Hi,

My house was built around 1995 and has original boiler, water tank and immersion heater.

I’ve got solar panels and a device which works out when I’m making solar power and heats the water for free.

I want to change the original thermostat for one I can control on my phone but from what I’ve read they aren’t compatible with a water tank.

I currently with Scottish Power, they used to do a climote connect but it doesn’t appear anymore.

Any recommendations and ideas of cost appreciated

Thanks

Doesn’t the water tank just provide hot water and not central heating? If so, I imagine any smart thermostat will work-you just won’t be able to control/regulate the hot water. We have a hw tank and the room thermostats have nowt to do with the tank. It’s just linked to the boiler to control the ch. There are some boilers that are not compatible with certain smart thermostats-there’s a list for example on the Nest website.

I’ve got a hot water tank in my place and it’s controlled with a Nest thermostat.

Works perfectly.

Notmyrealname: what generation is your nest?

Eat more cheese:

I want to be able to control the heating and charge the hot water tank from my phone. Ideally know the temperature of the water on the tank if possible?

A lot of the thermostats will just do the heating.

I didn’t realise it there was a list of non compatible boilers, thanks for that, I’ll take a look.

Tanked system with hive here.  Works well, you can control the water and heating, in my case dual zone. Alexa integration allows me to boost the hot water from anywhere in the house

Pretty sure that Evohome has the kit to fully control your HW, pre programmed schedules and additional control from phone or laptop. I’ve got a combi so no direct experience.

https://theevohomeshop.co.uk/honeywell-evohome/18-honeywell-evohome-hot-water-kit-atf500dhw.html

Evohome will tell you the tank temperature.   To be honest for what you want to do I’d be using Nest, leaving the current valve system that you have connected to your solar panels in place (it’s very unlikely to have any integration with the heating side, typically it’s an extra coil through the tank and a controller), and using an el-cheapo IOT device to tell you the tank temperature.

(Google Sonoff DS18B20 for the sensor)

Notmyrealname: what generation is your nest?

Just checked and mine is the 3rd generation Nest.

Basically if you have a controller system for your heating and water now, then I’d imagine something like the Nest 3rd gen will work. It basically mimics the existing but gives you control.

We have just installed a Nest with our new boiler and essentially the aditional box on the wall that goes near the boiler simply replaces a timer controller module you’d normally have.

In essence it does the same thing but allows you remote control and monitoring over it all.

I was never sold on the idea in principle and simply left the system to keep the house at 20 degrees no matter what, with the hot water on continuos so always ready.

However after a few chats with people and understanding on how our unvented system works to be the most efficient energy consumption wise, the Nest went in and we now lower temperatures when not needed etc.

Nest 3rd gen will control it fine. It wont control the water temp, that is done by your boiler/tank stat.

Depending what you want to do, there are other options – having refitted the house i find myself leaving the hw off all the time in the summer and using the immersion to heat a tank up when i need it. Electric shower, cold fed dishwasher and its cheaper to boil a kettle if i just want to fill the sink, so Want to now fit a wifi immersion timer switch. Would be great if they could integrate immersion control to the next, the base unit is so close to the immersion on most systems youd think ot would be the obvious solution.

If you system is piped as an S or Y then you will get hot water control from most smart system, just remember that you CANNOT by pass your control stat and over temp stat on you un vented cylinder as this is primary and secondary protection! Also we set cylinder temperature at 55/60 degrees C to sterilise from legionella, don’t be tempted to reduce cylinder to 40 degrees C as legionella will love that 😊