wireless heating thermostats - a warning

System

dada44 wrote: »

I do not know what honeywell uses.

.

The radiator controller is set for the following battery type:

• 2 alkaline cells 1.5 V; type LR6, AA, AM3

You can instead use the following batteries or accumulator cells:

• Lithium 1.5 V; type LR6, AA, AM3 • NiMH 1.2 V; type LR6, AA, AM3

I appreciate that the OP wasn't commenting on Honeywell's products; however, it would be wrong to condemn smart heating controls based on one person's experience with a particular manufacturer and a 5 year old system.

Smart heating controls make a lot of sense. To take up Cardew's point, my hall controller only controls the temperature in my hall. The rest of the rooms have individual temperatures based on a schedule or by individual selection on the valves. In homes where there are too many little fingers then individual valve temperature adjustments can be programmed out.

dada44

thanks for all your replies

so it seems that you guys are having good installations.

my wireless system is with underfloor heating so this may add to the troubles.

i personally would still install wired over wireless - if i had the choice - particularly with new builds. I do agree with having thermostats in every room, and i've seen this work very well in wired systems, and you can have thermostats which also display the temperature. Simply the reasons being - it keeps the wireless range uncluttered, and not interfering with your wifi. It may be better for your health given what is suspected about wifi. Is simpler to maintain as you don't worry so much about connection loss, or battery drain. And environmentally more friendly over the long term, as you are not using as many batteries. Say you have 4 or 5 thermostats in the house (or for a large house, possibly 15+ as i've seen) - and need to replace the batteries every 3 years. If you have hundreds of thousands of houses doing this - it can add up.

Either way - if you do go for wireless I cannot recommend Wirsbo, now called Uponor (though they may have improved the last 10 years)

GwylimT

I still don't understand why you find it difficult to find batteries? Where abouta do you live? Our very small post office sells them if I haven't bought in bulk online.

System

[QUOTE=dada44;69218099

i personally would still install wired over wireless - if i had the choice - particularly with new builds. I do agree with having thermostats in every room, and i've seen this work very well in wired systems, and you can have thermostats which also display the temperature. Simply the reasons being - it keeps the wireless range uncluttered, and not interfering with your wifi. It may be better for your health given what is suspected about wifi. Is simpler to maintain as you don't worry so much about connection loss, or battery drain. )[/QUOTE]

Modern smart heating controls avoid domestic wifi bands and use the 868Mhz band for range penetration through solid walls. I can buy 40 Duracell Plus batteries for £17. Replacing a timer, hall thermostat and conventional TRVs with wifi TRVs is saving me 20% pa in gas. More importantly, in a home with two senior citizens, we can have heat on in the rooms that we use without heating the rest of the house. I am not aware of any electronic TRVs that come with a hard-wired option. Happy to be proved wrong.

Richie-from-the-Boro

Just my comment

Its best viewed as what it is, it is not a heating control issue, its a computing issue. Control, security, speed and data bit interference affecting reliability are all data controller issues. Any computer control choice has to be hard wired as the first system of choice followed by the rest. Unfortunately we are where we are and wired is I agree difficult for most legacy boilers. The Irish joke about " I wouldn't start from here" comes to mind, I've often though that most of these new 'internet of things', flogged to anyone and everyone i.e. running your heating system in Macclesfield from your New York office is a nonsense toy.

There are many brands of boiler, each with different reliability issues and hard wired logic embedded into the controller on the boiler pcb. Having a new super-dooper phone based controller interfacing with a hard embedded set of instructions on the boiler motherboard is the equivalent of speaking different languages unable to properly interpret each others instruction set on 'one size fits all' multiple different computing platforms. So hard wired manufacturer specific controller 1st, then manufacturer specific wireless controller 2nd then its a turkey shoot as to which of the rest is able to pay for itself over what period of time, and that's the real first question, "what is the reality - what is the cost benefit payback period".

Cardew

Richie-from-the-Boro wrote: »

Just my comment

Its best viewed as what it is, it is not a heating control issue, its a computing issue. Control, security, speed and data bit interference affecting reliability are all data controller issues. Any computer control choice has to be hard wired as the first system of choice followed by the rest. Unfortunately we are where we are and wired is I agree difficult for most legacy boilers. The Irish joke about " I wouldn't start from here" comes to mind, I've often though that most of these new 'internet of things', flogged to anyone and everyone i.e. running your heating system in Macclesfield from your New York office is a nonsense toy.

There are many brands of boiler, each with different reliability issues and hard wired logic embedded into the controller on the boiler pcb. Having a new super-dooper phone based controller interfacing with a hard embedded set of instructions on the boiler motherboard is the equivalent of speaking different languages unable to properly interpret each others instruction set on 'one size fits all' multiple different computing platforms. So hard wired manufacturer specific controller 1st, then manufacturer specific wireless controller 2nd then its a turkey shoot as to which of the rest is able to pay for itself over what period of time, and that's the real first question, "what is the reality - what is the cost benefit payback period".

Whilst I understand the thrust of your post, are you not reading too much into the issue being discussed in this thread?

The issue is a simple case of having a fixed wired thermostat, or a wireless thermostat capable of being moved from room to room and thus, as stated above, 'have heat on in the rooms that we use without heating the rest of the house.'

P.S.
Do houses in Macclesfield have heating systems these days;)

alderpoint

Cardew wrote: »

heat on in the rooms that we use without heating the rest of the house[

If you have rooms in your house which you don't use, wouldn't it be cheaper to move to a smaller house??

Cardew

alderpoint wrote: »

If you have rooms in your house which you don't use, wouldn't it be cheaper to move to a smaller house??

Our Butler and the Head Footman would be horrified at such a suggestion.

teddysmum

We have had our wireless system, provided with the new combi, for 20 months and it's fine. It has a battery low warning .


We like the idea of not having it fixed (the old one wired one was in the hall) as the most important room temperature for us is the living room's. ( I am quite temperature sensitive (sometimes too warm and sometimes too cool), so having the unit within easy reach means it can be adjusted without leaving the room.)

System

alderpoint wrote: »

If you have rooms in your house which you don't use, wouldn't it be cheaper to move to a smaller house??

A fair question which I shall answer in the spirit that it was asked.

The simple answer is that from a MSEr perspective the sums do not add up when I look at the cost of heating my present home (£700 per year). Moreover, builders do not build properties suitable for older people: they can get a better RoI by building a house rather than a bungalow. If we could find a property, then the fees and stamp duty would be many times more than the savings that we might accrue from energy saving. I could add to that the fact that we know the area; we like our house; we have a good and caring GP etc etc.

To get back on topic. As we get less mobile with age, then wifi controls offer us greater control and better targeted heating. I don't have to scramble around bedrooms turning up TRVs when the family come to stay. "Zoning' is as much about convenience as it is savings: that said, my gas bill is down c.20% on what it was 2 years ago.