Hey all

As ever STW is a wealth of info.

I stumbled across some old threads on smart heating from a couple of years ago, but wondering if there is any up to date advice.

Currently we have a Baxi combi with Honeywell thermostat on a single zone – 8 rads in total.

We’ve got an old 1930s semi with a large kitchen extension, since moving in over the past year I’ve done loads of work chasing down drafts throughout the house but its still a cold house.

With us working more from home I’m interested in getting move to a multi zone set up to make the house more comfortable particularly for my partner who’s home based for the foreeseeable future.

Obvious choice seems to be EvoHome particularly with the wiring already done, lots of positive feedback on it but wondering if there is anything else we should consider?

Few threads on this recently. I went with Drayton Wiser. There’s also Tado which has lots of clever features but is cloud only.

Interesting I’ve seen a couple of other people mention the Drayton Wiser.

What drove your decision was it price or other features when compared to something like the EvoHome?

I use Heatmiser for wireless control of a 3 Zone system. Easy to install & great technical support & advice too. They were the only multizone option at the time I installed so I haven’t compared to others subsequently available.

I started a thread a few weeks ago. https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/tado-smart-heating-users/

I went for the Tado in the end. All in with the starter pack inc hot water, 2 extra thermostats and 8 radiator PRVs

It’s good, but has some flaws. Installation is very good. They send you bespoke instructions taking into account the kits already in place that needs uninstalling and your boiler. Mine took a good few days to come through as none standards and put together by an actual human but they worked perfectly.

Tado requires a internet bridge which everything else is connected to over it’s own wifi network. It’s not brilliant tbh. My house is not small but it’s no mansion and all the internal walls are flimsy. A dozen times a day it loses contact with a radiator or a thermostat. It keeps on working in this state – you just can’t adjust anything and can’t see the temperatures remotely

The early start feature is meant to work out how long it needs to warm up a room using the temperature and the weather. It doesn’t – it’s rubbish. I’ve turned it off in all rooms now.

The geofencing could be cleverer. If the only person to use a specific room (like a bedroom or a home office) is out you’d have thought there would be a feature to turn off those rooms and leave the common areas on. But no, it’s an all or nothing feature – all registered phones need to be offsite to go into away mode. Not currently a biggie in lockdown mind.

Having said all that I do like it. Warming up just the areas needed makes so much sense. Currently in office and the wife in her’s – the rest of the house is Baltic. Tonight when the stove in warms the heart of the house right up the bedroom would have been freezing but now I’ve got it programmed to put the temperature up a few degrees for when we go to bed ad drop it down a little when we are asleep.

currently -7 outside and I’m glad I got it done when I did.

Yep currently sat in my office shivering until the heating comes on at 5PM! I blame my yorkshire heritage!

To be honest the multizone systems makes a lot of sense for us, we’ve got more rooms than people and have fairly predictable patterns of usage of the rooms so it would be a lot more flexible for us, our kitchen dinner is pretty large and is a struggle to get heated well in the depths of winter which is frustrating as we spend a lot of time in there.

Initially I’d been swayed with the EvoHome thinking it would be a fairly straight swap, that said the Drayton Wiser does look a bit less intrusive than the EvoHome controller and TRVs

We considered both the Dryton system and EvoHome. Now had the Honeywell EvoHome installed for a while (possibly 12 months?) and no complaints. 1870’s detached set up with 9 zones with only the bathroom and downstairs WC not zoned.

Works very well for us. Bought with aim of keeping house at a more comfortable temperature without going nuts with the heating being on all the time. Didn’t live in the house long enough beforehand to have a full idea of pre-smart heating energy costs, but it’s certainly more comfortable now than before. App is very occasionally flaky but generally very easy to use.

What drove your decision was it price or other features when compared to something like the EvoHome?

EvoHome wasn’t even on my radar tbh. Main criteria (along with easy DIY installation) was integration with the home automation server I’m running (Home Assistant). You CAN do it with Evohome, but it’s a bit of a bodge, whereas DW works great! Also I wanted everything to be locally controlled rather than cloud-based, from the research I did only DW really fit the bill (saw a couple of recs on here for it which is how it first came to my attention!) Got a deal on a starter kit from Amazon, then after I’d got it setup and saw it was going to do what a wanted bought TRVs for the rest of the house when they reduced them again on BF last year!

Can’t fault it, no WiFi issues even before I upgraded my Wifi setup (fairly small, open house though) although haven’t used any other system to compare it with! Probably similar installation to other systems, TRVs are a straight swap, in theory the controller (which needs to be mains wired) is a straight swap if your existing one uses the standard mounting bracket… mine didn’t, but didn’t make it a massively harder job.

TBH any multi-zone system using smart TRVs is going to work fine in the sense that it will do what you want, obviously they are all slightly different in the features they offer.

Some people on the home-automation groups have accomplished it quite cheaply by buying Chinese smart TRVs e.g. Tuya and then using a software solution to control them. Apparently works quite well, I was keen on having a standalone system though that would still work even if my home server went offline!

Doesn’t mater as they all essentially do the same thing. Just get whatever you like the look of the best and what you can get a good deal on or fits to your budget.

Ive been using EvoHome for about 2 years now.

Pros:

Being able to control each room – great for working from home – son in one room, me in another, just those rads on in the house.

Remote control – just like all the systems.

Cons:

Expensive

Cold rooms – Because you are not wasting heating rooms, the downside is that when you do want them hot the air temp is correct but things in the room are not warm to the touch etc ie beds are cold.
Ease of Use – I use the phone app 99% of the time its is ok but when doesnt offer the range of flexibility you would like to do different patterns ie its 2 sets patterns of manual override which is annoying at times.

Stability – The last 6 months mine has become more unstable ie weird things happening like rads not turning on when they should be, in fact the whole system not being on when it should be. There have been multiple periods of time when the system has been down for maintenance too.

No external temp sensor – This would transform it for me. It gets weather data from an external link, and the data it pulls for us is weather 5 miles away with a very different climate, an external temp sensor would be much better.

Definitely I wouldn’t go back to individual manual TRV’s. But for the money EvoHome costs I think it currently has issues.

but things in the room are not warm to the touch etc ie beds are cold.

I have literally never even thought about this 😂 Electric blanket on a timer if it’s a massive problem?

There have been multiple periods of time when the system has been down for maintenance too.

is that because it’s internet only & the cloud service is offline?

zilog6128 – Thats not quite the point. Historically with a wall thermostat the house may for example had the heating switch on at 5pm in the evening – every room at 20 deg. By bed time the bedroom is nice and warm, and the walls, bed etc have absorbed some of that heat. At the moment our bedroom heating comes on at 9:40pm and the room is heated to 19deg by 10pm when it then switches off. The air temp is warm, but the room itself is cold, so it all cools down quicker too.

So you save money by installing a smart system, but ironically you then feel cooler so either put it on for longer to heat the room, or buy an electric blanket which again defeats the object. Its just a small quirk of how it works. Pros/Cons

You can use the system controller when the system the internet service is down for maintenance, but most of the maintenance happens early morning or evening when you dont really want to be getting out of bed!

The maintenance thing was more that for the first year of ownership there was very little maintenance at the moment it is very frequent, which to me hints there are problems they are trying to sort.

We upgraded to Hive this year thanks to the sales bringing the cost down. Installation took all of 5 minutes for the controller and a good 60 seconds per TRV. App works well and everything stays connected to the web, but should the internet vapourise it’ll still work as it all talks to itself.
Only issue thus far is the lounge TRV keeps wanting to calibrate, not noticed that it’s impacted the use of the radiator though.

It’s a single zone system but smart TRV’s are a revelation! Also handy to control heating & water when we’re out and about – or at least it was when we were able to do such things.

Awesome stuff – lots of really good feedback to mull over.

Probably erring toward the Drayton wiser kit based on aesthetics and price.

Also this thread https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/smart-thermostat-opinions/#post-11648566 where I recommend giving Netatmo a miss. Even more so now due to Brexit making Return-to-base support in France even more comex.

So you save money by installing a smart system, but ironically you then feel cooler so either put it on for longer to heat the room, or buy an electric blanket which again defeats the object. Its just a small quirk of how it works. Pros/Cons

The heatmiser thermostates have a learning fucntion, and i believe a lot of others do that monitor the heating and colling time and will adjust boiler outputs to compensate. Not sure if you can get TRV’s to do that, but if you can then you need the boiler output to be over-ridden by the new software if you’ve kept an old control unit.

I say this from experience of having half a Vaillant system (rads upstairs) with heaatmiser system downstairs (UFH) – it required 4 different controllers to tell the boiler what to do and how to over-ride it’s default which is always DHW and CH to rads..

Doesn’t mater as they all essentially do the same thing.

True, but the USP of Tado is def something others don’t quite have and more cloud based than the others. You have to pay an extra monthly subscription for it tho, I believe.

is that because it’s internet only & the cloud service is offline?

Evohome is not internet only, you can control it by various methods including a physical controller in your lounge, hall or kitchen like a normal heating system. What FunkyDunc is on about is basically they have a phone app which communicates with servers which give you remote access to your home controller from you phone (or laptop). Sometimes it’s down for maintenance so you lose remote access for an hour or so. All the others will do the same I expect from time to time, but your central heating still works in all cases. I had something similar to funkydunc with the central heating not coming on, but it turned out to be the boiler microswitch not evohome and it’s fixed now. I’ve found evohome to be pretty flawless. I suppose the only negative I can think of is it’s not quite as sexy as some others.

The maintenance thing was more that for the first year of ownership there was very little maintenance at the moment it is very frequent, which to me hints there are problems they are trying to sort.

I haven’t noticed this at all, but that could be to do with us using the system in different ways.

I am a big fan of my Tado system but have spent far too long in the past writing about it here – I’m sure you can find the threads! If I was buying now I’d definitely look in detail at the others in more detail as previously they were either non-existent or clearly inferior but that’s not the case now.

The geofencing could be cleverer. If the only person to use a specific room (like a bedroom or a home office) is out you’d have thought there would be a feature to turn off those rooms and leave the common areas on. But no, it’s an all or nothing feature – all registered phones need to be offsite to go into away mode. Not currently a biggie in lockdown mind.

It could be worse – I’m sure I read recently that with one of the other systems (Wiser?) if ANY registered phones leave then it goes into Away mode – which seems so utterly ridiculous that I am sure someone will tell me that is wrong!

I have a Wiser setup.

Wiser doesn’t do geofencing natively, you’d have to do it through IFTTT. I’ve only had mine since November and we’ve barely left the house so not an issue for us.

IMO Wiser has the nicest looking TRVs by far. The system can also be used with Home Assistant (you can even communicate with the TRVs directly via Zigbee if you wanted) so no worries if Drayton go bust/stop supporting it.

Things that annoy me:

1) Algorithms seem a bit over damped, they can sometimes take a few hours past the set point time to reach the set point temperature. Office rooms on monday morning for example are set to be at temp for 9am but it can be 11am before they actually get their. It reduces the boiler demand (via OpenTherm, another reason I bought Wiser) proportionally to the temperature difference. I feel like it could get there a little bit faster but I guess they don’t want to overshoot.

2) Eco mode is pants:

“This mode learns about your home’s thermal properties and how long it takes to react to temperature changes, and turn the boiler off sooner to save energy. By adding smart TRVs to gain room-by-room heating control, the effect of this is magnified to achieve even greater savings.”

This isn’t very good when you want to heat the office till 1800 then have it turn down to say 10 degrees (or off entirely) as it gets to some point in the afternoon and it thinks “oh I’ve got loads of time to drop down from 20 to 10 degrees, i’ll stop maintaining temperature” and then it gets cold!. It makes it hard to set schedules on rooms correctly so I’ve turned it off.

I installed a EvoHome system several years ago. I think if I was doing it now I’d go with the Drayton system; cheaper, looks easier to install, and looks better connected.

Cold rooms – Because you are not wasting heating rooms, the downside is that when you do want them hot the air temp is correct but things in the room are not warm to the touch etc ie beds are cold.

Watch out for that – our mattress has suffered a bit from effectively being in a cold humid room for most of the time as we were only spot heating it in the evening. I’ve ended up increasing the minimum temperature during the day.

they have a phone app which communicates with servers which give you remote access to your home controller from you phone (or laptop). Sometimes it’s down for maintenance so you lose remote access for an hour or so. All the others will do the same I expect from time to time

with DW although they offer a cloud service for what I’d call remote (i.e. away from the property/local network – I don’t use that anyway as my remote control is all done through my HA server) you can always use the phone app etc. from anything on your own network (as long as you have WiFi) as that functionality doesn’t go through the cloud. This is a big plus in my book and the main reason I went with DW.

the USP of Tado is def something others don’t quite have and more cloud based than the others

that’s actually a massive disadvantage in my book! although horses for courses and all that 😃

It could be worse – I’m sure I read recently that with one of the other systems (Wiser?) if ANY registered phones leave then it goes into Away mode – which seems so utterly ridiculous that I am sure someone will tell me that is wrong!

That’s what would happen for any system where the user is using IFTTT geofencing linked to their smart heating. It’s a big downside for couples / families who don’t have regular routine (or Tado)

I believe, it’s the main difference between Tado and all the others. However, Tado’s not without it’s “trying to be too clever” ie someone who works close to home would find that the central heating never turns down (I’m pretty certain that’s what someone on here was experiencing 1st hand). Also in that respect I presume it’s much more reliant on cloud based stuff, internet, wifi, servers, phone signal etc etc

My nest system has a number of ways that it detects if people are in the house. Firstly the actual dial thermometer bit monitors movement in the house. Useless if its in a hallway that you only walk in a few times a day, but in my house its at the bottom of the stairs so will detect alot of movement as people move around the home.

Also you can select it to monitor your phone location so it knows if nobody is in the house and will then delay CH coming on as per programmed so as not to heat an empty home, but also know when you’re coming home and fire up the system if within a times period that has been delayed because you’re out of the home. I don’t currently have this functionality turned on. You can of course turn it on remotely from the app if you know you’re going to leave for home soon.

Also has a holiday or away from home mode.

Also it monitors seasonal variations in how you use the system and suggests tweaks and improvements. Works well if you’re a creature of habit.

OK, wow. Reading some of that then you can scratch my previous comment about investigating the others if I was doing it again. Tado has it’s quirks but at least it’s based on a coherent principle.

Tado requires a internet bridge which everything else is connected to over it’s own wifi network. It’s not brilliant tbh. My house is not small but it’s no mansion and all the internal walls are flimsy. A dozen times a day it loses contact with a radiator or a thermostat. It keeps on working in this state – you just can’t adjust anything and can’t see the temperatures remotely

Have you talked to them about this? They can boost the wireless reception on particular devices (at the expense of higher battery consumption).

The early start feature is meant to work out how long it needs to warm up a room using the temperature and the weather. It doesn’t – it’s rubbish. I’ve turned it off in all rooms now.

You can ask them to reset it so it learns again. For some reason mine was much better the second time around.

This is the screen again this morning.

My heating is due to switch off at 7:30 and I want to override that from my phone but can’t. This is happening a lot recently

what’s the average saving you’re all seeing on your bills?

@FunkyDunc – us too this morning but back up now. I rarely delve into the app to override as I’ve tweaked settings a lot and happy with our programme at the moment – easier given that most days follow a similar pattern or house occupancy due to WFH/home-schooling etc. Wife was an unhappy (and cold) bunny seeing that screen this morning.

what’s the average saving you’re all seeing on your bills?

For me, it’s less about saving money, and more about being more comfortable.

Probably have pretty equivalent costs (difficult to say, installed it pretty early on in this house), but before we were much more stingy with running the heating.

For me, it’s less about saving money, and more about being more comfortable.

yeah this for us too, will never know anyway as we only moved in July so didn’t run the heating for that long before getting the smart kit setup!

I have three zone smart heating using Heatmiser. Combination of underfloor in two zones and traditional rads in the main (rest of house) zone. UH8 wireless receiver, three Neo stats and Neo Hub / Neo app combo.

It is my nemesis, I hate it with a passion. It is not smart, it is controlled by a pissed off, stupid and belligerent gremlin.

Its programmed to go off at 11pm, keeping U/F at 17 degrees and house/rads at 12degrees. Last night, at 1am, heating is firing off full whack throughout the house, despite the house being 10degrees warmer than it should be on night temp.

This morning, no heating coming on. House is freezing. Just another day of battle of wills between me and the bastard heating.

If I could do so cheaply and easily I would just go back to simple, dumb thermostat and timer.

It is my nemesis, I hate it with a passion. It is not smart, it is controlled by a pissed off, stupid and belligerent gremlin.

what is the issue? hardware/connection issues with the thermostats? or software? sounds pretty rubbish tbf!!

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently. This kit seems like a decent deal. Any reason not to go for that?

https://www.costco.co.uk/Appliances/Cooling-Air-Treatment-Heating/Smart-Thermostats/tado-Whole-Home-Starter-Kit-with-Hot-Water-Extension-and-8-Smart-Radiator-Thermostats/p/338338

The early start feature is meant to work out how long it needs to warm up a room using the temperature and the weather. It doesn’t – it’s rubbish. I’ve turned it off in all rooms now.

You can ask them to reset it so it learns again. For some reason mine was much better the second time around.

This works well for me and my Nest system. I have the normal Nest setup for the home but I have a separate Nest for my downstairs wet UFH system and I set it to be at 18 degrees by 6:30 in the morning and it will fire up at about 4am in order to achieve the 18 degrees at 6:30. I only set the desired temp at a given time. Also it will shut off at say 6:45 or 7am due to the thermal lag/inertia of a wet UFH setup. OK I’ve not monitored this closely to correlate start up times vs outside temperature and if it hit temp at exactly the time I set or if it achieves it before or after, but it’s never cold when we get up on cold winter days so assuming it’s working quite well.

For me the next step is to replace my normal mechanical TRV rad valves with smart ones so I can get much better room to room control rather than the system being trigged by the temp in the hallway where the main thermostat is placed. It’s always warmer upstairs in my home than downstairs so by the time the downstairs has reached temp it’s usually a bit too warm upstairs is would be good to fine tune that better (I don’t have a dual zone system unfortunately).

For me, it’s less about saving money, and more about being more comfortable.

It’s a blend for us – about directing the heat so we can justify warming certain room as warm as we would like and not having to heat unnecessary rooms to do so (or run around adjusting manual trvs multiple times a day).

I do have some concerns though……we’ve switched from heating our two wfh offices with the electric heaters to the Tado enabled central heating warming those two rooms but everything else wound back. Because of the nature of the house and the central heating design (both to be improved in a big project over the next year or so) and where we live the boiler has to work pretty much fully time to get the rooms to 16/17 deg. If the heating ‘seems’ to be working hard all day is it actually saving much money over if it was heating the whole house? Logic says yes as the return water must be warmer than if it was going through the 6 radiators closed right back by the Tado….but even so it’s unnerving. Our LPG bill from 8th Dec to 18th Jan (before I install the tado) was north of £500 and we never have any room warmer than 17deg and unused rooms turned off. We also burned half a forest in that time too.

and where we live the boiler has to work pretty much fully time to get the rooms to 16/17 deg

I’m really surprised by that. Because we’re basically able to smash a 30kw boiler through one radiator, rooms get up to temperature pretty quickly.

Perhaps your boiler does some kind of flow temperature regulation based on the thermal demand?

I’m really surprised by that. Because we’re basically able to smash a 30kw boiler through one radiator, rooms get up to temperature pretty quickly.

Perhaps your boiler does some kind of flow temperature regulation based on the thermal demand?

I’m hoping it’s something clever. The heating pipes are a throw back to the 80s but the boiler is only 4 or 5 years old.

I think its partly the house is poorly insulated, partly that the rads are only type 21 and not big for the room volumes and partly that the pipe system seems to be a single pipe system so I suspect I’m heating the wall cavities brilliantly and the rads just can’t output enough heat. The offices are the outliers though – it manages the rest of the house fine so maybe we should just use leccy for wfh….

The temperature here has not go above zero day or night since before Christmas and it was -15 last night so I guess it is working harder than most.

Thread revival!! Interesting that others are having success with Drayton Wiser. I bought the system last November, along with 13 (in total) TRVs. I’m now on Amazon chatting with an agent to arrange a return of the whole f***ing thing. I’ve had enough.

When it works, it’s great. But the TRVs keep losing their connections, the hub occasionally just goes into full idiot mode where it stops doing anything, and trying to add new TRVs just doesn’t work – it spends ages trying to add them and then just fails.

The folk on the Drayton Wiser helpline are all very friendly and helpful, but are never really able to fix it.

Time to try something else!

Never had any problems with mine! WiFi issue? Are you using an ISP supplied router (which one if so?) or something decent, or mesh system? DW uses 2.4Ghz (Zigbee), prone to interference from other devices apparently! Could try manually changing the channel your WiFi uses. Could also try disabling 5Ghz on the router while trying to add the TRVs.