Morning all,

Anyone using Nest or Hive heating controls?

Amazon have the hive on sale today, and I am tempted.

If you have, did you fit it yourself?

Cheers,

Pau

Nest.

It was fitted free of charge when they were first released in the uk.

It’s rather fit and forget as far as I’m concerned.

Hive here.

I got it for £129 from Amazon (just before the new model came out which seems to have had a largely cosmetic update though it is maybe more obvious what it’s doing if you look at the controller on the wall) including fitting which seemed a bargin as I was after a better controller anyway.

Fitting wasn’t difficult (I watched the guy do it) but that will depend on what you already have.

Happy with it though but it’s not as clever as the Nest as it doesn’t have the ‘learning’ side of things to it.

EDIT – top tip – when I got my Hive, it was only the model that offered heating and hot water that was on sale. I only needed heating (combi, on demand hot water) but reading up on it, there’s no real difference and the ‘hot water’ model works fine even if you don’t need to control that.

We’ve just had NEST fitted.
It looks lovely, and the user interface seems very straightforward.

I can’t comment of ‘what it does’ as i haven’t really had to change the temp. It does sense when you walk past it, which is pretty cool i suppose!

In a few weeks I’ll be able to see a graph of ‘function/temp’.

DrP

Got a link to the sale?

Have you got a link to the offer please?, it’s just showing at normal price to me.

nest user here.

inital problems were my router wasn’t compatible??? check on their site for the list, anyhoo since a change of router its been faultless.

great for turning off if wife has heating on when i’m nightshift

Just remember Nest wont control hot water if you have it, its purely for central heating, where as Hive will do both.

netatmo here, got it for £80ish on a amazon lightning sale.

dead simple to fit and worked flawlessly ever since.

My tap controls the hot water.. combi boiler!

DrP

We have the Hive controller, fitted when we had the combi boiler replaced in Jan this year.
Beyond the initial fitting and setting up the timing we’ve barely touched it. The app is handy for a heating boost if you can’t be arsed to walk the 20 feet or so to the wall stat, not much else to be honest. If it failed it wouldn’t be replaced like for like.
Oh, they send an email when the batteries are going.

The Tado offering also looks good.

We are changing the heating system fairly soon, so may fit zones (lounge / kitchen / bedrooms + bathrooms) and I’m looking at the different ‘intelligent’ heating systems.

Nest here, very nice but I ended up turning off the intelligent learning mode as it seemed that if wanted some extra heat on a Tuesday morning, it would then modify my heating to come on for weekday mornings…sort of a dumb learning mode!

It would probably work better now I’ve linked it to Google Now as it supposedly knows when we are travelling home and gets the heating sorted, or keeps it off when we are working late.

Nest here as well, I’ve also turned off the learning schedule for similar reasons to spooky – why does a supposedly intelligent controller only have a 7 day programmer, the Mrs works from home 2 days a month the self learning mode decides to put the heating on every Monday and Tuesday.
I’m also not convinced about the preheat function, great for getting home but I wish there was some way to say ‘i want the temp to be 18c @ 6:30 but do not come on before 5am’ during the colder weather sometimes the heating was coming on at 4am to hit target temp by 6:30, adjusting for target temp to be reached later stopped the heating coming on until after I was up on milder nights.

It is the mark 1 version- offer here – £97.99

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00NAWL1FS?ref_=gbsl_tit_l-1_5467_bba82713&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE#Ask

It would probably work better now I’ve linked it to Google Now as it supposedly knows when we are travelling home and gets the heating sorted, or keeps it off when we are working late.

DrP will look into this function!

DrP

EDIT – though our new conversion is so well insulated the thermostat hasn’t read below 20 thus far… will await winter!

i need to replace my ancient non-thermostat boiler so i’m gonna go with nest i think, as i already have nest detect and google everything else. and it seems to fit the bill for what i’m going to need.

The heating only one is £150

See my post above but if you’re talking about the hive then the heating+hot water one works fine for heating only. (It’s actually the same unit – IIRC it’s just got a slightly different mounting plate for part by the boiler)

It’s actually the same unit

Fair enough then.

Being lazy… how programmable is it?

My current Honeywell does:

7 programmes per day
Holiday Return ie it stays off for a predetermined number of days.
Boost- You set it to keep the current programme for up to an additional 24 hr period.

I’m also not convinced about the preheat function, great for getting home but I wish there was some way to say ‘i want the temp to be 18c @ 6:30 but do not come on before 5am’ during the colder weather sometimes the heating was coming on at 4am to hit target temp by 6:30, adjusting for target temp to be reached later stopped the heating coming on until after I was up on milder nights.

Just add a lower temp during the night and it won’t pre-heat until the time you want!

i.e. I want mine to be 20ºc at 8:00am, and not come on in the night, so I set mine to 9ºc at around 12:00am

Funky – for the hive, you can have either 4 or 6 slots/programs per day – I only use four though (two on, two “off” – actually you can set it to be on during these – mine’s at 7C so effectively off)

It has a holiday mode – I haven’t used it yet so you’ll need to check out exactly what that does.

Boost – set a temperature and a fixed time – eg heat the house to 22 for the next 30 mins. You can then adjust that if you choose during the boost to end it early, extend it or change the temperature.

EDIT – holiday mode – by the looks of it, you set a start and end date and a minimum temperature. Essentially it’s freezing protection. Or of course you could just set a new schedule if you were wanting to warm the house for a cat, etc. Setting a schedule is really very quick and easy as you can copy from one day to another.

Ladders – It will still start preheating to get the house to the 8am target of 20c…it can be annoying if you are a light sleeper as the colder the morning, the earlier the heating wakes me up!

Can you not set a phase for 8am at say 18 degrees (so that it doesn’t start too early) and then 20 degrees at say 9am?

If you can afford it, Honeywell Evohome better than both Nest and Hive. Though Hive 2.0 very impressive for a fit-and-forget solution, can be installed in less than 10 mins whereas Evohome will take half a day.

Was thinking about getting one of these (nest or hive) the other day, so am interested to hear the views above.

I think both these devices claim they have save money by being more intelligent about controlling the boiler, has anyone noticed any cost savings since having the devices installed?

or if no cost savings, is the house no warmer for longer, for the same cost?

It has to be said some of the stories above about the learning mode being less than intelligent do make them sound not much better than my existing 30 year old programmer though. I think this thread is putting me off them .

I think both these devices claim they have save money by being more intelligent about controlling the boiler

My experience says that there probably isn’t that much in it and my use of our log burner is more effective at keeping heating costs down. Bear in mind, though, that my house is centrally heated with bottled LPG, so burning £50 notes to stay warm would be cheaper….

It has to be said some of the stories above about the learning mode being less than intelligent

It (Nest) seemed fine to me, although IIRC ours was fitted in late spring, so it was a bit limited in what it was able to learn.

That said, the schedule facility means you can tweak and play a lot – way more than a standard programmable thermostat. I think we have around 4 temperatures a day Mon-Fri and similar (but different) at the weekends.

And it’s all controllable from your phone/tablet, so you can adjust it from bed or a thousand miles away (unless your MIL unplugs it when checking on your house while you’re on holiday… 🙄 ).

I tend not to use location services on my phone, but with a bit of IFTTT action you can link it up with all sorts of other stuff (too imaginative for me).

It’s very convenient, but I’m not convinced about cost savings (if any).

julian – the hive doesn’t learn – that’s the nest. The hive is an internet enabled thermostat/controller – it’s not smart like the nest but it sounds like maybe in some instances, it makes it easier to make it do just what you want.

I got mine installed in the spring so I can’t say whether it’ll save money (I’m not really expecting it to TBH) but it does at least stop the argument over how hot/cold the house is 🙂

I also quite like the ‘history’ function which shows the changes through the day/week/etc.

Nest – I did some work for the company that build Hive and I wouldn’t get one fitted to my home, especially now that BG bought them.

I’ve tried setting colder periods in the night, as far as I remember from last winter even if I set say 15c at 5 am the preheat overrode it.
The big problem with our house is the nest is on the upstairs landing where there’s no radiator so at night when the bedroom doors are shut it takes forever to heat up, hence the preheat coming on so early and the bedrooms getting too hot. I tried tricking it by sleeping with the doors open, which worked until we started closing them again, the nest recalibrated the preheat…..
I might try using tasker to set away mode until 6am to see if that tricks it.
I do like being able to turn the heating off from work if I’ve overridden it and its off schedule or turing it on from the supermarket car park on our way home.
Bills don’t seem to have changed much but the house maintained a much better temp when we were home.

Nest here – fitted it myself. We previously just had a timer on the boiler, so a pretty big improvement TBH.

Hardly have the log burner on these days as whenever we think about it the house is up to temperature anyway…

Nest – I did some work for the company that build Hive and I wouldn’t get one fitted to my home, especially now that BG bought them.

Can you explain why please?

That Honeywelll Evohome does look fantastic and the most logical solution. Couple that with a Veissmann boiler with external temperature sensor, probably is as efficient as you can get

I presume you already need your ch plumbing split into zones for every room for the evohome system to work though.

Edit: ahhh, no you don’t. Cool system but it seems very expensive.

Those that have nest…..we live in a house where the bathroom is still downstairs. Assuming we have it set to low overnight when we are asleep, if one of us goes to the loo in the middle of the night and walks past the nest will it suddenly think we’re awake and turn the heating on? Perhaps my view of it being an all seeing heating eye is a bit far fetched but if it did the above it would be very annoying.

If you can afford it, Honeywell Evohome better than both Nest and Hive. Though Hive 2.0 very impressive for a fit-and-forget solution, can be installed in less than 10 mins whereas Evohome will take half a day.

If it’s a like for like install then it will only take the same amount of time to install…

Evohome for me. They’ve updated it now so you don’t have a seperate wifi bridge, its all internal. Also depending on the boiler you have they also have an opentherm bridge, which will allow a compatable boiler to modulate with internal sensing.

The bonus to the evohome is you dont need to do the multi zoning straight away. I can be quite costly but you can get just the base pack first and hot water kit if you need it. Then add the hr92s afterwards.

Flux – so do you mean if the boiler has capability, it can sense that the room is say 10 deg and should work harder to raise it to 20 deg, than say if the room is already at 18 deg?

A modern efficient boiler can ‘idle’ to maintain temperature, rather than going flat out for 10 minutes three times an hour. I think the condensing/heat recovery from the flue works better like this. (also works more efficiently if you turn the temperature of the central heating water down, although too low and your rads won’t be able to heat the rooms properly)