[Closed] Which Smart Home Thermostat

We've got a nest, and it is fine for heating, but doesn't do hot water.

Honeywell Evo home is the best out there but possibly more accomplished than you need it all you want to do is turn it on with your phone.

Simply use a Honeywell programmable room thermostat. Has a holiday feature that you set for however many days you are away.

I really don't see the point if I'm honest. Any prog stat will do 95% of what they do, the only bonus is being able to postpone or advance remotely. Which you do what, once a week at most. Which will make about 20p a year difference in costs.

I liked the Tado system. uses apps on your smart phones to see when you leave the house and knows how long it will take you to get there when you head back and switches heating on accordingly. They do a rental or purchase. I didnt go ahead because we were moving house but still considering it in the new house.

The problem with the nest, tado, etc is that they still heat every room in your house when they don't need heating - I struggle to see how they can really save you as much as they say you can.
The Evo home system allows you granular control over each individual radiator, so every room becomes a zone which you heat to a specific temperature only when you need it. I think the size of the house makes a difference as to whether it's worth the high cost though.

I've just bought a Honeywell "dumb" wireless thermostat and controller.

Having bought it, I think the reason for getting a "smart" one is to avoid having to figure out the instructions and poke around in the back of your airing cupboard with an array of cryptic buttons. Any savings in gas bills is just a bonus.

I've got the Nest (think the latest does hot water) but I just make regular use of the thermostat valves to control which rooms are heated. Working from home...just turn off the living room one and turn on the dining room (aka office) one.

Evohome is surely the best way to go

We've got a Salus it-500 which controls heating and hot water which is supplied from a biomass boiler. It's phone app and Internet interface are good but nowhere near as polished as nest etc. That said its been working well for me.

we have hive (check for special offers - which is why we got it), app or text remote control

We've got a Tado, it's pretty good - controls heating and hot water, knows when we're away and turns the heating off, back on when we're heading home.

Most importantly, it stops the other half fiddling with thermostats all the time.

I fitted a Tado for my mum - it is, as stated, single zone ( as are almost all others ). It works very well, to the point that you comepletely forget about it and just get used to the house being normal temp when you come home, or if you go away for a few days it is allowed to cool down ( with the heating starting up again before you come home ). It is, or was a year or so ago, the most fit and forget solution that also managed hot water.

They are developing a multi zone system at the moment for people like me who live in a building with a shared boiler - it will control individual radiators. I would think that feature will soon make it into the home version pretty quickly afterwards.

Tado here, fitted it just over a year ago and it's been excellent, as had been said above if you have the app on your phone if see when you are nearing hone and gets to your target temp, very good user interface on the app as well.

I'm interested in this thread as my wireless thermostat has gone on the blink.

With the Honeywell Evo does it merely monitor the room temperature or does it control the valve on the radiator too so it closes it off once it's warm enough and opens it back up if it drops?

does it control the valve on the radiator too so it closes it off once it's warm enough and opens it back up if it drops?

Yes.
You replace each normal trv with a wireless trv each of which has its own digital thermostat. You can then set the target temperature and time for each zone/radiator (if there are multiple rads in a room then you can group them together) with the controller.
So if there are room that you don't use until later in the day, you can set them to only come on in the evening. Similarly you can set different temperatures for each room.
There are some nice touches as well, such as when a trv detects that a window has been opened it switches off the radiator (because it assumes you want to cool the room down) for a set period. Best bit is that,if you want, you can set each trv to display a temperature a couple of degrees higher than it really is, so if the wife complains you can point to the trv and say 'but darling I've set the temperature to 21c'.
Overall it sounds like the way heating controls should work, but it does come at a price. Each trv is about £45-50 on top of the £250 controller price - if you have a lot of radiators the price can rise dramatically. That said I'm thinking about fitting it even though it would cost >£1000 if I put a trv on every radiator as we have rooms that are not used before 6-7pm. Reviews are excellent.

i bought a netatmo thermostat in an amazon lightning deal. It was about £60 I think. Took about 10 mins to wire in, 5 mins to set up and means I can sit at work and turn the heating down to see how long my wife will take to notice...

The Evo home system allows you granular control over each individual radiator, so every room becomes a zone which you heat to a specific temperature only when you need it. I think the size of the house makes a difference as to whether it's worth the high cost though.

I hope you keep all of the doors in your house closed!
More seriously, I can't believe that the likes of Trend etc haven't got in on this. With their experience of HVAC controls, they could have made something to blow all of the others out of the water.

I hope you keep all of the doors in your house closed!

I was wondering about that! TBH I've never heard of Trend and, given that Honeywell are massive, they'd have to go some to produce something better.

I've never heard of Trend and, given that Honeywell are massive, they'd have to go some to produce something better.

Trend produce commercial Building Energy Management Systems - they're pretty well known.

The problem with the nest, tado, etc is that they still heat every room in your house when they don't need heating

Yes and no. They would if you didn't have TRVs but I think it's a reasonable assumption that most people do have them and if they don't they should be getting them regardless. With TRVs you're only going to heat rooms to the temperature you want them at.

I have a hive - it's not particularly smart but it does exactly what I want - provide lots of schedule options, the ability to turn on/off remotely (or automatically based on distance from home if you want but I don't use that) and it seems reliable in that the house now heats as I want it and doesn't seem to swing between too hot or too cold as it used to.

I looked at the Honeywell system too and it's great (especially that you can get one radiator to turn the heating on if required) but it's bloody expensive for most decent sized houses unless you don't fit the remote valves to all rads in which case, I felt you're missing out on the point of it.

I have a hive - it's not particularly smart but it does exactly what I want - provide lots of schedule options, the ability to turn on/off remotely (or automatically based on distance from home if you want but I don't use that) and it seems reliable in that the house now heats as I want it and doesn't seem to swing between too hot or too cold as it used to.

I have a Worcester Bosch Wave which does much the same thing. One bonus is it uses the local weather data to do weather compensation, i.e. modulating the boiler up or down according to how cold it is outside. I've noticed that the radiators stay warm for longer rather than swinging between hot and cold as they used to with the old controller.

I was wondering about that! TBH I've never heard of Trend and, given that Honeywell are massive, they'd have to go some to produce something better.

Trend are the market leader (by a significant distance) in Building Management Systems. Their BMS' are quite a lot better than Honeywells!

ransos - I'm sure there are lots of options that do similar. My hive was cheap on amazon (£129 fitted) so it was a simple choice.

I note that the hive app and website do also show local temperature but I haven't seen whether that's factored into its heating calcs though it couldn't adjust the boiler directly since it's effectively just an on/off switch for it.

Trend produce commercial Building Energy Management Systems - they're pretty well known.

Ah, fair enough.

[i]Overall it sounds like the way heating controls should work, but it does come at a price. Each trv is about £45-50 on top of the £250 controller price - if you have a lot of radiators the price can rise dramatically. That said I'm thinking about fitting it even though it would cost >£1000 if I put a trv on every radiator as we have rooms that are not used before 6-7pm. Reviews are excellent. [/i]

And you expect to save how much over just leaving the heating on (using the thermostat and timer)?

The correct answer is nest and now the people who haven't bought a nest cant even harp on about how it doesn't do hot water.
The other systems I have played with including hive and tado whilst working well have nowhere near the coolness and polish of the nest. We had ours installed when they very first came out and has been the biggest influence in the reduction we have seen in our bills but more importantly the comfort of the house. Its just so easy to change heating patterns and the fact that you set the time you want it a certain temperature by is much better than the old way of it coming on the same time every day regardless of the current temperature.
I also like the integration of other devices. We have the nest smoke alarm which links in to the same app and they also link in with things like hue lightbulbs.

I agree that the nest is clearly the cleverest system and no doubt will become cleverer.

But... 😉 when I was looking at my hive, I had been planning to go for a nest up to that point. Real world feedback suggests that some of the cleverer functionality doesn't actually work quite so well in the real world with heating coming on in the middle of the night in order to get the house up to temperature by a certain time which people are then having to work around with various ramping up temperatures and so on to avoid that. I'm sure that longer term that'll be resolved or options to just run like a traditional timer are provided but I don't think it's a perfect solution for everyone, particularly in this country where lots of people live in old houses that aren't all that well insulated (hence the long time to hit a fixed temperature target).

The integration and long term development of it will no doubt be an increasingly attractive selling point though.

Also have a Tado, also fitted it just over a year ago and it's been also excellent. Yes it is single zone but compared to my old manual system it's got some distinct benefits for us:

1) It's saved money - my gas bill has gone down by approx. 30%
2) I'm not heating the house when I'm not there - old system worked on setting on/off times and was a faff to change so we just didn't
3) I can change settings via the app which is helpful when I want to prewarm the house quicker than would happen with the (excellent) proximity system
4) The night mode maintains a steady temperature so the difference between night and day temperatures is consistent which I think makes the boiler/gas usage more efficient (I'm not a scientist so I may just be guessing here)

The correct answer is nest and now the people who haven't bought a nest cant even harp on about how it doesn't do hot water.

I didn't know that the Nest did multiple zones now.

in the real world with heating coming on in the middle of the night in order to get the house up to temperature by a certain time

Optimisation (as this particular function is called) is usually set up with a maximum time (eg 3 hours) limiting exactly how much optimisation can happen. No idea if the Nest can do that, but if it can it's a good idea to limit it.
A Cool down period is a good idea, turn the heating off a good couple of hours before you go out/go to bed etc. As long as your house isn't a sieve, the temperature decay shouldn't be noticeable.

A Cool down period is a good idea, turn the heating off a good couple of hours before you go out/go to bed etc. As long as your house isn't a sieve, the temperature decay shouldn't be noticeable.

As an example - we turn the heating off at work at 3pm, and the building is still reasonably warm at 7pm. It has high thermal mass, though.

Does anyone have any experience of the [url= https://www.heatgenius.co.uk/ ]Heat Genius[/url] system?

I work from home so a zoned system would be ideal to just heat the office during the day and heat other bits of the house at night.

sharkbait, how do you find the Honeywell interface? Their ability to improve the apps and continue to develop the product makes me a little nervous.

Ideally I'd like Nest to do multi-zones...

We used to have a Tado but just removed it and sent it back as it should be good but actually cost us far more. On their website it says you can control your boiler even if the internet is down, oh no you can't. We just had no broadband for 2 weeks and the Tado just couldn't handle it. No way to manually turn the heating or hot water on which they admitted when I called the help desk. The support team agreed their website is wrong and the only way to get heating on was to replace it with a manual thermostat and boiler control. (luckily I had the old one kicking around) Even when my complaint was replied to by the CEO in Germany they still wouldn't admit that their website was wrong, however he was happy to admit that the Tado couldn't work with out any internet.

The other issue which we had is that if your internet ever goes down it reverts to leaving your heating and hot water on 24/7. We got back from holiday in May to find our heating blasting it out. Turned out they had some server issues and our Tado was switched to manually on. Living in the country our internet is not the most stable and every time it goes down, day or night, the heating would switch to on.

The basic premise of Tado is great but its total reliance 100% on an internet connection and their servers to be working is poor. I do like the way that it learns how quickly your house heats up and then you tell it what time you want the house to be warm. It then calculates when it needs to switch on. Far better way than the standard of when do you want the heating to come on with no idea when it will hit the right temperature.

I have now just installed a Hive and so far it seems very good and simple to use. But it really is just a wireless dumb thermostat that you can switch on using your phone. It is nice that it has a boost function, which the Tado does not have.
Tado was very easy to fit yourself, Hive was a tad more tricky as there are not really any instructions as they want to sell you the fitting service. Tado did have a very good installation process where you put in your old thermostat make and model and then it told you what had to be be changed.

I agree with the others that the Honeywell system would be the best but the cost is just far to high compared to the amount it would save, well that is my opinion.

I did wonder if these would be any good as you would then have a correctly positioned thermostat in each room and not one at floor height. Normal TVRs always seem to be slightly hidden away.
[url= http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1-x-DIGITAL-PROGRAMMABLE-WIRELESS-ROOM-THERMOSTAT-TRV-RADIATOR-VALVE-HEAD-/181693552588?hash=item2a4dc797cc:g:SCIAAOSwhcJWHQQM ]http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1-x-DIGITAL-PROGRAMMABLE-WIRELESS-ROOM-THERMOSTAT-TRV-RADIATOR-VALVE-HEAD-/181693552588?hash=item2a4dc797cc:g:SCIAAOSwhcJWHQQM[/url]

I really don't see the point if I'm honest.

The main advantage is being able to turn it on/off whilst in bed (mainly off when we've gone to bed early and I then hear the boiler fire up). Not a massive saving, but for the £100 it cost (Heatmiser), I'm happy with it.

We have a Vera Edge with Stella-Z TRVs. It's a zwave system, so we should be able to replace the controller and keep the TRVs if we need to. We should also be able to control other stuff with it, but only have the TRVs.

We've got a big-ish house and both work from home and have two children under 5. We've got it set up so the bedrooms are heated for morning and bed time, the office is heated Monday to Friday 9 to 5 and the reception rooms are heated when they are used and cool down at different times.

I'm not sure if it will save us money in the long run, but our house is more comfortable than it was last year.

I can't recommend the system though, it crashes occasionally and we had to do some scripting to get the boiler to come on when it's needed. Maybe a different controller would be better.