I’m looking into fixing the thermostats at home. The house is about 100 years old, with radiators and central a/c, and I want one thermostat that controls heating and cooling.

Thing is, from bitter experience I know that the basic programmable ones don’t do a good job of accounting for radiators – it takes a while to get the house up to temperature, and once there, the radiators keep giving out heat, pushing the temperature past what I want.
And I’ve also noticed thermostats tend to be in places that aren’t representative of the rest of the house – so the hallway is 18C, but the rest of the house is sweltering at 23C (in winter); or in summer the hallway’s 20C and the rest of the house is at 17C.
…and I reckon it’s good to have two-zone heating/ cooling, as the top floor tends to be hotter than downstairs.

Sooo… what thermostat combines all of these traits in one good looking form factor? Nest is allegedly good with radiators, for example; Ecobee has additional monitors for different rooms.

Experiences?

Edit: I also have a small dog that stays home most of the day, apart from when the walker stops by to take her out for a walk.

Fit TRVs to all the radiators bar the one in the hallway.

That’s where you site the programmable thermostat.

that stops the rads from overheating individual zones and the allows a simple programmable thermostat to run the show effectively.

I was idly looking into this recently as most of the thermostatic valves in our flat are knackered and the thermostat doesn’t actually talk to the boiler. We control our heating by physically turning the boiler on and off, which isn’t ideal!

You can get wireless controllable thermostatic radiator valves which communicate with a central thermostat. The boiler will only run if there is a requirement from one of more radiator for heat, and these can all have their own temperature and timing requirements. Seems the most efficient way of doing things, but up-front cost would need to be considered over long-term energy/cost savings.

Cheers, Rich

Honeywell Evohome – expensive but worth it for convenience, my gas bill is down 40% on last winter. You can start with just the controller pack and add wireless TRVs as you go.

Remote access through phones (Apple / Android / Windows etc). being able to tweak just one room is great.

As has been said, Honeywell is very clever and certainly the ‘best’ solution in that you can only run the boiler when a room actually needs heating BUT the radiator controllers aren’t cheap so depending on the size of your house you may not want to pay for them in all rooms which then diminishes how well it works.

As above, decent TRVs and a thermostat that you can move around (eg wireless) will do a decent job. Set the TRVs as desired and put the thermostat in a place that heats up slower than the rest of the rooms with TRVs (eg the hall which is what most people do) and if you get it right, all rooms will reach the desired temperature and then cut out via TRV while the hall will eventually warm up and the thermostat will then cut the heating.

I’ve just got a Hive which is basically that but also means I can control it away from home