Hello,
I’m a long-time Aqara user and overall I’ve been satisfied with your products so far. That’s why I’m quite disappointed to write this message today.
I recently bought 10 Aqara W600 thermostatic radiator valves to upgrade my heating system. Eight of them are paired with Aqara W100 temperature sensors, all connected via Zigbee to an Aqara M3 hub. All devices are running the latest firmware (W600 version 0.0.0_1839).
After a few days of use, I have to say that I’m honestly surprised, worried and unhappy. To be very clear: in its current state, the system is unusable.
Pairing was already extremely painful. More than half of the devices (7 out of 10) failed during the first pairing attempt. In some cases the process gets stuck when switching from Thread to Zigbee, in others it blocks during hub pairing, and in several cases the valve remains stuck in calibration mode. When that happens, there is no way to recover, even after rebooting or removing the internal battery. The only solution is a factory reset and starting over. In practice, installing 10 valves took almost half a day.
Configuration through the app is also very unreliable. Changes made in the app are often not applied to the valve, and conversely, temperature changes made directly on the valve are not always reflected in the app. The interface itself is not intuitive. The smart schedule time slider is badly designed: after selecting a time range, you must wait around two seconds before validating, otherwise the wrong value is saved. Copying a day schedule to other days works randomly. Most importantly, smart schedules are never applied correctly. All my valves have the exact same schedule, with the same temperatures and time ranges, yet at a given moment they often end up in different states. For several days I manually forced a return to the smart schedule by setting a manual temperature and cancelling it. Eventually I gave up and set all valves to permanent manual mode, which obviously defeats the purpose of buying connected valves. I also had three valves where smart schedules were never saved at all, requiring a factory reset. Child lock is completely unreliable as well: I enabled it on all valves via the app, but in practice it disables itself on all of them after a few hours. Temperature source selection is also broken. Even when I explicitly select an external W100 sensor, the valve often continues using its internal sensor.
Actual heating behavior is just as bad. Some rooms have multiple radiators, all equipped with Aqara valves, same configuration, same W100 temperature source. Despite this, some radiators are fully closed while others are fully open. This looks like a badly tuned PID with strong overshoot and undershoot. In practice, it is very rare to see a valve in an intermediate position; they are almost always either fully open or fully closed. I tried everything to fix this: recalibration, forcing temperature updates from the W100 sensors every 10 minutes, nothing helps. The valves always diverge.
Right now, while it is –3°C outside, the house is under-heated in the morning. Beyond comfort issues, I am also worried about the impact on my heating system itself. When several valves randomly decide to close, the boiler keeps running with little or no effective load. I deliberately kept two radiators with manual valves, and those two now receive an abnormally high flow, clearly showing that the installation is becoming unbalanced. This behavior is not only inefficient but potentially harmful for the long-term health of the system.
I’ve seen on various forums that many users are experiencing similar issues, and that Aqara support mentions ongoing efforts to improve the situation. I sincerely hope a permanent and reliable solution will arrive soon. In my case, this represents close to 1000 euros invested in valves, temperature sensors, hub, Zigbee relays and accessories, which are currently almost completely useless.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this feedback will be taken seriously.
