Away temperature on thermostat, keep it warm or cold?

gsmh

If you're talking geolocation with a nest thermostat, good luck! When I had one it worked correctly around 20% of the time. Often I'd check while at work and my boiler would be busy heating the house when it should have been off.

I use Tado which is 100% reliable. When geolocation clocks me as away from home, I have the heating off (save for frost protection) and it comes on when I enter my home location. I don't do pre-heating because my house doesn't lose that much heat when the boiler isn't on. When I get home it feels a little cold, but heats up very quickly. I'm not so fragile that I can't deal with that.

Astria

Depends what time of year it is, if it's in the spring/summer/autumn then I'll set the thermostat manually to 10c before I leave and 18c when I'm a few hours away from home as typically the temperature will never drop below that and the harm will warm up during the day anyway when the sun comes out. During winter, the heating comes on every night around midnight regardless of temperature stop things getting too cold and ensure damp doesn't settle in anywhere as there's only a single thermostat in the hall and all the doors are typically shut so can't determine if one room could be significantly colder than the others.

coffeehound

gsmh said:

I use Tado which is 100% reliable. When geolocation clocks me as away from home, I have the heating off (save for frost protection) and it comes on when I enter my home location. I don't do pre-heating because my house doesn't lose that much heat when the boiler isn't on. When I get home it feels a little cold, but heats up very quickly. I'm not so fragile that I can't deal with that.

So in fact you could have just a simple 10 quid thermostat and turn it down while you are out?

Astria

coffeehound said:

gsmh said:

I use Tado which is 100% reliable. When geolocation clocks me as away from home, I have the heating off (save for frost protection) and it comes on when I enter my home location. I don't do pre-heating because my house doesn't lose that much heat when the boiler isn't on. When I get home it feels a little cold, but heats up very quickly. I'm not so fragile that I can't deal with that.

So in fact you could have just a simple 10 quid thermostat and turn it down while you are out?

But then they'd have to remember to do that when they left and when they returned. The idea of smart things is that you shouldn't have to do those things.

coffeehound

Astria said:

But then they'd have to remember to do that when they left and when they returned. The idea of smart things is that you shouldn't have to do those things.

Fair point, but if that were the only functionality the clever t-stat was providing, I'd prefer occupancy sensors to detect when anyone's at home.  Inexpensive, simple, reliable, no need for wifi / bluetooth / web server whatnot or the potential security considerations mentioned above.

Unless the householder is genuinely someone who does not know which country they will be sleeping in that night, I suspect the main reason for fitting a £300 thermostat system is not for the functionality it provides