Hydronic Zone Control Panel Thermostat connection question

[Peter Klietz]

Hello Everyone, I was spending a couple of hours trying to connect with someone from Honeywell Resideo, to ask them specifics about their Hydronic zone control panels, but of course all their support lines have technical difficulties and not working. Thats when I found this incredible forum and thought I give it a shot and see if someone can help me out. Here is our (Probably quite unusual and specific problem
We have a retrofitted home with trench heaters (Which a pretty much hydronic fantail units that are embedded in your floor) and are about to wire the fantail thermostats to our Honeywell zone control board in order to open the actuator valves on our manifold if the thermostats call for heat. This is of course all very simpel and nothing unusual, besides that fact that these thermostats are usually used to drive the actuators themselves, basically sending a 24V AC/DC signal when calling for heat. But of course the zone panel has the usual R/W/C connectors for a normal thermostat to just close the loop when calling for heat and not supplying power to these connectors (At least that's what I am guessing - I am not sure how these regular thermostats operate and or supply the signal to turn on power to the actuators. Well, my question is, if anyone has experience as to how we could connect our fantail thermostats (Model is Siemens RDG160TU) to the Honeywell Zone control board (HPZC106). Also, because the trench heaters are running on DC power in order to run the modulating fans, the thermostats are as well powered by the 24V DC power supply, so the power the Thermostat outputs when calling for heat is 24V DC. Is it at all possible to connect these specific thermostats to the Honeywell HPZC106 ?? Any help or knowledge would be much appreciated. Best, Peter

 

[Fitter30]

Honeywell panel strictly 24vac input from a 3 wire stat. Siemens stat has either a 0-10 dc or on & off output. Possible to program a input / output module to relay stat signal to the valve and convert 0 - 10 to relay closers to the Honeywell panel.

 

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[Peter Klietz]

Honeywell panel strictly 24vac input from a 3 wire stat. Siemens stat has either a 0-10 dc or on & off output. Possible to program a input / output module to relay stat signal to the valve and convert 0 - 10 to relay closers to the Honeywell panel.

Hi Fitter, Thanks for your comment and input. We did find a setting in the Thermostat that produces a relay output, when programmed to the on/off switch setting and paired with the C terminal output. This gives us a continuity without DC voltage on the output and seems to work with the panel. Right now when calling for heat the light at the zone panel indicating lights up and sends 25V AC to the sone valve actuator, so looks like it is working. Fingers crossed

 

[Fitter30]

I have to ask you must be in the commercial- industrial industry - mechanical engineer to even consider a seimens stat! That can be set up in so many ways. Was very surprised that i could find any info on that stat. Any info for seimens had to go thru backdoor info or honeywell.

 

[Peter Klietz]

Haha, actually have a love - hate relationship with Siemens stats. I am originally from Germany, so grew up there with these Stats and knew all about them. But been in the US since 25 years and lately have some quality and user guide error issues with them. But at least Siemens is open to input and you will get the direct access to the product managers and engineers (even though in this case they are of course in China). Actually these Stats could be amazing and incredibly user configurable, if they just had the right Manual to point out all the features and options. Problem is that with these particular Thermostats I already spoke 3 times to the product manager to point out simple user mistakes which make the product literally useless if you are not able to trouble shoot and spend hours with it in order to figure out that ultimately it is an error in the user guide that instructs you to push the right side button for 2 seconds in order to get to the special setup menu, when in reality you have to push the left side button - this is actually a true story and guess what, after bringing that to the product managers attention, they realize that this is a printing mistake and states the wrong side button to push, but when we just ordered a new Thermostat it still had the same mistake in the manual. I don't even want to know how many installers throw the stat in the corner since they can't enter the parameter submenu. Or in our case there is no single mention of the C terminal output in order to make just continuity on the Heat call terminal Q1. Again it took us to contact the Chinese product engineer in order to figure out that this is the way to wire the Stats in order to get that functionality. When asked why not to include and write a full guide for this, they said that it is better to get personal schooling on the stats, which unfortunately they don't have any support center in the US fork, but in the European market you would get service centers to school you on these Thermostats
Again, probably best to print conclusive manuals for the countries where they don't have the schooling ability, but the product manager in Hong Kong didn't think it was a good idea, hahahaha.
Well, but besides these dumb manual short comings the Thermostats are actually amazing little marvels, able to pretty much feed anything that I can think off and run on AC or DC power and put out DC 0-10 V for modulating, plus 1, 2 or 3 step and on off capability. Pretty remarkable I think.

Thanks for you help, Peter