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Vicare Smart Climate/Single Room Control - flaws and lacking features after one year of use

I've being using a full Vicare Smart Climate (also sometimes called Single Room Control) setup for a year now. The setup consists of a Vitodens 222-W boiler (model B2LF-25, E3-platform), 9 radiator thermostats, 3 temperature sensors and 2 repeaters.

 

I would like to take this opportunity to once more address the problems and lack of features that have plagued this system since the start. Most have been addressed here before in separate threads, but it seemed like the appropriate moment now to bundle them again in one post.

 

1. No room compensation or other kind of dynamic heating control

From a technical point of view everything should be in place to make for a more efficient boiler control algorithm that incorporates the differences between the current and set temperatures from all rooms. However this is not being used at all. It is still the same old "dumb, black box" weather compensation that is has been used for decades. The boiler follows the set heating curve according to the outside temperature and that's it. In practice this means slow heating in the morning when the rooms are cold, unnecessary overshoots when there is a lot of sun, unnecessary boiler short cycling when you reduce the temperature and just general bad efficiency.

 

Note that this makes my system less efficient then my previous owned 15-years old boiler controlled by an OpenTherm Nest thermostat. Due to the whole work-from-home covid situation my heating pattern and temperatures are identical for 2020 and 2021. These are the results taking into account degree-day correction:

 

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Together with the installation of my Vitodens boiler in February 2021, my heating system has been completely hydronic balanced with Oventrop GHQ valves. Making the comparison even worse.

2. Incorrect boiler pump on-off logic

This has been posted many many times before. The only time the pump will shut off is when in reduced mode and the outside temperature is 5°C above the set temperature. For Vicare Smart Climate the minimum set temperature is 8°C. This means that during the heating season the pump will shut down only when the outside temperature is higher then 13°C in reduced mode (for most users this will be at night). In all other cases the pump will be running. Basically for a normal West-European winter this means the pump will be running 99,9% of the time during the heating season. Again technically everything is in place to make for a very efficient pump control (the boiler knows the valve state from all the Vicare thermostats), but this is not being used at all.

 

3. No adjustable timer.

You can program the room temperature via the time schedule or set it manually, but that's it. When you set it manually it will run until the next heating schedule activation. You cannot specify for how long you manually want to override a temperature. Every other competitor has had this very trivial and useful feature for years.

 

4. No eco-mode/away-mode shortcut.

When you leave the house and nobody else is home you expect to shut off or lower the temperature with the push of a button. This is not possible with Vicare Smart Climate. You will have to manually lower the temperature for each room and make sure that the heating schedule will not interfere while away (see previous item).

 

5. No geofencing.

There is no geofencing available nor planned for Vicare Smart Climate users. This has been confirmed to me by the Viessmann management. Yes you are reading this correctly, it's 2022 and the most expensive heating system known to me will not have geofencing. Not even as a payed option.

 

6. No Google Home or Apple Homekit integration.

They support Alexa but that's it.

 

7. No historical logging.

You get a very poor estimate about electricity and gas usage but that's it. No room temperatures, moisture,.. logging. Look at Tado and Netatmo for how it should be done.

 

8. Unstable backend.

Server outages almost every month, sometimes going on for multiple days. And a constant stream of "server maintenance, limited availability" moments.

 

9. No professional support.

I don't know about Germany, but in Belgium support is almost non existing. Had a full Vicare components outage a while back and had to wait for 9 days, several calls and email later, to get some very rudimentary support. All while my heating wasn't working. Currently I've been requesting support for a month and a half about 2 thermostats that don't fully open or close correctly. Not a single response so far.

 

All of this has also been reported multiple times to the Belgian Viessmann management. But by now they are basically ignoring me.

 

When will this finally be taken serious?

4 ANTWORTEN 4

Updated feature matrix showing Vicare Smart Climate vs competing zone controlled systems:

 

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Your sixth bullet has been taken care of. I had to find that out accidantally, though, as it was never communicated through the ViCare app. Otherwise I agree with all the issues you have summed up: Viessmann offers an expensive and reliable system, but seems to be lagging way behind when it comes to software development to improve their system performance.

Thank you for the information. I was also unaware that you could now add the Vicare thermostats to Google Home.

 

The integration however seems to be limited. For example you cannot trigger an "home" or "away" routine for the thermostats. Meaning geofencing is still out of the picture. Something I am able to do for e.g. my Philips hue lights. You do can adjust the thermostats using a voice assisted routine. Which begs the question why the former isn't possible. Classic Viessmann fashion. Hopefully this will be added soon. Nonetheless finally some good news!

 

Vicare Smart Climate has been introduced into the market April 2020. We are now almost December 2022 and the system is still plagued with its original flaws and lack of features. Even more things have surfaced for which I don't have the energy any more to address. Nothing will come of it.

 

Viessmann is where technical excellence and innovation goes to die.