For the last 12 years I’ve been getting grief from my wife about our kitchen being the coldest room in the house. It’s a 50’s build with no floor insulation and old style double glazing and part of it (single storey breakfast room) is actually 9″ brick with 12yo french windows on two walls and a roof space that is difficult to insulate due to a low pitched roof.
It heats up OK’ish (a bit slowly in reality) but it loses heat quite quickly due to the above combination.
Short of adding internal insulation one option is to add more heat, but as the house is fairly big and we’re on oil (fine right now but who knows for how long) I’m not keen on heating everywhere just so the kitchen is warm.
So I’ve been looking at the Honeywell Evohome which would allow me to zone every room and control each radiator separately. Doing this would allow me to heat the kitchen in the mornings without pumping heat into the rooms we don’t use until the evening. Similarly the bedrooms could remain at a lower temperature until just before bed time.
It sounds great but would cost me in the region of £1k* to do properly so not something to be done without some serious consideration.

So who’s using an Evohome system and what are your thoughts?

* Although much less than the other option of installing an oil Aga!

My mates just fitted it and it seems like a great idea. Heats the bedrooms etc on a morning when you’re getting up but not rooms like the lounge etc and then heat the lounge/kitchen in time for getting in from work.

Really like the idea – may go down that route when we move. For the technology, I didn’t think it seemed too badly priced – about £50 per radiator + the control unit?

I heat the barn using the same principals as the Evo home, but not that system. It is a very sensible approach but only now becoming possible thanks to wireless TRVs to create the room by room zoning when retrofitted. Most zoning in older systems will be at best floor by floor.

UFH manifolds have an “innate” zoning, so lend themselves to this approach, but to make a “room” zone, I had to fit valve actuators to every room. Older houses with accessible diversion points between upstairs and downstairs circuits can also be controlled as two zones at v reasonable cost.

Im surprised there arent cheaper systems out there though.

It’s the 16 rad units that hurts (and that’s not fitting then to every rad!)

I’ve had EvoHome for the past 3 years or so. I got it for similar reasons as you – 250 year old cottage with little insulation and oil heating. I bought the head unit and boiler interface from a reputable supplier, and picked up most of the TRVs from ebay – a while back they kept coming up cheap, but I’m not sure about now… I remember they were cheaper if you bought the installer multipacks though…

I’m really really happy with it – being oil fired it’s hard to keep track of monthly bills, but I’m pretty sure it reduced our oil usage to pay for itself within 18 months to 2 years. It took a bit of setting up, figuring out how to pair the TRVs especially when there’s 2 rads in a room but once I’d sussed it out it’s been fine. One of the TRVs went mental a while back (refused to report back local temperature but would work to control the rad OK, then would randomly go beserk and set the temperature to the max), but other than that it’s been great…

The newer version looks a bit more advanced – you can have it internet connected / app controlled, the display is colour and the TRVs look a bit different but I think basically it’s the same setup…

Any questions let me know 🙂

I have it for similar reasons to the OP, installed 18 months ago, it works great, only heating the rooms being used, oil useage has definitely dropped a lot.
Also nice being able to control heating remotely – coming back to a cold house is a no-no as far as my better half is concerned.