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TRV grouping within the Hive app provides a simplified experience to our Hive Radiator Valve users, allowing you to control more than one TRV as a single device. The information below will help you decide if grouping Hive TRVs is the right thing for you.
How Grouping Can Help
Grouping TRVs together is ideal when you regularly want to control multiple TRVs in a specific area of the home at once. Here are two examples where it comes in really handy:
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When multiple radiators are in the same room: If you have more than one radiator in a room, it’s so much easier to group them together and run them on the same schedule. It also makes manual overrides simpler, such as raising the temperature a little on a chilly day. All you need to do is change the target temperature in one place for all radiators that are in the same area and group. That makes it a lot easier compared to doing them all individually!
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Zone control of specific areas in the home: Modern homes often have their plumbing split into different heating zones, meaning you can have multiple thermostats controlling different areas of your home. Plumb zoning a central heating system can be intrusive and expensive, which is why older homes aren’t plumb zoned. Our TRVs are super simple to install and by grouping them all in the Hive app, you’ll have greater control over different zones. So with the use of groups and ‘Heat On Demand’, you can easily have upstairs on and downstairs off. For more information about heat on demand, click here.
What if I want to keep individual control over the radiators, but occasionally I’d like to control them as a group?
No problem. Rather than grouping the TRVs together, you can use our Hive TRV quick actions instead. Quick action is just like the name suggests. You can change what it triggers, such as on/off/duration and temperatures. You can find out more information on Hive actions here.
How Do I Create a Group?
- On the dashboard, tap the ‘Manage’ button in the bottom right, then tap ‘Groups’.
- Once you’re on the grouping page, simply select the “create a group” bar.
- Now you can choose between lights or TRVs.
- Simply choose any TRVs you want to include within a group and then name the group.
TIP: Consider a functional name such as “bedroom” or “living room”.
NOTE: Once you’ve grouped TRVs, you won’t have individual control over the valves. They’ll disappear from your dashboard and be replaced by a singular group dashboard icon.
Group Schedules
When creating a group, we’ve designed it so that the first TRV added into the group will then share its schedule with all others that are added later.
TIP: After creating a group, we’d suggest you visit the schedule page and make sure that the schedule fits your requirements for the area where the grouped TRVs are.
Group Settings
After you’ve created the group, you can access its setting menus just like any other Hive device. Simply click on the settings cog in the top right corner of the group’s control page within the Hive app. Once you’ve clicked through into the settings page, you’ll see all individual TRVs included within the group. Select any of these to see their own individual TRV settings page.
You’ll also have access to the group settings for all TRVs in the group. This will let you change:
- Heat On Demand
- Valve position
- Edit group (here you can add or remove individual TRVs)
- Delete group
TRV Groups and Voice Assistants
For now, neither Alexa nor HomeKit will recognise our TRV groups in their respective apps. We’ll be working on this in the New Year and we’ll provide an update here once all the work’s completed. You can still control single devices through Alexa and HomeKit.
However, Google Assistant will see the groups on their “Home” app so you can control them with Google Assistant, just like you can at the moment with individual TRVs.
TRV Groups and Ambient Temperature
Each radiator valve has three separate temperature sensors built into it. They use clever algorithms to factor out heat from the radiator and pipes and estimate the temperature in the middle of the room. Once included within a group, we take the average temperatures reported by the grouped TRVs and return this as the ambient temperature for your chosen area.