Anyone using Hive radiator valves? We’re about to refit a radiator and thinking of fitting these to make better use of our heating. I know there are other brands available , but we have a couple of Hive products, so would like to stick with it.

We went mad and bought a house-worth when the boiler was changed. So far we are behind the curve for gas usage according to the bills and had a small surplus balance when going into the warmer weather. (Octopus wanted us to bung them more money as the surplus wasn’t big enough which we ignored as we’re not their bank).
You need all the radiators fitted with valves as you can then schedule rooms to be heated individually and let the valves control the boiler. Mrs S working from home during cold weather we had her office and the nearby toilet heated with downstairs on for lunch only.

You need to have 1 rad per zone not on a valve

We have them, useful as different days we need heat in different parts of the house (I work from home, so only heat that room when it’s just me).

Given the cost I’d be extremely surprised if they were financially sound, but nice to have anyway

@5lab that’s not correct if the valves are controlling the boiler. Note the bold bit, it’s very important. No valves calling for heat, no boiler fire. All my rads have a TRV from Hive on them and running for 6 months without a problem.

There’s also the Wundasmart system which might be a better bet in the long term, although slightly more expensive if you already have Hive.

Went full guns for it earlier in the year on the back of pending gas price rises. As others have said I don’t think it makes strict financial sense (payback will probably be a few years) but feels good having a a very flexible heating control system and our gas use definitely reduced over the last 3 months we had the heating on. Need to run a full 12 months before truly understanding the reduction in fuel consumption. Ability to zone up the house in multiple different configurations is great, especially as two of us work from home in a non regular fashion. Can recall any of these via a simple one click on the app (or siri etc.) No issues so far. Apart from the initial price!

Bear in mind that a lot of Hive stuff is permanently tied to the original owner which means you can’t take it with you if you move house.

I don’t think this applies to the valves, though given the price I’d be taking them with me if we moved!

@5lab that’s not correct if the valves are controlling the boiler. Note the bold bit, it’s very important. No valves calling for heat, no boiler fire. All my rads have a TRV from Hive on them and running for 6 months without a problem.

the trouble with that is there is lag between the valves and the central hive hub. I think the valves check in every ~5 minutes (to save power) and so if you tell your hub to turn on the rad in room x, the boiler will be called for heat immediately, yet the valve may only open 4 minutes later, putting un-necessary strain on the boiler and its pump.

Hive agree with this.. https://community.hivehome.com/s/article/Can-I-install-Hive-Radiator-Valves-on-all-my-radiators

Can recall any of these via a simple one click on the app (or siri etc.) No issues so far. Apart from the initial price!

the one thing I find frustrating is changing schedules around. My house has effectively got 3 or 4 different day profiles (me working from home, wife and family home. Me working from home, them out, normal weekend everyone in, everyone out) – but you can’t set the entire house (afaik) to a profile. So if someone’s work from home day changes from a tues to a weds, you have to go in and change each valve separately, rather than applying the setting to the whole house.

@5lab That’s not what I put, we don’t call for heat the valve does and the thermostat does not control the heating in that instance the TRV does (switched to schedule on the valves). The thermostat control reverts to on/off for the boiler in our set-up.

Your linked item doesn’t refer to a Hive stat but implies standard one which will require a non-TRV radiator somewhere in the circuit to prevent pump overload.

The only downer is that the valves can sometimes actuate when the heating is off and the room temperature is low but 20AA batteries annually is considerably cheaper than burning lots of extra gas unnecessarily.

but feels good having a a very flexible heating control system and our gas use definitely reduced over the last 3 months we had the heating on.

This is certainly what appeals.  If I am working from home, I would like to just keep my office on, and maybe an hour in the kitchen over lunch if its particularly cold.  With my study then off, and just downstairs and our bedroom (its a 4 floor terrace) warmed on an evening.  Looks like it might be worth it, even if the £££ don’t truly add it, it is a way of reducing demand on resources.

Exactly this. Most days WFH I’m ok without the heating in at all (my office is in the new bit of the house, well insulated) but my wife needs the heating on so good to hear just her office room. Works for us.

We’ve got them on most of our radiators (some still need TRV’s fitting), they’ve been good so far over the 18 months that we’ve had them. We’ve not gone as far as others here in that they’re for controlling room temperatures rather than controlling the boiler, so that’s on a separate schedule to the thermostats.

We found it really useful in the evening when you don’t want to bake the kids while they’re in bed but you want a warmer downstairs. Other than that it’s been more about having a reliable method of controlling room temperatures, the Hive system in general has been good for managing the heating & hot water, it’s also great to be able to turn stuff on and off remotely.

What is a pain is that sometimes the odd radiator valve will decide it need re-calibrating which is an inconvenience more than anything (although leads to the occasional cold room), on the whole it’s been very stable. As the hall doesn’t have a radiator we put the main thermostat in there as that’s what’s controlling the boiler, probably not the most efficient but it works for us.

Overall a smart system has been a great improvement on standard TRVs, I’d like to think that off the back of that we’ve used less gas although I’ve got no actual data to back that up.

the one thing I find frustrating is changing schedules around. My house has effectively got 3 or 4 different day profiles (me working from home, wife and family home. Me working from home, them out, normal weekend everyone in, everyone out) – but you can’t set the entire house (afaik) to a profile. So if someone’s work from home day changes from a tues to a weds, you have to go in and change each valve separately, rather than applying the setting to the whole house.

That’s not how I work it. I have one schedule set up for winter which is on in the morning for an hour, and then on in the evening for 3 hours, set at 19deg. This works as there is always somebody in bed needing to get up in the morning, and then nearly always people in the house making dinner, going to bed etc in the evening. Then have a few different shortcuts set up for during the day which are on my phones home screen such as “My office, 1hr boost”, “Her Office, 1hr boost”, “Both WFH Offices, 1hr”, “WFH +kitchen etc.” Just use the right one depending on who’s in.

I have nearly a whole house of them but I need to buy more for all the rads.
It’s been a bit of a learning curve on how to use them but I think I’ve got the hang of it now.
What works for us is heating the rooms we are in first thing and in the evening differently, which is obvious. However the times we are in our work rooms varies so I’ve set 4 time periods during the working day for each room which are default off. If you are working in it then set the temp to say 20c and it will heat that room to the temp until the end of that period then turn off. So for my work room the time period starts at 8am and finished at 11am. If I set it to heat at 8am (just turn temp up) then it will turn back off at 11am. That has the advantage that if I leave the room/house the rad will turn off even if I forget and won’t be heating until 6pm. If I stay in the room I probably won’t notice it’s getting cold for a while after 11am – and I might not notice at all. So even if it’s a cold day I might not put the heating back on until noon which has saved an hour of gas – or it might be that I don’t think it’s quite cold enough to warrant it so I’ll leave it off.
It’s a slight faff but it works better than the boost option for us and does mean the heating isn’t on at all if we aren’t in the house.

Not sure how much money it’s saving yet as we only had them on for a couple of months and we are still heating the dining kitchen as that doesn’t have a Hive TRV on it and also the hallway doesn’t which is a waste.

One thing I did notice is that if you have column rads you need to run the temp much higher to get the same room temp as column rad radiate more heat sideways than a standard modern rad. So we have a fancy column rad in our bathroom and I have to set that to 27c to get it to stay on. Not a massive problem you’ve just got to adjust the temps to the room – sticking at 21c for example for every room might not get the same temp in every room.