Smart thermostat feedback

orrery

r2015 wrote: »

We have a totally predictable life schedule for 2 OAP's.I could give you our schedule for the next 6 months. Would you spend over £300 to save £20 or less a year? How much extra would that cost us just to save 5%? ...... And no internet no heating. It's bad enough when the electricity goes off and the heating stops but if the internet goes down?

I'm in a similar situation - retired. So, I spend some time away at family, and I make sure that the heating is on minimum when I'm away to save money, so Tado isn't going to save me anything. It will, however, mean that the heating will be on full when I get home so I don't have to suffer a cold house when I arrive home. It also means that I can make sure that the house is warm in the case of a snap freeze (frost stats are a poor and inefficient way of preventing a freeze, as different parts of the house cool at different rates).

Tado doesn't stop working if the Internet fails - it continues with its current cycle (I had an outage a couple of days ago and Tado spotted it and marked the log as Internet failure). I understand that in the case of internal wireless failure Tado defaults to always on (it turned on during the installation until all the parts were connected).

teabelly

Tado has saved us money and made the house warmer at the same time. We were using CH about 6 hours a day and it was miserably cold a lot of the time. For roughly the same gas cost the Tado keeps the house warm for 18 hours a day and it doesn't get as cold over night as it did either.

There was no thermostat before, just TRVs on the radiators. The heating was left on timed and a gas fire used in the evening when it was colder.

I bought it on the rental plan as I didn't want to cough up several hundred quid for something that might not work.

The location detection is useless though. It thinks we're out when we're in and vice versa. They claim to have fixed it but it is still a bit weird. That's the most annoying failing as half the reason to buy it was to manage times when you wanted to be out but didn't want to return to a freezing cold house or heat an empty one as normal.

alderpoint

I'm put off by the hype, e.g. "tado .. will pay for itself in under a year." - how can such a claim be 100% true?

Most people would be better off improving their insulation.

b33r

r2015 wrote: »

We have a totally predictable life schedule for 2 OAP's.

I could give you our schedule for the next 6 months.

That's what I said/meant, how predictable your schedule is dictates whether a remote system is a good investment (financially). If yours is predictable then it wouldn't save you as much money. I was saying I don't think the size of your property dictates it, the same applies if you live in a 1 bedroom flat or a mansion.

r2015 wrote: »

Would you spend over £300 to save £20 or less a year?

Manufacture said based on our lifestyle we would be lucky to save 5% on our gas bill of £500 a year plus standing charge ( and that was before we replaced our warm air heating with a combi and radiators) as our heating is on all day from 7:30 - 24:00 and in the very cold of winter 24 hours.

If it was just a financial decision no I wouldn't but it has many other benefits (most of which outweighed the potential for cost saving in my situation) plus technically the value of the system would be in your house when you come to sell it. Also our Hive system was ~£140 when i got it which included fitting and got rid of the nasty looking old wired thermostat above a door in the hall.

r2015 wrote: »

We would also have had to buy a smartphone to make it work and learn how to use it.

How much extra would that cost us just to save 5%?

I don't know about others but Hive you can control by text message, and from any device with an internet browser. And it's getting more difficult to buy a phone that isn't *smart* now anyway.

r2015 wrote: »

And no internet no heating.

It's bad enough when the electricity goes off and the heating stops but if the internet goes down?

It still works when/if your internet is down, the schedules still run etc. and can control it from the thermostat, just the remote features that wouldn't work.

System

OK - a few facts. The savings quoted by most smart control manufacturers are based on research undertaken by the University of Salford in a test house sited within a controlled environmental situation. The basic results were:

Test
Energy cost (24 hr)
Savings
1
No controls
£5.31
-
2
Room stat
£4.68
12%
3
Room stat + TRVs
£3.15
41%

Most manufacturers always quote Upto 'X'%. It follows that if a homeowner has basic controls and TRVs, then a smart control system is not going to produce anything near the %savings quoted.

A few more facts. My Evohome system cost over a £1000 for a 5 bedroomed modern detached house. My gas usage for the period 15 August 2014 to 14 August 2015 has fallen from 10400Kwhs to 8716KWhs - a gas usage saving of c.16% and an overall gas cost saving of 13%. In bill terms this equates to a saving of £50 per year on my current gas tariff.

However, this is not the whole story. We have a wood-burning stove and this year - based on my storage capacity - I bought only three bags of kiln-dried logs compared to 4 in previous years. Why - because rather than just sit around a stove in the afternoon we have had radiator heat wherever my wife and I were doing something: for example, her in the kitchen and me in the study. In truth then, the 'payback' has been about £150 per year which gives me about a 7 year ROI.

So, in sum, we are saving money from zoning with smart controls; we now have heat on whenever we want it, and we have the convenience of controlling the heating from a pre-programmed schedule, via individual room TRVs or from an iPhone/IPad.

Don't believe the hype. It is down to individuals to consider whether smart controls will work for them. For example, zoning is excellent for older people at home all day, or a young couple that just want to keep a baby's bedroom warm at night ( the system will even alert you if the room gets too hot or too cold). A simple smart thermostat is ideal for anyone who has an erratic lifestyle.

SuiDreams

I decided to go for a programmable thermostat instead of smart controls, there is only me in the property and my schedule doesn't change much. I've found its saved me money on heating bills against using the old dial thermostat and the house is seems to be at a much more comfortable temperature. I don't think a smart controller would save me anything (other then pennies) over the programmable thermostat which was much cheaper to purchase and easier to install.

b33r

Anyone interested then Hive 1 is £118.99 at Argos at the moment. Here