Different schedules for different rooms

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eg37
Posts: 23
Joined: 18 Dec 2021, 16:15

Different schedules for different rooms

Post by eg37 »

I tried to search but after reading a number of posts, I'm only more confused, so let me ask this:

I have 3 smart thermostats in 3 different rooms in the house. We have a central heating boiler and floor heating that is controlled by separate thermostats per room that turn the pumps on and off in each room separately - so these are not radiator valves but Smart Thermostats controlling the pumps in each room, which is the means of room by room temperature control.

One thermostat is in my office, another one is in my wife's office. We work on very different schedules - she starts working 3 or 4 hours before me. I can't seem to find how to set different schedules for the rooms, so that her room heats up to a comfortable temperature by the time she starts working, and mine heats up by the time I start working. I only seem to be able to set one schedule for the whole house, which is not good. If I set the schedule according to her work hours, my office will start cooling down for the night when I still have several hours of work left, and it starts heating up hours before I need it, wasting energy - and vice versa.

I hope I am just missing something as it would be a major oversight if the only way to control multiple thermostats is to have them all on the same schedule. In a big house, different rooms can be used on very different schedules and I bought the smart thermostats because I want to have control over the heating - cool at night to save energy, comfortable during the day, according to how each room is being used. How can I do this?
GEORGzer
Posts: 2663
Joined: 14 Jan 2014, 18:14

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by GEORGzer »

Are the Thermostats in different „rooms“ in the app as well?
Take a screenshot of the app‘s overview and post it, thanks.
Home: Weather Station (V3 + Rain & Wind Gauge, 3 additional Indoor Modules, Shield), Valves Starter Pack + 7 Valves, Video Doorbell
Office: Thermostat (V2), Healthy Home Coach, Smoke Alarm, 2 2in1 Sensors

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eg37
Posts: 23
Joined: 18 Dec 2021, 16:15

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by eg37 »

Yes, they are - but I don't know how to set different schedules on a per room basis.
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GEORGzer
Posts: 2663
Joined: 14 Jan 2014, 18:14

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by GEORGzer »

Well you can‘t, directly at least.
You have to create a schedule with time slots at points that matter to you. And then for every time slot you can define a temperature for each room (Thermostat).
Home: Weather Station (V3 + Rain & Wind Gauge, 3 additional Indoor Modules, Shield), Valves Starter Pack + 7 Valves, Video Doorbell
Office: Thermostat (V2), Healthy Home Coach, Smoke Alarm, 2 2in1 Sensors

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eg37
Posts: 23
Joined: 18 Dec 2021, 16:15

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by eg37 »

Wow. I'm speechless. I don't want to sound cynical, but... that makes this thermostat pretty dumb... not smart at all. I don't know what the designers were thinking, but come on... do they really think that every room in a house will have the same schedule? What a gigantic oversight. Why would I be forced to set the same schedule for a bedroom and a living room? The entire point of a SMART thermostat is to control the heating according to the way the user's habits and life - and the Netatmo "Smart" Thermostat can't do that? That's the most basic feature... I'm stunned. This makes the Netatmo "Smart" Thermostat practically useless for anything but a one room studio apartment where the user wants a single temperature setting for the whole place. How about, you know, homes with multiple rooms...?

You have an app that can control multiple thermostats. Since you can't have two thermostats in one room, it's common sense that anyone who has more than one, would have them in different rooms. So having only one schedule for ALL of them makes absolutely no sense.

Where do I submit a feature request? I'm stunned that after so many years this is still not a feature. I would never have bought them if I knew that these thermostats (or at least the app they are controlled by) were so... dumb! Now I'm not surprised why my search for this turned up only questions (going back YEARS) but no answers.

This issue has already been reported as early as 2017 (more than 4 years ago!) and still no one thought of actually doing something about it?

https://forum.netatmo.com/viewtopic.php ... oms#p50993

Come on Netatmo, can you do something about this and make this thermostat live up to its name?
GEORGzer
Posts: 2663
Joined: 14 Jan 2014, 18:14

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by GEORGzer »

Just put them in two different „homes“ in the app and you get what you want.
They can‘t interact with themself anyway and hooking them up to floor-heating is already a hack in itself 🤪

You will need to do so anyway for your other plans.
https://forum.netatmo.com/viewtopic.php?f=73&t=20324


Btw. what is the endgame here, 2 rooms with floor heating and radiators or what?


Merry Christmas 🎄
Home: Weather Station (V3 + Rain & Wind Gauge, 3 additional Indoor Modules, Shield), Valves Starter Pack + 7 Valves, Video Doorbell
Office: Thermostat (V2), Healthy Home Coach, Smoke Alarm, 2 2in1 Sensors

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eg37
Posts: 23
Joined: 18 Dec 2021, 16:15

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by eg37 »

I have a house with a lot of rooms with floor heating on the ground floor and radiators on the upper floors. And I'm not the only one - believe it or not, there are other people with homes that have more than one thermostat and more than 10 rooms in their house. The fact that Netatmo has been asked for YEARS to provide a solution for these issues and absolutely nothing was done is stunning. Netatmo's marketing material didn't inform me that I would have to "hack" the so called "smart" thermostats and radiator valves to use Netatmo equipment in my entire home. I guess that reality only sets in after you buy all the equipment like I did, and then when people ask about options they expected based on the marketing hype, they are told that those are nonexistent and repeated request to add them are ignored.

Equipping a large house with so called "smart" thermostats shouldn't be a "hack", it should be a basic feature. How "smart" is a home that forces the user to set up 3 "separate houses" in the app, each of which have to be individually set to away mode when I travel? Seriously, as soon as you go larger than an apartment or a small house, the Netatmo becomes the dumbest thermostat there is!

Of course you can explain it all away, but that doesn't change the fact that you have a customer who spent quite a lot of money on Netatmo products and is VERY disappointed by

1. The gigantic oversights in Netatmo's product design (specifically, the app, which, ironically, would be the easiest to fix after shipping, but Netatmo doesn't seem to give a damn - see posts on this forum going back more than 4 YEARS (!!!)

2. How Netatmo completely ignores customer feedback and even after 4 years with these mind numbing errors going unfixed, continues calling installing Netatmo equipment in a big house "a hack". Are you kidding me?

I finish as I started: speechless.

Competitors are watching, they LOVE opportunities like this, when a company becomes too big and too arrogant to listen - the rest of the story is a textbook case. The company becomes a dinosaur with new startups running circles around it until it becomes irrelevant. And they are always surprised and "haven't seen it coming".
eg37
Posts: 23
Joined: 18 Dec 2021, 16:15

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by eg37 »

Just one example of how different Netatmo's marketing is from after sale reality:
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This is what I read on the Netatmo website before I bought the "smart" thermostats. What this forgets to mention is that ALL of those 10 thermostats are forced to be on the same schedule!

Don't you think that that is either a major oversight at best, or misleading at worst?

Common sense: do you think that someone who has a house with that many rooms will use all rooms on the same schedule? Extremely unlikely. What is the purpose of a SMART thermostat? To adopt to the users' habits, life and preferences. Can Netatmo do that? No, it can't. Why? Because many years ago it was designed that way, and since then, despite repeated user feedback and requests, absolutely nothing was done to fix this blunder.
eg37
Posts: 23
Joined: 18 Dec 2021, 16:15

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by eg37 »

And how about these? Also from netatmo.com:
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Sorry, but based on what you re saying, the Netatmo website simply advertises a feature that doesn't exist in the product.

Website says I can create up to 10 different heating schedules. What does that mean? Probably not what most people would understand it to mean, i.e. different schedules for different rooms.

And again, what is a multi-zone installation worth if all of the zones are forced to be on the same schedule?
GEORGzer
Posts: 2663
Joined: 14 Jan 2014, 18:14

Re: Different schedules for different rooms

Post by GEORGzer »

You can generate different schedules for like different times of the year as someone might have different needs for heating in the fall than in the middle of the winter. And then you can switch between them, but only one schedule can be active.

But you can still do what you want to do, the interface just requires a different way to set it up than generating a timetable per room.
I assume at some point in your house everyone will be asleep. Take that timeframe and start from there. Then start a new time-window when the first change in a room should happen and so on. You can define the temperatures for every room per timeframe and also change them after the schedule is completely set up.

Could there be a more comfortable way to do this, certainly. Is it impossible to do this as advertised, no.
It‘s like the old analog time clocks you had to set those little on/off dip-switches, but you can set individual temperatures for each and every timeframe now.


As for myself calling the floor heating installation a „hack“, well it is if the Thermostat just controls an actuator but not the heating source itself.
That works as a single installation with no issues, for places with offsite district heating for example.
If you add Valves to the mix, it get‘s complicated.
For the Valves connected to the Thermostat, that Relais becomes kind of the master device that is supposed to control the heating source, while the Thermostat will act like an additional control panel for the room it is located (in the app).


When you add Valves to a Thermostat that is just connected to an actuator, you will run into the following issues:
Every time a Valve „requests“ heat, the floor heating will become active as well because the system assumes it is controlling the main heating source.
When the set temperature is reached, the system will „shut down“ the source but the Valves will remain open. The reason behind this is to avoid overheating of a closed boiler system and to make use of the remaining hot water. But in that particularly case the rooms will just get hotter because the source keeps delivering.
That is also the reason why setting up two Thermostat/Valve combinations and wiring them in parallel to the same boiler will end in overheating behavior.


Radio range and room number limitations aside, the Thermostats just aren’t made for floor heating systems with different zones controlled by actuators and they are not advertised for that.
Multi-Zone is referring to boiler types which provide more than one zone with individual room thermostats.


So if you can‘t control your source, the scheduling part is not your main problem.
Home: Weather Station (V3 + Rain & Wind Gauge, 3 additional Indoor Modules, Shield), Valves Starter Pack + 7 Valves, Video Doorbell
Office: Thermostat (V2), Healthy Home Coach, Smoke Alarm, 2 2in1 Sensors

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