve this.
- It would be great if each EvoHome thermostat had an independent thermostatMode, although I’m pretty sure this is a native EvoHome limitation rather than a SmartThings one.
Temperature Setpoints:
- If would be great if the setHeatingSetPoint() method supported a time period akin to the native EvoHome functionality. E.g. “set to 22C for 2 hours”: setHeatingSetPoint(22,120). Plus, also allowed the time period to be aligned with the next scheduled setpoint change. Ditto for raiseSetPoint() and lowerSetPoint().
- I would also like a method to be able to retrieve information about when the next scheduled setpoint is, and what the temperature is due to be set to. e.g. getNextSetPointTime() and getNextSetPointTemp()
Thanks,
z.