Smart Thermostats/Full Heating Control Options

gsmh

I have a Tado smart thermostat. One thing to bear in mind - modern boilers modulate. This means if your house need only, say. a degree or two to bring it up to temperature the boiler will work at a lower level to achieve that. The old way way meant that the boiler was either on (full power) or off and the thermostat was effectively a simple on/off switch.

Many boilers use a technology called OpenTherm which most smart thermostats can work with and you will get modulation. Vaillant, however, uses its own technology, referred to as eBUS. Only Tado, or Vaillant's own controllers, work with eBUS. If you have Nest or Hive your Vaillant will revert to the older on/off protocol. There is a mod where the Vaillant boiler can be fitted with an OpenTherm controller from Vaillant Netherlands (where it is mandatory for all boilers to use OpenTherm), but this will invalidate any UK warranty - even though it is a Vaillant product.

Having had experience with Smart thermostats I would tend to recommend a smart thermostat, like Tado, in the living area and basic thermostatic valves on the radiators in bedrooms, studies and suchlike. Anything more is overkill IMO. I've used Tado for 6 years and especially love the 100% reliable auto home/away detection. I've working with Next and I would say that 80% of the time it didn't correctly detect when I was away from home. Nest was a bug-fest TBH. Tado is a fit-and-forget system once it has been set up. It doesn't need continually fiddling with but does its thing in the background.

Reed_Richards

gsmh said:

One thing to bear in mind - modern boilers modulate. This means if your house need only, say. a degree or two to bring it up to temperature the boiler will work at a lower level to achieve that. ..

Modern gas boilers modulate, oil boilers do not.  But the ability to modulate the output according to the difference between the room temperature and the set temperature is generally referred to as "load compensation".  I don't know enough about the OpenTherm standard to know if all OpenTherm boilers can do load compensation.  Boilers can also modulate according to the outside temperature, which is termed "weather compensation". 

gsmh

Reed_Richards said:

Modern gas boilers modulate, oil boilers do not.  But the ability to modulate the output according to the difference between the room temperature and the set temperature is generally referred to as "load compensation".  I don't know enough about the OpenTherm standard to know if all OpenTherm boilers can do load compensation.  Boilers can also modulate according to the outside temperature, which is termed "weather compensation". 

Sorry, I made the assumption we were talking about gas boilers. Tado absolutely does weather compensation.