We recently moved to a new house and it has a Seimens wireless thermostat and an old programmer that only switches the heating and water on twice a day which is a bit limiting, what is the smart heating controller of choice if I want to upgrade? Preferably I’d like to fit it myself.

The heating/hot water is a common Y plan system with a 3 port diverter valve and a hot tank.

Cheers

They all do, or claim to do, the same things so it doesn’t really matter. The only things you need to look out for are things like if you want it to work with the Apple Home app (some don’t) or if you want to also control things like light bulbs via the same app, so then you can look into the cost effectiveness of compatible light bulbs, CCTV, smoke alarms and other add on accessories.

I’m leaning to Nest purely because the thermostat looks the prettiest, which is as good a criteria to make your decision on as anything from what I can see.

I have a Nest v3 and am happy with it, easy to use and looks OK. That said I’ve turned off the learning mode as even after a couple of weeks it didn’t seem particularly smart (I guess didn’t help the weather was quite changeable at the time). It’s so easy to program though and my routine is pretty consistent so I don’t see manually setting things as a bad thing. Easy to control via Alexa to…

I actually bought it second hand off my plumber who was changing my boiler, he was switching to a Tado system as that can control individual TRVs on rads (he’s got a bigger house + family though so very different requirements to me).

Both can do the geofencing thing (along with Hive to I assume) so can detect when you’re in/near the house ( apart from I’ve got a Windows phone so can’t run the app but this feature wasn’t a big deal for me).

Thanks all.

I think I’m leaning towards Hive at the moment as it seems reasonable at 135 quid at Screwfix.

I’mnot too bothered about the stuff like it sensing when you’re near the house or whether it can warm each of my dogs individually, I just need more control of the heating and water as the current controller just has on/off twice a day.

I fear Skynet! 😂

I could be wrong but I’m fairly certain there’s a monthly subscription for hive? I’ve had a nest for 3 years and it’s virtually halfed my gas bill.

I don’t know about Hive but I was fancying getting the Tado system until I read the reviews about their subscription service. Looking at Honeywell EvoHome now, or maybe Drayton Wiser. Anyone got any experience of these?

I was looking into a Tado system and found out about Netatmo, similar as TADO can run individual radiator wireless trvs, no subscription plan and they also make indoor and outdoor security cameras you can link up. I was talking to the rep and a trade show last month who showed me it all on his phone linked back to his house in Yorkshire, I was in London. It was quite impressive really

You can buy tado outright without a subscription

@cheers_drive I’m assuming the subscription being talked about is the fairly recently introduced one for ‘Auto-Assist’, which is £2.99/month or £24.99/year.

I’d missed the introduction of this, having made a decision to go to Tado for our house.  It means that geo-fencing only works if I react to a notification pinging up on my phone, saying that it has detected that I’m away from my home, do I want to switch off the heating, or vice-versa, it has detected I’m getting close to home.  As I’m always driving at this point, it renders it pretty useless and annoying.

I’ve switched to controlling it through the Apple Homekit app, and that seems to work fine – I’ve just added the heating to an ‘Automation’ routine so that when the last person leaves the house, the heating is switched off, and on arrival it switches back on.  That works, however lacks the sophistication of warming up the house as it detects you getting closer to home, but so be it.

maybe Drayton Wiser. Anyone got any experience of these?

That’s what I’m leaning towards. No experience of it but reviews have been positive and the local heating guy fitted it in his own house (kids at school together – topics that come up in the school playground…) which I take as a positive.

Yet to move into the new house but it’ll be one of the first things we do. Large, old house so we’re especially keen on the individual TRVs on radiators.

Netetamo sounds similar, haven’t heard of that so will take a look.

I just need more control of the heating and water as the current controller just has on/off twice a day.

Our (dumb) new controller and thermostat has upto 24 time zones a day, in 10 min blocks, at an temp you like. Cost £35. In addition, I can turn in on / up / off in person using one button.

Do you *need* all the clever functions and extra cost?

I’ve got the Drayton Wiser for our CH (we’ve got a combi)

Very impressed – very simple to install/set up and then very easy to zone the whole house with the rad TRVs.  That is way more useful than geolocation on/off IMO.

E.g I’ve got it set up so the downstairs is heated first when we come in, then the bedrooms come on for a bit sometime later.  Attic/spare room has its own smart TRV/zone too so we can easily control that just for when we have folk visiting.

 Looking at Honeywell EvoHome now, or maybe Drayton Wiser. Anyone got any experience of these?

Evohome here. Honeywell have been doing zoned systems for 15 years and that maturity counts for a lot, others have only come in with zoned systems in the last 12-18 months. Drayton wiser looks interesting and has some functions that Evohome doesn’t. I use IFTTT to turn off/on my heating, but have been having issues with delay since changing phone.

Drayton Wiser system being fitted end of the month. 2 Zone heating system so need a sparky to do some wiring changes.

Fair amount of research done, Evohome was edging it at one point, price of TRVs & additional kit made it a bit on the expensive side.

Bought it from Wolseley (Plumb Center), you get 10% off if you subscribe to their newsletter.

Update to follow.

Another question – I fitted an external temperature sensor to our new boiler, plumber was ‘meh’ about it, yet in Europe they seem the norm. To me it also makes sense that a boiler can make temperature measurements part of the information it has about how/when to fire up etc.

We had boiler 6 months before, and it noticeably changed when the boiler starts at time and saved about 10% off the bills in the following 18 months compared to first 6 months.

Is some of the saving via ‘cleverness’, not just better sensing like this?

If so, do these smart systems have more sensors?

MOAB is your outside temp sensor working with opentherm controlling the boiler? As I understand it, it intelligently controls the water temp going thru your rads. Evohome has a bolt on opentherm controller but it was all getting expensive already and I only have a smallish house, so just put the boiler rad water temp in super efficiency mode, which I assumed more or less what opentherm would be doing.

BTW these smart systems are for smart in a different way, turning the boiler off when you leave home, turning it on 15 mins before you get home etc. some try to learn your routine, some work on location (of your phone) some just give you remote access via your phone etc etc they’re all a bit different, but essentially for more control of the boiler on/off switch (rather than actual boiler efficiency).

The outdoor temperature sensor, can these be linked up to a Nest Thermostat? I know the Netatmo one can link up to the weather station they make. Nest looks much nicer though in my opinion.

MOAB actually, Evohome does have an optimisation function where it learns how early it needs to turn the boiler on to achieve a set temp by a set time (and in reverse, so it learns how quickly the room cools and therefore how early it can turn the boiler off). I suspect the an outside temp sensor would help in that decision. I think they can also work with operntherm units as I said above, what is yours actually being used for?

Tado uses weather conditions/forecast from the internet to influence the heating decisions rather than have a sensor which seems a sensible approach for a connected device to me.

I’m also looking at replacing the old 1 day controller (ST699) for something a bit more flexible.. smart features would be nice but not essential.

I was leaning towards the Drayton Wiser but have just spotted the Hive system (with or without hot water) is now £108.99 with a free Echo Dot. There seems to be a bit of debate in the questions as to whether it comes with the hub or not (older responses say no, newer responses say yes) but it’s free returns so will give it a try and see..

Interesting frogstomp, where are they advertising that?

A few on the market use weather forecast information too, but not sure that is a positive given how inaccurate weather forecasts are…50% accuracy rate at best. The number of rides I’ve not planned due to the forecast when its turned out to be a perfectly pleasant day so not sure I’d want my central heating system being influenced by it.

I got a Netatmo with my new boiler. It’s been pretty good so far and I’d recommend it. It’s learned the thermal latency of my house and uses some clever algorithms to switch on the heating at just the right time to get it to the temp i want as per my schedule. It’s linked into Google Home, so I can ask it to raise/lower the temp by voice command (if that’s your thing).  The app is pretty good and does some nice graphs to show you how the temp varies and when the boiler was on/off.

I did have to experiment a bit with where I placed the sensor unit, so as to have the whole house at the temp I wanted and then played around with the (non-smart) TRVs to get the rooms right (i.e. bedrooms cooler). I’m looking at getting a couple of Netatmo TRVs to give a bit more control.

spursn17 they’re here. Mine came today and did include the hub etc.

Bumping for later as we are just moving home and I will be needing to put a new system in. My own thoughts are moving to EvoHome.

In our current home the boiler is linked to an external temperature sensor. The boiler definitely doesn’t work as hard or get as hot when it’s warmer.

I don’t know how much this has saved us as it was installed when we bought the house. If I’m honest I think there must have been a setting on the boiler that needed tweaking too. In the region 5-10 degrees external temp the house can struggle to warm up quickly to the correct temp. 3 deg or less and the boiler works very quickly and produces lots of heat.

I wouldn’t trust anything that links to a weather forecast!

We’ve got standard wall thermostats for 2 zone hesting. I’m going to cheap out and remove the themostat and replace each one with a WiFi relay. That gives me the ability to turn it on/off via an app or controller and then put a temp sensor in each of the rooms. Each room has a standard trv, so if any room drops below the set temperature then the relay switches on the heating until up to temp. This does rely on the rad trvs closing down the rooms that are already at temperature but should cost around £80 all in to get a temp sensor in every room to control the heating

I’ve just ordered a hive and hot water kit from currys in the sale at £115 via quidco which have 15% cash back with currys at the moment. I couldn’t see it any cheaper.

I just need to find someone to install it now

Just installed my Hive.. pretty straightforward.

Also received an email from Amazon today for a £5 refund / credit as they are now including a v3 Echo Dot (rather than the previous v2 included).

Go for Hive direct from BG as their sale has the Hive without hub at £74.25 with the Dot.

With the hub it’s £99

Anyone considering Evo home should also look at Heat Genius.

If you like playing with electronics you can build a basic WiFi connected smart controller with <<£10 worth of parts.  Obviously only worth it if you enjoy these sort of projects or have specific feature requirements.  I had a bash last year if you want “inspiration” 🙂 (outdated write up: https://peter.windridge.org.uk/home/playing-with-cheap-iot-devices ).  I also got a Chinese controller (Hysen HY02B05H)- worked fine but ended up reverse engineering it so I could interface with other stuff.

Quick question….

I’m not interested in controlling my heating away from home etc and no hot water to worry about as it’s a combi but do any of these smart controllers/apps allow for a custom “week” length? 7 day timers are no good as we work a 10 day shift cycle.

Or do they have a very simple to set next on time that I could set when I set my alarm?

Just occasionally it would probably make it easier to get to for work if it was already warm….

They seem to be fully customisable against a daily calendar. So you set the times you want your home to be warm, the system susses out the temperature lag and decides how far in advance to turn on your heating so it is upto temp at the time you want it to be, so yes, I think something like this would be a standard feature.

But I used to think I’d not benefit from one of these systems because we have a pretty set weekly routine so a normal timer can be programmed to closely suit our heating needs, but when I really looked at how often we’d be slightly late back, pop our during a heating cycle and especially at weekends were either out all day…or in all day, I found that there was still alot of scope for optimising when the system was on. And the apps are very easy, so to just tell the system you’re on your way home so it can fire up takes a split second and can avoid having the system on needlessly for a few hours when you’re out, or getting back from work later, or even earlier than possible.

We’re doing some work on the house next year, so thinking of going for a Nest. Our schedule changes a lot each week, so some ‘smartness’ should benefit us.

We’re doing some work on the house next year, so thinking of going for a Nest. Our schedule changes a lot each week, so some ‘smartness’ should benefit us.

If your routine is completely random and you want the heating off if no one is in the house, you should make use of IFTTT app or Tado system might be a better bet if there is more than one of you coming and going randomly (it works on phone location and can make decisions based on multiple phones and their location ie if someone leaves the house but someone else is still there, then it won’t turn the heating off, IFTTT probably would. I’ve no direct experience of Tado BTW.

It’s not that random – we’re both teachers so there are weeks when we’re around during the daytime on weekdays and others where we’re not.

They seem to be fully customisable against a daily calendar.

You can programme 7 day schedules on Hive…but you can’t customise it to 10 days that I’v’e found (only fitted on the weekend though)

I don’t think you can do anything other than a 7-day week in the Hive app / settings. However, you could probably set something up using IFTTT (which is supported).

Anyone considering Evo home should also look at Heat Genius.

Ive just costed up both systems, and its scary !

Both within £200 of each other, but Heat Genius comes out at £1,500 all in (big gulp) .  Is it ever going to repay itself, or give advantages of just any internet enabled thermostat controller for £200 ?!?

The Genius website isnt great to see what you need/get and what it can actually do, but for the money I would get 4 electric sockets randomly in the house that could be controlled by the system (ie switch lamps on & off etc).  Also in theory it could be used as a basic intruder system, texting if someone sets off a motion sensor in the house. It can detect when near home and switch the heating on, uses weather data (god knows how because there are no weather stations near by).  This is all stuff evo can not do.

I am also concerned that they might not be around in 10 yrs time when they have gone bust and I have gadgets that can no longer replace/maintain.

But still in some ways the system feels more compelling than EvoHome

Edit: Just googled and it appears EvoHome may be IFTTT and therefore will switch heating on when nearing home etc?