So looking to get a ‘smart’ thermostat – thinking Nest Thermostat E as I don’t want to replace the controller – just the stat.

Currently just have a rotary wall stat by the front door – not the best place for it, plus the Mrs can’t really reach/see what the temp is as she’s in a wheelchair, so having the remote stat/display would be useful.

Appreciate that it’s not as all singing and dancing as the normal Nest controller.

Anyone use one, is it worth it?

We’ve got the ‘all-singing, all-dancing’ Nest thermostat.

Erm, it looks nice.
Functionally though, it is a pile of turd.
We got it when we had the boiler replaced & I wish I’d just stuck with a ‘dumb’ controller with wireless thermostat like we had before.

The smart stuff doesn’t even work properly. E.g, if you leave the house it goes into eco mode after a certain time to save energy when no one is at home. When you return it is supposed to turn the heating back on. This is not ideal as you want the house to be warm when you get home, not turn on when you get home – but I can understand why this would be more difficult to achieve.
BUT – when we get home it doesn’t kick out of eco mode, even though it recognises that we are at home (the home/away records the event that we have come home). So, the house stays cold until we manually turn off eco mode.

Also, you don’t set an on/off program like a traditional thermostat. You just set house temperatures for times of the day which it follows.
All well & good, but if you stay up a bit later than usual & it switches to the night time temperature there is now way to tell it to provide an extra hour or two of heating before reverting to the program. Our old controller had an ‘extra hour’ button for heating that allowed you to click up to 3hrs of extra heating. That’s not possible with this, so you wind the thermostat temp up to where you want it & then it keeps that temp until the next temp change, so you have to remember to turn it back down when you go to bed.

Also – programming it is a pain. The old controller allowed you to copy days, so it was quick & easy. You can’t do that with this controller. Probably because it wants you to just let it ‘learn’ your habits & run in ‘learning mode’ but that was so bad we devised our own schedule. Learning mode just seemed to fill up with 10’s of temperature changes a day that bore no real resemblance to what we wanted and then after a while it just gave up making changes.

Anyway – I wouldn’t recommend one.

I echo the above, only smart feature we use is the app to turn it on when we’re away or heading home and even that was a ball ache as you have to have 2 apps if you want you AND wife to be able to do it both of which are very poorly designed.

I use a netatmo thermostat. Decent app control and temperature logging for a casual observer. Not that complicated to add schedules, boost or reduce temperature. Subscription free.

I have a full blown nest. It’s shit. I’ve turned the smart feature off as it’s leanring is very inefficent in my experience. All i used it for is a fancy programmable thermostat. Not being able to turn the heating ‘off’ is annoying – you end up just set the temp to like 10 degrees. It has a pretty stupid pre warming function too. They’ve also changed it so you can’t even remotely get your temp history via an API which used to be a cool feature.

Stumpy – if you use the phone app you can copy days pretty easily.

Take a look at the Wiser stuff. The controller is a straight swap if you have the standard backplate, and you can then buy as much of it as you want. Start with the roomstat only if you want.

I’ve left the old roomstat connected, just leave it at 30. Means I can take it all with me if we move. Placed the smart roomstat somewhere more central, and also got their TRVs on all the rads.

Def noticed our oil usage has reduced this year – but that’s the TRVs more than the smart stuff I reckon. We can now boost just a room rather than the whole house.

The smart stuff is it learns your system, makes adjustments depending on the weather, has eco mode and open window detection. Also dead handy as we are away quite a bit, turn the heating back up remotely before you get home and stuff.

In practice, you never use the roomstat – all via the phone app.

quite like our full fat nest.

As far as i can tell the nest E has all the functionality, just an easier install at the boiler end that you can DIY.

i dont disagree, The “smart learning” thing is a bit crap, and the preheat thing is annoying. The idea being rather than saying “turn the heating on at 5am, and aim for 18 degs, you say “i want it to be 18 degs at 7 am. The nest can look at local weather and other things to adjust how long that will take, but more often than not your heatings blaring away at 3 in the morning. ive turned that off.

The “home and away” thing needs a bit of work too. When i first used it, i looked at the house while i was on holiday and the heating was still chuffing away tyo itself. Turns out the thermostat has a motion detector and can use that as a factor to determine whether anyone is home. The Cats can whistle if they think im leaving the heating on for them. You can turn that off to, so it only looks at geofencing on my phone and it works well. If i “head out” the heating goes off, and comes back on when im heading home.

BUT

I like being able to adjust the settings from my phone. Its very lazy being able to nudge the heating up from the sofa without getting up

I like that the thermostat control is just a spinny wheel. You dont have to enter any programs or buttons to adjust the temperature, just turn it up like an old style bimetallic clicky thermostat.

I think the scheduling component of the app is fine.

In summary, it could be better, but its loads better than the Heatmiser crap that it replaced.
I went with Nest as all my other stuff is in the Google Ecosystem.

On my Nest app I can just go to the mode and set it to off for those saying you can’t just switch it off. Also using the app I can just copy a day’s schedule and paste it to another day etc. I have switched off the smart stuff and set the schedule to the temps I want so low temps at night to switch it off and then certain temps during the day, usually around 18/19 and this way we get up to a couple of hours max a day the heating is on during a colder day.

It’s not perfect by any means and ideally I would have a smart stat on each radiator but the make up of the house may prove difficult for signal coverage as no boosters seem to exist for those sort of heating systems.

Ewan

Stumpy – if you use the phone app you can copy days pretty easily.

wooksterbo
Also using the app I can just copy a day’s schedule and paste it to another day etc.

Ah, OK. I take that bit back. Just had a play with the app & pressing & holding the day itself gives you the option of copying that day. I didn’t think that functionality was there because the schedule window has a specific ‘copy week’ button at the bottom, so I assumed ‘copy day’ functionality would be the same, rather than a different method. Cheers.

I stand by all my other points though (until someone shows me I’ve just been doing them wrong too ;o) )
The annoying thing about the “heating not coming on when I come home” thing is that it worked when we first got it. But then it stopped working. I assume there has been some kind of update which has bollocksed it, because there are tons of people online saying exactly the same thing – i.e, it worked fine, and then one day it didn’t.

I’ve got the full Nest. I’m fairly happy with it, although I disabled the learning mode as it seemed keen to keep heating the house i.e every Thursday morning despite only requesting a boost on one occasion. Its not as keen to remove unused heating periods…you quickly end up with a cluttered schedule including the odd occasion it gets cranked up to 25c.

I set multiple ‘resets’ back to the background temperature so that if you want to boost the heating for an extra hour, it will turn back off later.

I think you can set it up via Google Home so if it thinks you are heading home it will start heating. What I would like is a phone widget to easily adjust the heating and see its status without navigating into the app.

Don’t get a nest, google took them over and destroyed all inter compatibility with other products.

You want a product that can interface with intelligent radiator valves so the values can make a call for heat in any room.

I have the ‘full’ Nest to and like others above think it’s pretty crap. I gave it 4 weeks before I gave up on it’s smart learning – I’d occasionally pop home from work at lunch time so it just ended up confused, the final straw as me waking up at 2am only to find the heating still on.

I just have it programmed now, it’s OK but a waste of money for just that. The only slightly useful thing about it is when it’s linked to Alexa/other smart device so I can just tell it to turn off/on or change the temperature – I can’t say I do this a whole lot though

I’ll 2nd the Wiser system. Replacing the controller is easier than replacing the thermostat if it’s got a standard backplate. Just slot the new one in. On the whole it’s been great, although I did have to buy a wiser smart plug which acts as a range extender as the TRVs furthest from the controller kept dropping off. We’ve got the wireless thermostat but I just use the app on my phone if I ever need to boost for an hour etc.

Pretty happy with our nest. It doesn’t do a lot and, as already mentioned, the smart learning is rubbish, but the basic operation is good. Comes on when were in, goes off when we’re out, can be overridden by phone from anywhere. That’s enough for me.

Wundasmart have a very good reputation in the underfloor heating world and do a similar system to Drayton. Only real advantage is that the thermostat screens are e-Ink so always visible, and you don’t have to suffer with Drayton’s build quality.

Although I have a vague feeling that Siemens owns Drayton now.