Active Thermostat controls

diesel100

Anyone here has any experience of using Nest or Hive wireless thermostat heating controls?


are they are good?

Procrastinator333

Not yet - but I have been researching them quite a bit. I do like the sound of them a lot. Very clever.

Check in detail exactly how they work. E.g. Nest, works based on sensors to know when you are away and when you come home. It also learns your regular patterns. But this can create wasted energy. Say you normally get home at 6 every day, but one night you go to a friends. Nest will have heated your house ready for your 6pm return. And likewise, if you make a one off trip out, it will sense you leave, turn off the heating, but then not turn it on again until you walk back through the door later - walking in to a cold house.

I think I actually prefer one called Tado. Probably the one I will get in the end. The difference here is that it all runs off smartphones. This does require every person in the house to have a smartphone. But it then works on the basis that once you are a preset distance from your home, it turns the heating down or off. And likewise, it doesn't matter if you have less of a pattern to your travels, as once you are say 1 mile from home, it turns the heating back on for your arrival.

Tado also checks the weather forecasts to adjust how much it fires the boiler, also learns how quickly your house heats and how quickly it losses heat.

Different systems will work better for different locations / families. But I'm pretty sure Tado is the one we will try. Post back here if you do go for one of them as I would be interested to hear your experiences.

lstar337

There are a few existing threads/topics on these here and in the energy forum. Might be best to do a search for Tado, Nest, Hive, etc.

Should get some good results of those keywords.

diesel100

thanks for feedback.
only thing with the Tado it has no local display or control buttons - all done via smart phone. good point about the Nest learning point, but I guess you could disable it remotely?

Procrastinator333

Yeah, with any of them you can over ride it with the various apps.

But they are not all the same and I think the different methods of smart control will suit different people.

bridgedino

Currently enjoying our hive. Love the ease of setting up timed schedules

Previously it involved hiring a rocket scientist to operate the digistat we had. Talk about an overly complicated piece of equipment.

Thumbs up from our house

PheoUK

I went with Tado, pleased so far. Don't need a display, got devices coming out of my ears. If I extend the home automation, I may get a cheap/2nd hand android tablet to act as a control mechanism.

getmore4less

We went with Owl to get the hot water water control.
Both wired but with network access
No displays and simple boost buttons

Tado seems a reasonable heating only solution especially when the offer(£50off) was on.

Heatmiser do a wi-fi based programmable stat

giraffe69

We switched to Hive in Feb. Much more controllable than previous system. Is saving energy. Controllable via thermostat, computer or smartphone. Smartphone app has improved over the last few months.

mavisangelica

We went with the Evohome system. Very expensive and haven't had chance to test it out properly as it was installed in August.
I already like the flexibility - the heating is switched off at the minute (there is an off setting) and this morning I was sat in the bathroom feeling cold so turned the radiator control up and radiator came on straight away. It will then go off at the next timed setting (I hope) even though the full system is off.

Edit: no it doesn't switch off at the next timed setting, when the system is set to off, the timed settings are disabled

diesel100

thanks for so many replies and feedback. I tend to switch off my phone at night so guess if I needed control during a cold night it would not be possible.