Smart heating

scottishblondie

I'm after some personal recommendations for anyone who has gone down the route of "smart" heating in their homes.

I'm looking to initially get 2 or 3 smart TRVs to allow us to do a bit of zoning on the heating. I go around and turn all the bedroom radiators right down in the mornings, and then have to go and turn them up again in time to heat the rooms for bed. We need the heating on elsewhere in the house during the day for the grandparents to look after our child without freezing. It's not exactly onerous, but I'd prefer not to have to do it!

I'm also interested in getting a smart boiler controller to allow us to control the heating from our phones when away from home and also via our Amazon Echo. Hive is my front runner at the moment, but I'm open to others as well. We only have a combi boiler, so hot water control is not required.

TIA.

savemoney

I use the nest and love it and control it via Alexa and on the app mostly, easy to install didn't take heating engineer long at all, 30 mins tops. I really had it installed because boiler had to be moved and we hated the old controller couldn't figure out how to use it so turned heating on and off when we liked. This one the nest comes on, on schedule and if we could just tell Alex to turn nest up to a bit or down depending on how cold or hot we are sure others are similar though

missile

We have hive to manage two separate heating zones and hot water supply. One it is set up I rarely need to adjust it. I can operate via my phone.

I find the holiday function useful. I can set heating to front free for the duration, then come on for our return.

Another useful function; We can set hive to monitor location of my mobile and turn heating on when we are nearing home.

FreeBear

scottishblondie wrote: »

I'm after some personal recommendations for anyone who has gone down the route of "smart" heating in their homes.

Depends how technically minded you are... I installed Home Assistant a couple of months back in order to get better control over my heating. It started off as an exercise in getting a "smart" thermostat that could be set to different temperatures depending on the time of day or week on the cheap.
Now that I have the system running, I'm also logging not just temperatures, but also humidity and energy consumption - In the long term, it should enable me to adapt and reduce energy consumption. The graphs should also show how effective various home improvement (insulation, DG windows, etc) are.

Down side to packages like H.A. is the steep learning curve in setting it up. So what you save in terms of money over Hive & Nest, you spend in time configuring the system.

getmore4less

You have to change mindset when you go smart.

You no longer have heating on/off to a set temp.

What you do is have the heating on 24/7 and change the temperature at times you want.

The heating system should work out and adapt warm up and cool down periods.

With zones you can set each zone to different temp profiles.
Eg. Bedroom warm in the morning and evening, min sleeping temp and a potentially different min day temp even lower.

Options to override on temp basis like, boost for x hours, advance to next schedule early, holiday for x days etc. All useful features.

lindens

Following as we are in the market for the same. We have a normal boiler that heats water in the tank and radiators. All radiators have TRV fitted. There is a generic timer fitted near the boiler and a dial thermostat in the hall.
Can an electrician just fit me a hive/nest whichever i decide? we are not DIY people!

Shaun_of_the_Dead

lindens wrote: »

Following as we are in the market for the same. We have a normal boiler that heats water in the tank and radiators. All radiators have TRV fitted. There is a generic timer fitted near the boiler and a dial thermostat in the hall.
Can an electrician just fit me a hive/nest whichever i decide? we are not DIY people!

Easy job for an electrician or heating engineer.

ic

I have the Bosch Easy Control, with linked TRVs on seven of the nine radiators. It works well, configured to warm certain rooms during the morning, day and evenings - and differently again at the weekend. The only thing you do need to get used to is the whirring as the motors turn radiators on and off.

john.h

I looked into a few, got the Honeywell Evohome. It can control every radiator individually, and can also control each radiator with you phone if needed. It has been running a few years noe with no problems.

missile

lindens wrote: »

Can an electrician just fit me a hive/nest whichever i decide? we are not DIY people!

Price of hive includes fitting by an engineer. Watch how he does it and you will see it is easy :T

scottishblondie

Thanks for the thoughts, everyone.

Depends how technically minded you are...

Home Assistant looks interesting thanks, I'll look into it more. I'm pretty technical (software engineer by trade) and have started off on some home automation projects using SmartThings. I've installed some cheap temperature sensors to monitor what is going on, as my initial worry was that the baby was getting too cold overnight.