Using that diode and those resistors to keep the motor in a reduced, half wave voltage stall tuned to exactly counteract the spring force, is sheer brilliance! Hats off to those guys for keeping it simple and reliable.

And while I'm at it, My all time favourite video of yours is probably the automatic washroom siphon. Absolutely wonderful explanation that one!

"we've got a fuse which is quite good" - someone send this video to weller!

Honeywell has some very clever stuff. When we installed a new heat pump, the manufacturer called for an 8-wire thermostat connection. In our home, all the wire is buried behind walls and replacing our 7-wire cable would have been a real job, given the wire path between floors. No matter--the installer turned to a 2-wire thermostat that talks to a controller down on the heat pump. Has all sorts of options; multiple temperature sensors and WiFi--all over 2 wires.

Nice units but I like to think it's important to fully understand the wiring of central heating systems before installing them, even when using wiring centres like these. They are after all really quite simple. A good understanding of the wiring and how the components work also makes fault finding much faster and easier. I'm always surprised how many electricians and plumbers are baffled by 3 port mid-position valves and have no idea they operate!

This is probably one the best video's I've seen on KZfaq ; thank you for taking the time to explain

That's clever, putting some Dc on the synchronous motor to hold it mid position. I love these simple, elegant engineering solutions. I also enjoy your sharing of the information with us Best regards, Duncan

These sorts of devices are fascinating.

Clive, you've saved the day again. I discovered your channel when attempting to diagnose a faulty cooker clock/timer, turned out to be a dry solder joint, one of your vids helped me find and fix it, and now you've helped me with my non-existent hot water! I thought I'd have to replace the whole valve, but I can do just the motor and JB?! And lo, there was again hot water! Much appreciated! What will you get me fixing next?!

My house has one of the early 80's honeywell boxes where everything is Rammed in there and screwed shut. Quite tempted to get one of these and re-do it myself to make it neat and tidy.

I have this in my house, with a Landis & Gyr RWB2 mechanical timer controller. That also lives on in the Siemens RWB2e which has the exactly same wiring diagram in the manual as on the back of my unit. As a hint of age, the PCB of the honeywell sundial has 1987 stamped on it for when it was designed (pre RoHS of course which seems to have been the big change to your current unit), and the date of manufacture of the rwb2 was 1996.

Following my visit to the UK, where I had the pleasure of using many different establishments and homes showering facilities, I think it's fair to say that the height of plumbing in the country was reached during Roman occupation, and went downhill from there. I don't know what that thing has to do with it, or what other monstrosities are hidden away in your wall spaces and utility rooms, but I was very glad to the back in Australia to have a decent shower with steady water pressure, consistent temperature and with a volume that means all of me remains showered upon throughout.

In the Netherlands, most of the homes have a single unit that does both the heating and hot water. Usually, hot tap water is not stored in tanks, but is produced on the fly. It comes as whole unit, so it is quick to install. just connect the pipes and hook up the thermostat and you are done.

Ah, the apprentice box. Throw one of these at them then tell then about the secondary conservatory heating circuit that stops the grapevine freezing and that it's a three pump system with relays. 😂 Honeywell three-port valves are cunning engineering genius though. Can't reduce that component count anymore. They can lock-up in the wrong place if customers are prone to messing with the programmer settings throughout the day because they don't always fall back to the expected position.

Excellent video Clive.

That link box is beautiful design. If the designer happens to discover this vid and then the comments, kudos, nice bit of engineering design mate.

'Neat' - the highest praise from Big Clive!

Very interesting to see the workings of the valve. I got a roll of orange electrical tape with my last JLC order.

I’m in the US and we have something similar here but they are not common for residential use we mostly use natural gas or electric for hot water and forced air heating or a boiler with radiators that is separate

Very informative and interesting video.

Haha, I was so confused at first. Not a bad JW impression that 😉 Thanks for the video

The label says "Installation should be carried out by a competent person." As if an incompetent person is going to read that and think "well, I'd better not try this then" 😂😂😂

Honeywell got taken over by AlliedSignal a few years ago, and Allied took on their name because it was well-known and came with a good reputation. Sort of creepy, just a touch like murdering someone and then wearing their skin and assuming their identity. Just slightly.

yay plumbing stuff ! I love it. Most dont know how plumbing is complex

My house has a 110-volt oil-fired burner with two internal water coils: one that feeds the hot-water baseboard (with a tiny supplemental water tank), and another coil that feeds the hot water at the taps. Our thermostats are 24 VDC that feed back to 3-wire zone valves that open or close depending on thermostat call (it's binary - either call to open, or call to close). There is a 110-volt recirculating pump that activates when any of the valves open to pump the hot water through the baseboard loops. The hot water for taps/faucets is a straight-shot from the main well pump, through the hot water coil, and out to the pipes. The burner itself runs automatically via very basic high and low temperature cutoffs to keep the water toasty for whenever/wherever it is needed. Keep in mind this house was built in 1975 by my family - my maternal grandfather was a licensed plumber and he originally installed this massive behemoth of a furnace - the left side was an oil burner (but could be converted to run LPG) and the right side could actually burn wood. When we finally had it replaced (and the new furnace has a 3' x 4' footprint and is only 4' tall) the techs said, "Man, I haven't seen one of these old furnaces since we refitted all the furnaces in _(local housing project)_ and... Damn." I smiled and said, "my grandfather installed those furnaces and plumbed those houses, he bought our furnace at the same time that housing project was being built." Now, sure, the new furnace has a very basic "brain box" now, with error codes but no legend for what they mean (random letters that don't even relate to the issue) and it requires a PhD to reset the dang thing if we've run out of oil and it takes me more than three attempts to bleed air from the fuel line (and it's outrageously-complicated to set the min/max temperatures on a two-digit display)... But other than that, it does the job, far more efficiently than that massive beast it replaced.

I was always interested in how such motorised valves worked. China sells a lot of those hvac damper actuators, they will probably work the same way

You had me at first... I thought "I thought this was the sexy one" then I looked down and saw the logo and was like "ok it is"... sorry JW

in the US from what ive seen on shows like This Old House for years now they run the output of the boiler into a manifold and that has individual valves for the zones. the hot water tank can be its own zone though its not uncommon especially in areas with gas to just have a seperate gas fired water heater. Storage hot water tanks are also pretty much still king in the US vs point of use or whole house tankless(upside to our natural vented gas storage WH is we still have hot water even in power failure). Some really fancy systems I have seen go beyond just having valves on the manifold, Each zone also has its own circulation pump. Smaller systems with two or three zones usually have a common pump for them all. Also not uncommon in some homes is "Hydro-Air" where you have a boiler as the heat source, it runs lines out to air handlers that basically have a big radiator in them and the air blows over that to get heated. this allows a home to have both forced air, Air conditioning and under floor radiant heating. As the wallet of a homeowner grows fatter the more interesting the HVAC systems can get.

I've recently been watching John Ward, really informative stuff.

Pretty much all combi boilers now, I used to wire them up with connectors off the top on my head, but its been a while now since I've done a heating install. Nice Honeywell unit though

Great one JW

In our system, the three way valve and the boiler thermostat both link directly into the furnace connection blocks, as does the outside temperature sensor and the room unit (behind a Bosch proprietary protocol). Things like boiler thermals and power level settings are all on the furnace lcd display.

Golly! What a robust and simple system for controlling water/heat.

Either way I love BC and JW 👍🏽

I remember 28 years ago ,moving into my brand new home . And almost every three way valve in the houses in my street failed . British Gas investigate and it turned out the onsite electrition had wired them all up wrong .. I remember wires every where .

I work in HVAC field and we have diverter valves on individual duct coils that work on a return loop to a boiler. The 24v vac mains, the valves modulate 0-10 VDC sig. voltage

Oh wow feeling special 😅 Im New to patreon! Feels good to watch before most others! Great work! I have learnt a lot from your videos ☺️

I literally have a box of about 100 of these in my garage. A company used to supply these I subbed to wiring boilers. Didnt like the look of them so just stuck to what I knew. Double patress, blank plate and strip of 10 15a connectors. If anyone wants to buy a job lot il do them £3 a piece.

The manual lever is for plumbers to be able to drain all the water out of the system.

Didn't know they made these, now to clean up my furnace wiring with a unit from another company like this.

Honeywell is big here. I actually got one of my dog's from there. He escaped after being abused with a broom or mop handle. Beautiful German Shepherd Dog who came free so I named him Freedom. Hell of a dog!

As of lately, the quick test and hoppi meter have been both used rather frequently. in most recent videos so far. It's interesting really to see so many appearances of the two devices working together.

Weirdly i was looking at a very similar unit a few days ago! StRaNgE

I work for a supply house here in the rust belt of America we still have L8148A1017 Honeywell electro-mechanical aquastat and circulator controls on large boilers. The simplest valve actuator is the wax motor in the Thermostatic Radiator Actuators. We also still have magic widgets like Q345A powerpile generators that use the heat of a pilot burner to make 3/4 of a volt to operate VS820 a gas valve, no "mains" no batteries just a flame to make electricity. My favorite obsolete but still in use technology in large buildings is pneumatic controls and actuators. I help with systems that are up to 70 years old and still in use almost every day. Electronic actuators cannot compete with the power and durability that you get from a pneumatic valve or damper actuator, they are just a spring and a diaphragm. One more reason to keep pneumatic controls is because it is impossible to hack or write malware for them and yet it is an open protocol! And to confirm Honeywell is their on worst enemy, is it Residio or just a residue?

Another oddity I've noticed with these mid position valves - they only seem to fail on a Sunday evening, just after toolstation and screwfix have closed. I've got to be in work early in the morning, and will be away for a few days. So the boss is left without heating or hot water until I get back. Ought to start keeping spares on the shelf!

This is a product of Honeywells Supercomputers. They just fed in the parts and told it to make this thing.

Looks nicer (and easier) than the old one in our house. Links were not supplied!

I have a veissman boiler with the on demand hot water. It uses two zone one way valves. That said. When I had a problem with the valves this winter, rewiring them was not all that much fun. I'm not an hvac person. I'm a carpenter. Haha. I have since learned a lot about hvac since then.

Good idea - agree that the tracks and pads should be more beefy because a 200lb gorrilla(c) is going to overtighten those screws leading to dry joints

Clive: If it has a Honeywell label on it, it is shite. Honeywell brought out a 2 wire heating control system several years ago. It, when it was working, was excellent. However, they withdrew the product and all support for it. Last year, a friend's daughters house was fitted with such a system and it went down. She was faced with ripping the house to bits and replacing every valve and control in the house because nothing is compatable with Honeywell unsupported rubbish. A nightmare!

A simplification system to allow a novice to install a heating system safely, but still needs some 2-day Part-P Course-certified halfwit who probably couldn't tell Live from Neutral to certify it as safe... :P

LOVE JW!

JW is great and he only lives a mile away from me :)

Intro cracked me up.

Honeywell, can be pain in the bum on big projects

good unit but takes all the fun(and skill) into turning a terminal box into a neat wired center

I remember subscribing to John Wards channel when he had about 80 total subscribers... seems like a lifetime ago.

In the US, at least from my observation, the system is quite different. The valves and control logic runs on a 24V system, and each zone is controlled by an individual valve. Each thermostat will have both an on and off signal, and the valve will travel to the set position and then disconnect the motor. A signal wire will then run to the boiler from each valve.

Actually a normal-sized house here would not have a heating system with separate equipment to be wired by the installer here. I remember we had that decades ago, but today there would be just a single unit that contains all the stuff, and has a mains lead, a thermostat lead, gas in, cold water in, hot water out, and radiator out and -return. The unit does all the magic and is delivered from the factory without any wiring required. Internally these things usually no longer contain a 3-way valve but rather they use two separate circulation pumps, one for the radiator circuit and one for the hot-water circuit, and they are controlled by the microprocessor-based controller. The better ones have variable rate pumps, the cheap ones only run at full (fixed) rate. And of course the furnace itself is a condensing type which has modulated gas flow rate, which is adjusted by the thermostat. So the furnace tends to run all day in winter to keep the house temperature constant.

We have a Honeywell a/c heating thermostat. They may be marked, but didn't didn't slow down our maint. person from miswiring the a/c unit. I had to fix it- and I knew less about electronics than a chimp. I'm slowly learning electronics, tho.

This board seems like the perfect display model for Autorouter capabilities. If I had to design this and I would not want to put much effort into it, I would just let it sit with the Autorouter over night...

Love the "Installation should be carried out by a competent person" remark on the lid. Should go without saying I'd presume but I every now and then the obvious just needs to be spelled out in clear words without going "US dummy lawsuit insurance" à la "you cannot dry your pet by hooking it up to your heating system".

"Sector" gear.

Funnily enough I just changed one for my dad a couple of days ago, his was a honeywell but it looked nothing like that one inside. Bought a Corgi version instead at half the price and it was identical to the honeywell I removed.

At which load does the HOPI stop being useful? I recall, a long time ago, that you mentioned that at very low currents, the HOPI's reading was unreliable. TY

wow...that tiny circuit board must have taken forever to reverse engineer. . . :D

..... Honeywell an American company can be proud of their products.....

What's going to happen if you remove the diode? 🤔 Or the diode is not conducive?

On another subject. How do you contact you clive. Just fitted a lightwave dimmer used phillips lamps had the problem of glowing lamps but in. The past found having more than 12w of load sorted the problem. This time I went for the varilight glow fix can you do a video on the glow fix on why it works?

the manual overide valve lever is to enable bleeding thr air out of the system before powering up.

Good instructions. Although, someone will use twin and earth cabling and think, I dont have a green or yellow cable!! In my previous job as a maintenance manager in a care home, everything was branded Honeywell! So must be good right??

I love this channel, you have the same name as my father, who also happens to be an electrical engineer AND we're British too. The coincidences.

14:03 It's a quadrant gear.

You'd be surprised how many plumbers actually set houses on fire. The danger of combustion is when they're making copper connections with flux, soldier and a torch.

hi can i use this on a combi boiler with UFH manifold

The heating system you are describing sounds quite complex. In The Netherlands we normally just have one integrated gas-powered kettle that you simply connect to the radiators, hot water taps and thermostat (which is just a user control panel, all smarts are inside the kettle). These days it even contains the pump. Can you do a video about the complex heating system commonly used in the UK?

2:40 15:38 "one moment please" :)

Yeah those are the old style haha, rarely see them these days, can I send you a really cool electric radiator controller (remote control) Would love it to be clived to pieces so we can see what it is all about 😋

Surely a 3 way valve is a Plumber's term for an Apprentice ...

I enjoy where you refer to the yellow wire as being "Earth" color.

I heard somewhere that in the UK water is very low pressure and you need something to raise the pressure to general home use. Something to do with the ancient water pipes not being able to take the pressure.

3:54 hmm, I just looked away for a sec, and now all the text is umop apisdn.

In the early nineties I used to run a non market leading pcb design program called E-router I think. I ran it on a state of the art 286 computer that had two house brick sized ejectable disk cartridges of an enormous 1.2 megabytes each! It would have taken it several hours to plot out even that circuit board! Overnight was more the norm. It had a library of components and after compiling the circuit diagram it could emulate the circuit function, place the components and plot the tracks. All badly. Sadly the components we used never seemed to be in the library and if you entered them yourself it never really worked. Those were the days eh!

6:59 POWN 💥

Also how do I send you stuff for you to explore? I have a simple but very intriguing non electronic mechanism that you might love!

You could put a different color led in eavh side then we could see the valve position by the color

This would be a formidable place to have a stepper motor and a feedback potentiometer...... you could provide hot water at the rate you want, whenever you want, on demand, with ultra fine control....

I dont know about that...are plumbers also part P?

Good old Honeywell, currently keeping me cool as I watch this. (My big fan is a Honeywell)

That joke about jw tho 😂

You didn’t mention the key characteristic of synchronous motors, that the approach relies on. This is that the motor ‘freezes ‘ when DC is applied. Even the half wave DC from the single diode is enough to stop the motor and resist the return spring force. Very neat and simple :)

Thanks to this video I have determined my 3 port valve has an issue with the spring return, I have none! The motor works and the CH and HW can be heated etc but because there is no spring return anymore manual override can not be engaged and the valve can get in a configuration where it directs water the wrong way.

0:15 Who cares, your ramblings are gold

👍

zone and heating valves in north america usually operate at 24v....strange seeing that at 230v.

"Sector gear" is what I've usually heard those called. You see them in dial test indicators. That particular one could possibly be operating by running the sector gear to its end and then just letting it click against the pinion. That would be much preferable to stalling the motor.

Clive a nice explanation. Personally I prefer zone valves to mid position valves. Some years ago It took me a while to figure out how a mid zone valve worked. Small point I think you missed that the four resistors are in parallel?

JW here!!

Hello Jw here I second guessed what I clicked on 🤣

+bigclivedotcom What do you think about debugging these valves? Have a V4073A1088 here [classic honeywell valve], which has become sticky! -- will fail to "roll back' on the springs reliably [i.e. won't run hot water] -- even after oiling and poking in-situ gets stuck especially in the mid position (can often unstick by setting programmer CH-only and room-thermostat high, to cause valve-motor to go to full-extent, and THEN set to go back to hot-water-only "all in one go"). With head removed, can you reliably tell if the stickiness is in the actual valve itself by twibbling the actuating point by hand/tools? Ideally want to change the head-only and not do a full system drain-down until next summer at this point...