I’ve got BG coming out tomorrow to look at a possible boiler fault and I expect the usual sales pitch from the engineer about Hive.

Current set up is – newish condensing combi boiler providing hot water and heating to thermostatically controlled radiators, there’s also a central thermostat in the living room.

We don’t seem to be able to get the system to work in order to heat the ground floor throughout, the upper floor doesn’t want to be too warm as I expect the heat from downstairs to go up through the day/night.

Have tried whacking the control thermostat right up, leaving it all on all the time, off / on during set periods of the day..

Would Hive work better in that it’d give me better control,,or is it just a posh app that replicates what I have in a more woohoo 21st century way?

Anyone here got it, what are your experiences?

Looked at it too but at the time three were reportedly reliability issues with the app. Ended up installing a programmable thermostat which has been great, once set up I’ve never had to adjust so wouldn’t have neededto use the hive controls via the app anyway.

The hive won’t help with heating different parts of the house, use the radiator trv’s for that or look at zoning the system so you can heat the ground floor only.

Your living room is possibly going to be the warmest room in the house (people, tv in there) stat cuts down when it senses the temp in there, so the rest of the house goes cooler, so yeah the getting the stat out of there will help and with the hive stat you could move it around the house till you find where it works best for you which you can with most wireless stats but with hive you can use your laptop & smart phone to control the heating to which can be useful 😉

If the ground floor is not getting hot enough, then either the rads are too small, there are not enough of them downstairs, or it is badly balanced. (or you have little insulation / draughts, and the heat is going straight outside.
Presumably you have got the upstairs TRV’s turned right down to keep them cooler?

Start with a good balance of the system.
Then turn down the upstairs, then see how hotter the downstairs rads are.
Be aware that many ‘engineers’ at BG are not particularly bothered about quality of work, and wil suggest bigger rads or a different controller when balancing may be the way to sort it.

Don’t buy any new controllers, they wont sort this out, it is a plumbing problem.

Thanks for this,

Alanl I suspected the issue might be the size of the radiators downstairs, the one in the living room is a walloping great big double rad, in the other rooms they are single, and not particularly large. Yes, the TRVs upstairs are cranked down.

We’re getting cavity wall insulation fitted next week (for free!) and we already have double glazing and loft insulation. Hopefully with some fiddling around, and potentially new rads we’ll get it fixed. At least I know that Hive doesn’t appear to be the solution.

I’ll get a heating engineer around once British Gas have sorted the boiler

G

I’ve got it. Seems OK for the money. You can unclip the thermostat from the wall and use it upstairs on a little stand if you’re worried about a cold bedroom, but I don’t use the heating overnight anyway.

It’s an easy DIY fit. My recommendation though would be to go for the Honeywell EvoHome setup, which allows you multiple independent zones via wireless radiator stats.