Earth Notes: Smart Radiator Valves Video

1014s "20201112 EcoHomeLab talk on smart thermostatic radiator valves TRVs [VIDEO]" (poster) (captions) Uploaded . Downloads:
Transcript...
[00:00]

product is Radbot and this thing is technically

[00:04]

Radbot 2R, so it's Radbot 2 with a radio in it.

[00:08]

I'm Damon Hart-Davis, right, here we go.

[00:11]

So tell them what you're gonna tell them.

[00:15]

What problem is Radbot trying to solve?

[00:17]

What's our solution?

[00:19]

A little bit of history, where are we now?

[00:23]

And there's a bit of alphabet soup there.

[00:25]

How does it work?

[00:26]

Don't worry, I won't wait right until then to tell you,

[00:29]

but I'll try and make sure I'm in a position

[00:31]

to answer a question.

[00:33]

And some secrets for devs and the more techy of you in here

[00:37]

who'd like to tinker.

[00:38]

Okay, so what is the problem?

[00:42]

The problem that we're trying to fix is climate change.

[00:46]

It's actually written into the articles

[00:49]

and memoranda of Vestemi, that its job is to help

[00:52]

ameliorate climate change and we're doing it

[00:56]

through space heating.

[00:59]

So you're probably all aware of these facts,

[01:01]

but to reiterate, carbon emissions contribute

[01:05]

In the UK, over 10%, I mean, I used to think it was 20%

[01:10]

and I saw government as just quoting a number back at me,

[01:12]

but I think it's about 10% of all carbon emissions

[01:15]

are from domestic space heating.

[01:17]

So not water, you know, in the home, not offices,

[01:19]

not cooking, domestic space heating.

[01:22]

And the scary thing is that maybe half of that

[01:27]

in to cut entire carbon emissions that we could just do

[01:30]

without and be no colder.

[01:31]

And one huge source of that waste is heating empty rooms,

[01:36]

e.g. your bedrooms during the day.

[01:38]

You sit downstairs in the lounge or whatever,

[01:40]

and you only need them warm when you go to bed,

[01:44]

And, you know, another problem we're trying to fix

[01:48]

is that people do come out with technical solutions,

[01:51]

but absurdly technical that need wifi and broadband

[01:55]

and Bluetooth and I don't know.

[01:59]

One of the systems I tried out, programmable radiator valve,

[02:01]

I found too bloody complicated to use.

[02:05]

And I have a master's degree in theoretical computer science

[02:11]

which convinced me there needed to be a simpler solution.

[02:23]

So one of the early things in Open TRV's existence

[02:27]

was winning a prize at a thing run by British Gas,

[02:31]

which preceded Hive, their connected homes thing.

[02:34]

And it was noted that all the winners

[02:37]

weren't actually connected.

[02:38]

So we're kind of IoT without the eye,

[02:41]

but we can do the eye and I'll show you some of that later.

[02:44]

So what's the solution?

[02:47]

So Red Bot attempts to make it all easy,

[02:51]

solve all your problems, having to lift a finger

[02:53]

by soft zoning.

[02:55]

So a number of you have mentioned

[02:57]

that you have multiple zones in your house.

[02:59]

So it's not as it used to be,

[03:03]

sort of when the arc was being launched,

[03:05]

that is either all gets hot or it doesn't all get hot

[03:07]

or even worse, you have to balance it

[03:09]

'cause some bits overheat and some bits never get warm enough.

[03:13]

Treat every occupied space as its own zone

[03:17]

for heating control

[03:19]

and do it without having actual pipes and valves to do it,

[03:24]

but do it with soft zoning.

[03:25]

And that's what Red Bot does.

[03:27]

Now, some of you've been coalescing multiple radiators

[03:31]

in a single room to make a zone, each Red Bot acts by itself.

[03:35]

So each radiator really is the zone,

[03:39]

but not vast quantity of rooms actually have two radiators.

[03:46]

And anyway, Red Bot's quite happy

[03:48]

to control those two radiators separately.

[03:50]

So what's it all about?

[03:52]

How do you save energy?

[03:53]

Well, set back the temperature when the room is vacant

[03:55]

and likely to be for a while,

[03:57]

set it back further when you're even more sure,

[04:01]

and on the other hand, start preheating the room

[04:03]

when you're predicting occupancy.

[04:05]

So hopefully you never walk into a cold room,

[04:07]

but do not require anyone to do any programming

[04:12]

or connectivity or pay attention, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[04:21]

people don't know how to do it, don't do it very well,

[04:23]

patterns change and they forget how to do the programming.

[04:26]

It's a nuisance to program and it doesn't work very well.

[04:29]

And there's reasonable evidence anyway

[04:34]

on requiring your attention persist much better,

[04:38]

maybe up to the life of the device rather than

[04:40]

maybe one to four years otherwise.

[04:43]

So Radbot's magic is, I do love it when people ask me

[04:47]

in a pitch or something and say,

[04:49]

so how does it work?

[04:50]

And I say magic with a completely straight face.

[04:54]

Mainly light, there are other things going on as well,

[04:58]

but stuff like when you flick on the light

[05:00]

or draw your coat and the robot knows you're there,

[05:02]

when it's pitch black and always is at that time,

[05:05]

it can be pretty sure you're either not there or asleep

[05:07]

and don't need the heat cranked up,

[05:10]

but it also detects your use of controls.

[05:12]

And there's other things in development

[05:15]

right at this moment.

[05:17]

And then that setback size, well, we risk weight it.

[05:19]

The more sure we are, you're not in the room,

[05:21]

the further we allow the temperature setback.

[05:24]

And in the middle of the night, when we're pretty sure

[05:26]

that you don't need the heat,

[05:27]

we set it back as much as six degrees,

[05:30]

which in principle would be a 60% energy saving

[05:32]

to a rule of thumb.

[05:33]

One degree setback for its duration is about 10%

[05:39]

of the heat requirement for that duration.

[05:44]

Brief history, oh, go back to 2009 or something,

[05:47]

David McKay was writing Sustainable Energy

[05:51]

Without the Hot Air.

[05:53]

And we were talking about all sorts of things

[05:55]

from solar panels onwards.

[05:56]

And that's a tiny credit to me,

[05:57]

somewhere in the depths of the book.

[05:59]

When he got to DEC, he claimed he wrote himself

[06:03]

the chief scientist role at DEC by writing that book.

[06:07]

And we continue chatting about what was likely

[06:09]

to be the best carbon bang for the buck.

[06:11]

What should we do?

[06:12]

I was very keen to do something.

[06:13]

And we decided probably domestic space heating

[06:17]

was really ripe for improvement.

[06:18]

People do it really badly.

[06:20]

Less than half the systems in England, for example,

[06:22]

would meet current building regs.

[06:25]

They wouldn't be allowed to be built.

[06:27]

And those are pretty poor regs.

[06:30]

He invited me to organize a meeting.

[06:36]

He invited me to lead a meeting at the end of 2012

[06:40]

about home heating, including zoning.

[06:43]

The great and the good were there, academics

[06:45]

and people from BRE and so on.

[06:47]

We all agreed that zoning was good

[06:49]

and probably some other things as well.

[06:51]

So, and some chat from one of the big companies said,

[06:54]

oh, and I'll send you all our kit, which does it.

[06:55]

Well, nothing happened.

[06:56]

And the government didn't do anything.

[06:57]

I kind of sent a snippy email in January saying,

[07:00]

well, what have you done?

[07:01]

It's been months.

[07:02]

You haven't done anything.

[07:03]

And they said, we're government.

[07:04]

We don't do anything in a hurry.

[07:06]

So in 2013, I started the open CRV open source project,

[07:11]

which is still there.

[07:12]

And we'll talk about it in a minute.

[07:13]

And in about 2014, created the company.

[07:18]

And about 2018 got some really good investors on board.

[07:22]

And we changed the name of the company

[07:25]

to one that wouldn't frighten utilities and thus Vestemi.

[07:29]

And we're commercializing it

[07:30]

because it's no good being a boutique tinkerer.

[07:33]

There's more than a billion rads,

[07:35]

which should benefit from a rad bot.

[07:38]

And we're not going to get there by tinkering.

[07:42]

We need some real commercial oomph there.

[07:44]

We've done testing.

[07:46]

So Energy House, I don't know if any of you saw Energy House 2

[07:49]

was launched today, which is rather good

[07:51]

where they've got Energy House 1.

[07:52]

They've got a whole Victorian end of terrace inside a lab.

[07:55]

So we tested in there.

[07:57]

So we're about 25% energy savings.

[07:59]

And we just completed two years of trials

[08:01]

with Bays and Off-Gem money in real houses,

[08:06]

more than 100 real houses.

[08:08]

And we've done other testing, qualitative testing.

[08:11]

And yes, it works.

[08:12]

We're pretty sure it actually works.

[08:14]

It's not a figment of my imagination as the inventor.

[08:17]

We're still arguing about how much it works

[08:19]

because it's really difficult to measure.

[08:21]

But we've got good numbers and our target is up to 30%.

[08:26]

So what are we doing now?

[08:27]

Sales, sales, sales.

[08:28]

Every rad bot can save as much as a tenth

[08:30]

of a ton of carbon per year from its rad.

[08:36]

And there's quite good--

[08:38]

oh, I've got a missing bracket there--

[08:45]

in a few hundred bytes of code on an AVR.

[08:51]

So that's what it looks like.

[08:53]

You don't have to keep your finger on the rad bot.

[08:55]

You are allowed to walk away.

[08:57]

But that's the boost button on top, if you see.

[08:59]

And I press it to close nice and red.

[09:01]

Otherwise, it's just like a normal TRV.

[09:03]

You set the temperature you want on the dial.

[09:06]

And rad bot, when you're in the room,

[09:09]

will do its standards to make sure that is the temperature.

[09:11]

Clearly, it can't work miracles if your boiler isn't on or

[09:14]

something.

[09:15]

But it will do its standards.

[09:17]

Rad bot will also, with a boiler controller,

[09:19]

but it's not the way we're selling it,

[09:21]

any rad bot can call for heat.

[09:23]

And so if you do that boost, it will turn the boiler on for you.

[09:28]

So some alphabets, alphabets spaghetti,

[09:32]

SAP, GHD, ECo3, alphabet soup.

[09:36]

So where would we be without TLAs and ETLAs?

[09:40]

And for those who don't know, three letter acronyms and

[09:42]

extended three letter acronyms.

[09:45]

So we've had some pretty industry awards,

[09:47]

like the one down in bottom right,

[09:49]

which I seem to only got a monochrome version of.

[09:51]

It was shiny, the original one.

[09:53]

But the important thing was that at the very end of September,

[09:56]

we went into the SAP tables.

[09:58]

SAP is the standard assessment procedure,

[10:00]

which, for example, drives your energy performance

[10:03]

certificate for your house.

[10:05]

And you need to get on that to go into all sorts of programs.

[10:08]

And for example, now people can pay for rad bots under the green

[10:12]

homes grant as a secondary measure.

[10:15]

And the thing that we're currently pending is all our

[10:18]

stuff is sitting with off gem to go and spot up on their fingers

[10:20]

and toes and see if they will accredit us for the ECo3

[10:24]

program.

[10:27]

So how does it work?

[10:28]

Well, I told you magic already, but maybe you won't believe me.

[10:32]

It's just like a mechanical TRV for the normal human beings we

[10:39]

want to use it.

[10:39]

If we're going to get anything like a billion of them in,

[10:41]

it can't be too fancy.

[10:43]

So it's just like a mechanical TRV.

[10:46]

And like a more normal mechanical TRV,

[10:48]

one of its jobs is to stop overheating.

[10:51]

And it quite took me by surprise to put one of our case studies,

[10:55]

someone was in quite a new house, only six years old,

[10:58]

which I assumed Radbot wouldn't be able to do much for.

[11:01]

But they said that downstairs was always too hot,

[11:06]

whatever they set their TRVs to.

[11:08]

And upstairs was so cold that they

[11:09]

had to run an electric heater.

[11:12]

Well, they put TR of Radbots in, and it stopped both problems

[11:16]

because it's presumably the one downstairs

[11:18]

was close to their boiler.

[11:19]

And Radbots really quite forceful about turning the Rad off

[11:23]

when it wants to be.

[11:24]

And it let more heat go upstairs when they wanted it.

[11:27]

So fabs, so it can stop overheating as well as

[11:30]

the other.

[11:31]

It's got the boost button.

[11:33]

Big problem that used to annoy me as I'm still school resources

[11:36]

governor is come to pick my kids up on a cold winter's evening

[11:40]

and see all the windows open because they're

[11:41]

being a bit cold in the morning, turned everything up to max,

[11:44]

forgotten, massively overheated, and they

[11:46]

have to turn everything off, all the windows.

[11:50]

So you press the boost button.

[11:52]

It basically raises the temperature threshold

[11:55]

for 10 degrees for half an hour and then goes back

[11:58]

to where it was before, so you don't need to remember.

[12:01]

Radbot is driven by occupancy and vacancy detection,

[12:03]

including some optimum on, optimum off,

[12:05]

a mixture of live detection and prediction.

[12:07]

So it's got a kind of rolling seven day memory

[12:09]

of various things like occupancy level, temperature, and so on.

[12:14]

It's got multiple sensors, light, temperature,

[12:16]

which it needs to regulate the room temperature, obviously,

[12:19]

humidity.

[12:20]

So we do some things to reduce condensation risk

[12:23]

and use of controls.

[12:24]

Outputs, it's got motor valve controls.

[12:27]

There's a little motor which drives the pin up and down.

[12:32]

And some haptics, I can do the equivalent of your phone

[12:34]

vibrating to tell you something's going on.

[12:37]

There's an LED at the top, and there's a radio.

[12:41]

We are probably going to do a cheap one

[12:43]

to get costs down with no radio fitted,

[12:45]

but nonetheless, it is happy to send properly

[12:48]

encrypted stats frames in JSON across the radio, which

[12:54]

will get across a typical house, cheap radio.

[12:57]

And there's some patent pending cleverness too.

[13:01]

We are galloping towards an expedited patent

[13:08]

of our first patent, which means it'll land in a year, we hope,

[13:11]

and four other ones as well.

[13:13]

So I'd have to kill you all if I tell you about some

[13:15]

of the stuff that's pending.

[13:17]

But lots of it is to do with making lots and lots of value

[13:21]

out of the cheap sensors in here.

[13:22]

These are not fabulously expensive,

[13:25]

highly calibrated sensors, but we can do a lot with them.

[13:28]

And so for example, when we use lighting to detect occupants,

[13:31]

we're doing all sorts of things.

[13:32]

We're doing edge detection.

[13:33]

We're looking at how much it wobbles.

[13:35]

We're looking at level detection.

[13:36]

We look at what typical things are by hour of day and so on.

[13:40]

Anyway, on savings in Energy House,

[13:43]

which is this Victorian end of terrace inside a lab,

[13:47]

we were seeing, for example, 60% savings of energy

[13:50]

in the bedrooms, 25% for the whole house.

[13:53]

We think realistic is 30% for houses for which it's suited.

[13:59]

So if you're in a tiny one bedroom studio or studio flat,

[14:04]

which is modern and well insulated,

[14:05]

Redpot isn't going to help you much.

[14:07]

It wouldn't in a passive house either,

[14:11]

because zoning won't have much effect.

[14:12]

But if you're in a big old draughty house which

[14:14]

loses heat like the clappers, yes, Redpot is your friend.

[14:18]

OK, some secrets for you.

[14:20]

Now, you can tell me again if I could show you this again

[14:26]

after we come off.

[14:27]

I'm hoping you can see.

[14:28]

I've just taken the lid off of Redpot,

[14:31]

and you won't be able to see it.

[14:32]

But inside the cap is a little row

[14:34]

of pads there, which includes power and serial.

[14:39]

So if you look at the Open TRV documentation,

[14:42]

you'll see that there's a documented 4800 board 8N1

[14:48]

serial interface with a CLI on it, which means you can do

[14:51]

things like set the key and the ID

[14:53]

and do some other bits and pieces.

[14:56]

And any stats, as provided you've got the key.

[15:00]

know the IDs, the existing open TRV stats hub and boiler controller received stats,

[15:07]

and there is a little graph courtesy of new plot of occupancy from all the sensors, all

[15:15]

radiative valves in my house a bit of last month. And if you look carefully, you can

[15:21]

probably see the difference. I think that's a weekend first one, the kids in and the kids

[15:25]

not in and different patterns of usage during the day, of course, under lockdown, a bit

[15:29]

more occupancy that would otherwise be the case. So a summary, it's been an overnight

[15:35]

success that took eight years. We've got we receiving accreditations, we've won some awards,

[15:41]

we've got 1000 devices still in stock, we're hoping to make, well, 10s of 1000s, if not

[15:46]

100,000 next year, we're ready for the green homes grant and eco three, or eco three sorry,

[15:53]

is the energy company obligation. Third round of the program where the government pays to

[15:59]

put improve the energy performance of the homes of people who are fuel poor or vulnerable.

[16:05]

About a quarter of the population is eligible for that. Our aim is save mega tons of co2

[16:11]

affordably and simply, we also aim to reduce fuel poverty to put up that horrible eating

[16:16]

versus heating dilemma for some people. And we want to go on supporting tinkering in a

[16:21]

way that doesn't terrify our investors. So there are some links for you the product has

[16:28]

its own page radbot.com. There was a count Radbot if you go and search for Radbot in

[16:34]

Wikipedia. Vestemi is the company. And if you want to go and look at the open TRV reference

[16:42]

code which still exists the open source stuff that's in GitHub. And there's also a wiki

[16:47]

on there. And if you want to drop me an email, there's my email address.

More...

Slide Text Content

Contents

  • What problem is being solved?
  • What is the solution? Does it work? What about the rest?
  • Some history
  • Where we are now: SAP, GHG, ECO3
  • How does it work?
  • Secrets for developers

Problem: climate change, space heating

  • Carbon emissions contribute to climate change
  • In UK ~10%+ of all carbon emissions from domestic space heating
  • Maybe 50% of that is unnecessary
  • One huge source of waste: heating empty rooms, eg bedrooms during day
  • Another: complex / expensive controls that fox users
  • Not everyone has reliable always-on Internet

Solution: soft zoning, Radbot

  • Treat each room/rad/TRV as a soft heating 'zone'
  • Set back temperature when vacant and likely to be so for next hour or so
  • Set back further when more sure, preheat when occupancy predicted
  • DON'T require programming or connectivity or attention
  • (Reasonable evidence that autonomous measures persist better)
  • Occupancy detection is driven by light (in various ways), use of controls and other things (development continues).
  • Size of temperature setback is risk-weighted.

Brief history

  • ~2009 David MacKay discussions re SEWTHA
  • At DECC, what was best carbon bang for buck?
  • Late 2012 meeting, home heating including zoning good
  • 2013 OpenTRV project
  • 2018 Vestemi commercialisation to try to reach >>1bn radiators!
  • Tests (Energy House) and trials (ROWR and ECO): yes, it works

Now:

  • Sales, sales, sales (every Radbot can save ~0.1tCO2/y)
  • Cost reduction, continuous improvement (h/w and data science)

SAP, GHG, ECO3: alphabet soup!

  • Where would we be without TLAs and ETLAs? B^>
  • Industry awards and key accreditation… SAP
  • Standard Assessment Procedure for home Energy Performance Certificate
  • SAP score allows use under Green Homes Grant
  • Coming: Energy Company Obligation deemed scores for ECO3 programme

How does it work?

  • Just like a mechanical TRV, simple display, dial clicks
  • Plus boost button!
  • Occupancy/vacancy detection
  • Prediction and 'usual at this time' 7-day-ish memory
  • Sensors: light, temperature, humidity, use of controls
  • Outputs: motor valve control (+haptics!), LED, radio
  • Some patent-pending cleverness too...
  • 60% savings in bedrooms, up to 30% realistic in suitable homes

Some secrets for developers and tinkerers!

  • Radbot 2 exposes serial connection (4800 baud, 8n1) for CLI
  • Key and ID can be set via the CLI (Command Line Interface)
  • JSON stats receivable by OpenTRV stats hub and boiler controller

Summary

  • 8 years in the making: in stock!
  • Ready for Green Homes Grant and ECO3
  • Aim is to save megatonnes of CO2, affordably and simply
  • Also aim to help reduce fuel poverty
  • Supports tinkering

Get in touch, buy Radbots, cut carbon!

  • Damon Hart-Davis

Show Notes

My presentation (~17 minutes) brutally extracted from the live EcoHome Lab Zoom meeting video of the larger smart radiator valves meeting (thanks Matt of Carbon Co-op!) without top or tail.

It was a good evening with some familiar faces, about 16 people present, from around the UK.

(The covid-19 pandemic lockdown was a thing...)

Download PDF slides for the talk.

Locally-recorded audio:

1039s "EcoHomeLab talk local audio" Uploaded . Downloads:

References

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