Reading posts, I could not conclude if it will work correctly with MCV. Has the F / C conversion issue been fixed?
As I was reading the posts, it doesn’t seem that it has yet. THen again, I am not directly involved in any way so I guess this was really a non value added post… :
This is still not fixed in the latest Lua/Luup release (1.0.745). Cmon MCV, we have been asking for proper support on this device for more than 3 months! Most of the reason I bought this device was because of the “It just works” and “Guarunteed Compatibility” statements. I realize you guys are busy with Lua/Luup so of course I am not going to go claiming my money back as the advertising states. There may be some bugs in the thermostat firmware… I’m not sure… but I know this device works fine with Homeseer. So there must be some workarounds. Not only do the Heat/Cool setpoints not work, but other functions like the Fan are broke as well…
This thermostat was just released under the “Trane” brand to work with the Schlage Lock/Gateway so you will only be seeing more and more people with these issues soon. Please at least update mantis bug reports to show you are working on this… we have been left in the dark.
On the other hand, I do appreciate all of your hard work the past few months on Lua/Luup, I just think some communication on some of the other pending bugs and requests would be nice.
Some background from my working with RCS and MCV, and the z-wave folks through these two:
The TZ43 accepts commands only in the units that being used on the display. So, if you want C on the display, then the commands must come in as C also. If you want F, then the commands must be in F. The command that is sent to the tstat has units specified, but the TZ43 does not use them. According to the z-wave folks, this is not the correct behavior.
Right now, Vera sends all commands in C, with those units specified in the command as well. The TZ43 should handle this.
I have no idea of the TZ43 firmware can be updated, or if it would require being sent back to RCS. Assuming it can’t, what we need is for MCV to change Vera to send commands using the user-specified units. This assumes that user specified the same units that are displayed on the tstat.
By the way, as a workaround, you can send the C equivalent of your F temp and it will be sent and interpretted “correctly” by the tstat. It’s a pain, the family can’t/won’t do it, and you’ll get angry every time you do it - but it works!
D.
drz-
Many of my TZ43 functions do not work correctly even when I select C units. The fan functions do not work, and there are some inconsistencies in the Heat/Cool/Off functions. I have 2 of these thermostats and they both function incorrectly with vera. Are you experiencing these other faults?
Unfortunately for me… I couldn’t tell you! I was supposed to add AC to my system this year, but the project got economized… so I just have steam heat being controlled by the tstat.
Things I can say work: I can turn the system off and to auto. I can change the temperature (using the workaround mentioned above).
D.
Agree with others expressing concern that tz43 still won’t work with vera. I have two tz43s and their operation with vera is significantly limited.
Hey how about to switch to °C finally?
This old German guy Fahrenheit got all this temeperatures screwed up. That’s why the whole world is using Mr. Celsius’s °. It’s like money, $1 has 100 cents, similarly there are 100 degrees between freezing (yes, he was Swede) and boiling of water (0°C = freezing, 100°C is boiling).
Can’t be any simpler than that. 
Oh, BTW, your body temp is 37°C.
Even after >20yrs living in US, can’t get used to °F, I have °C set everywhere.
I have two of these thermostats as well… I have both set to Celsius and Vera set to Celsius, but my setpoints are still not taking effect. If I input 30C as the cooling setpoint and press “Set” I can physically see the display on the thermostat flash: “Cooling Setpoint : 30” but then when that message disappears the setpoint has not changed from what it was before. On the right hand side of the display it still says “C 25” as in “Cooling Setpoint 25”. Am I missing something here? Is the “Celsius Workaround” actually working for anyone else?
This is not the only problem with these thermostats, but it would be a step in the right direction to get the setpoints to set correctly. BTW… this is with vera firmware version 608 released today. This is also how it acted for me with version 602.
[quote=“g7t, post:8, topic:164558”]Hey how about to switch to °C finally?
This old German guy Fahrenheit got all this temeperatures screwed up. That’s why the whole world is using Mr. Celsius’s °. It’s like money, $1 has 100 cents, similarly there are 100 degrees between freezing (yes, he was Swede) and boiling of water (0°C = freezing, 100°C is boiling).
Can’t be any simpler than that. Oh, BTW, your body temp is 37°C.
Even after >20yrs living in US, can’t get used to °F, I have °C set everywhere.[/quote]
Admittedly it is a terrible measurement method based on brine solution at 0 F and body temperature at 96 F (later modified to make boiling water 180 degrees higher than freezing, which resulted in body temperature of 98.5 F), but he was born in Royal Prussia (which was in the Kingdom of Poland), and lived most of his life in what is now the Netherlands, so not really a German, a Pol if anything…
But I guess none of that solve the TZ43 issue does it.
I bet is has something to do with the fact that TZ43 uses additional thermostat classes that allow Zwave to change the internal program set points.
You might be able to disable this at the stat and it might work.
Vera does not support this class from my understanding.
MCV an help here?
I have the tz43 set to display F and the vera GUI set to display C. The tz43 accepts cool and heat setpoints from vera when I enter values as F temps (ignoring the units displayed on the vera GUI).
Much to my surprise the temps are displayed as C values on the dashboard when the thermostat is polled by vera.
This is total hack, but at least I can set a temperature. I am also learning to convert C to F in my head - there’s always an upside.
Unfortunately, communication with the thermostat is too unrealiable to really use it when I am out of town. I am getting a large % of failures when the thermostats are polled. Wondering if others are having the same problem?
As soon as we finish the pre-luup to luup conversion program (about 1-2 weeks), you can upgrade to the luup version and you won’t have a problem. The issue is that in the Z-Wave command class definition, all the temperatures are sent in binary, and there are flags to indicate if the value is in celsius or fahrenheit, how many decimal places there are, and how many bytes. There is no way to “ask” a Z-Wave device what format(s) it can accept, so any device should be able to accept the temperature in any format. But the RCS ignores the flags and assumes every temperature is 1 byte, 0 decimal points, in whatever scale the display is set to. Internally Vera stores all numbers as metric because that’s the way the UPnP Forum defined it, and because although Z-Wave stuff does both F and C, many other standards only work with C. We’ve added to our new versions a work-around for the RCS explicitly so that when Vera sees that manufacturer, it will always send temperatures as 1 byte, 0 decimal places, in whatever standard you selected on the Location tab. So this problem should go away.
Thank you for that reply. I knew that the difficulty resided with the UPnP after searching the linuxMCE wiki. Aarons initial reply…“The celsius/fahrenheit issues with the RCS thermostat is a bug in the thermostat–not in Vera. RCS and Zensys are both aware of this.”… and the related forum discussion has not give me confidence that MCV was going to be working to resolve this issue. In fact my support request #573 submitted 6/5 has not even been assigned and there are other unassigned requests that predate mine.
For the moment I have abandoned vera and have installed homeseer pro. HSPRO handles both of my thermostats without a hitch. Temperatures can be assigned. Control of the fan works. The thermostat does not switch to RUN mode when a COOL command is set. Too bad, I really like the vera concept.
It appears I’m due a refund check for $302.90 according to the “it just works guarantee”.
Zean, two things…
First, it says in the “just works guarantee” the device must be Z-Wave compliant. The RCS is not. As we’ve stated, it’s a bug in the RCS, not in Vera. Vera IS sending the command correctly. The Z-Wave standard defines how a temperature is transmitted to a device. Vera is complying with the Z-Wave standard. RCS is not. The guarantee makes this point clear because, obviously, if some 3rd party manufacturer produces a buggy device that doesn’t work, Mi Casa Verde can’t be expected to fix everybody else’s bugs. The guarantee is that Vera will work. We obviously can’t guarantee on everyone else’s behalf that all of the thousands of Z-Wave devices on the market are bug-free. What we guarantee is that if you have a device which IS Z-Wave compliant, we will make Vera work with it, and add the necessary Z-Wave command classes and UI elements to support it. The only reason the Homeseer works for you is because it happens to send the temperature in Fahrenheit. 80% of the world uses celsius, and for them, it’s the inverse. Vera works and HomeSeer does not.
Second, despite this, we did introduce a workaround specifically for the RCS, which is in our new Luup release. So, if you want the RCS to work, we can simply upgrade your box to the latest Luup version. I’d recommend waiting a couple weeks, though, since the Luup version is brand new and there are probably a few other bugs, and there are simple workarounds for the RCS thermostat in the meantime anyway. But, if it’s important to have Vera transmit the temperature to an RCS in fahrenheit, we do already have a solution.
Zean, btw, re: “In fact my support request #573 submitted 6/5 has not even been assigned and there are other unassigned requests that predate mine.”… That’s because we did already commit a workaround issue for the RCS in the newest Luup version. So the issue is marked as ‘closed’ because we’re not intending to postpone the upgrade to the new Luup version to go back and do the same fixes to the old version, which will be abandoned in a couple weeks anyway.
Also, I added a paragraph to the ‘guaranteed compatibility’ page to be sure it’s completely understood that we are guaranteeing Vera and that Vera will support every official Z-Wave standard for every Z-Wave compliant device, but that we are not responsible for fixing other 3rd party devices on behalf of their manufacturers. It says:
Bugs in 3rd party devices: We cannot guarantee that all the devices made by other companies, which you may use with Vera, are bug free. We only guarantee that Vera will support the Z-Wave standard. For example, if Z-Wave comes out with a new standard for controlling a TV, and you purchase a new Sony Z-Wave TV, we guarantee that within 4 weeks of your submission of a trouble ticket we will upgrade Vera to support the new Z-Wave TV standard. But if there’s a defect in the Sony TV and it is unable to tune to a channel, we obviously cannot be responsible for fixing the Sony TV.
Thanks for the update MCV, look forward to the fix for this.
Is anyone else having problems with the Fan/Auto and Off/Heat/Cool settings too? Or is everyone only having problems with the temperature setpoints?
If someone else who owns this unit could check on the other functions it would be much appreciated…
I am glad to hear that MCV has committed to getting the TZ43 to function. I believe the overall concept of VERA is excellent and really like that it runs under linux embedded.
I am unable to find a list of z-wave certified products. This problem has been cited by others. This reduces the utility of the z-wave certification and any claim made by manufacturers about it.
It was my impression that the TZ43 is certified since RCS is an “affiliate member” of the z-wave alliance and the following was posted on the Zensys website 6/8/08…
” Thermostats, like lighting control, are another critical element to the management of energy in the home. The Intermatic CA8900, Wayne Dalton WDTC-20 and RCS TZ43 join the already strong family of fully-interoperable Z-Wave-enabled thermostats from ACT, Danfoss, RCS, Horstmann and HAI, bringing the total count of available Z-Wave thermostats to 12. These thermostats are fully Z-Wave compliant and interoperable with the more than 300 Z-Wave products already on the market, including lighting controls, appliance and motor controls, door and window controls, window coverings, pool pumps, motion, light and humidity sensors and A/V controls.”
http://www.zen-sys.com/modules/iaCM-ZW-PR/readMore.php?id=24117248
I will call RCS to determine if they believe the thermostat is certified.
In addition to the F/C problem, please recall that there are two additional issues precluding use of the TZ43 with VERA:
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The fan control does not work. OFF command from VERA causes TZ43 to switch modes from HOLD to RUN. This cannot be reversed remotely
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FAN setting switches to ON when AUTO radio button is pressed on the VERA GUI. This cannot be corrected remotely using VERA.
These issues were added to the bug log #563 on 5/21 by member cmaglio. The problems do not appear when the TZ43 is controlled by HSPRO.
I have been told that RCS will be providing a thermostat to MCV to help debug its operation with VERA. Has MCV received the thermostat?
Yes, we received the thermostat and have committed some more fixes for the other issues too. The ‘big’ one, though, was always the c/f, but we’re fixing everything. I agree that it’s frustrating that there’s no list of ‘certified’ devices, and that some devices which seem to be certified don’t in fact implement the Z-Wave command classes according to spec. I’ve raised this concern to the folks at Sigma (Zensys) before, and they do agree, but, like all of us, they have issues with bandwidth and have to prioritize. So in the Luup version, the RCS will work 100%. We should have the upgrade module done to allow easy migration from the current version to Luup, hopefully, by the end of next week. Then you can upgrade and everything will work smoothly with the RCS. Yes, we received a thermostat from them.
BTW, as far as I know the RCS thermostat was certified, but, after speaking to some engineers, it appears that there was an oversight at the 3rd party certification lab and they only tested it with a single byte temperature in fahrenheit, and just assumed the thermostat was using the size/scale/precision flags, without actually testing it. I’ve been told this won’t happen again and they’ll be checking for this from now on. So, the “blame” may be spread around. The folks at RCS are very helpful.
thanks. looking forward to downloading the luup.