Quest for lower heating cost, Smart thermostats / TRV's (HIVE)

[Feltwell]

I've got Evohome, only problems have been RTFM related from the plumber who installed it.

RTFM - Read The, erm, Flipping, Manual

He put the receivers for the signals from the cylinder stat and radiator valves too close together, once put at the recommended distance apart all was well.

It is good, being able to control each room individually is a boon. At the moment we're not really using the top floor of the house - daughter away at University so an empty bedroom, I've been off work so an unoccupied office - so being able to turn those off, and turn daughter's room back on if she comes home for a weekend, is good.

The ability to have a seperate timeclock pattern for each room, with different temperatures set for different times of day in each room, plus the ability for one room only if necessary to call for heat - all makes for a very well controlled system.

 

[a twig]

With Hive one of the big benefits is that it is one of the few that clearly shows you on the app which zones are driving the heat demand so let’s you adjust / optimise your schedules more easily.
Evohome arguably is the better engineered and more reliable / resilient system but has involved a bit more fannying about on my part to get it all running sweetly - ditto with Feltwell, our installer didn’t quite get things squared away properly so I ended up sorting myself (after a few weeks of research)

 

[johnbanshee]

I've had a TADO system for about a year and a half now. I think [as my wife will attest] it's one of the best things I've every bought for the home, I like to bore everyone with it that I meet. Effectively every single radiator becomes its own zone and can tell the boiler to come on and only heat the required room/rooms in question.

I was slightly worried when it first arrived to find that each TRV contained two batteries and reading up some people said they were changing batteries every couple of months...so I opted to buy a bulk battery charger and invested in Panasonic Eneloop batteries - these are the recommended ones. You do get fair warning when batteries are nearing depletion so it's really a non issue, but ensure you get rechargables is my advice.

I have also found the temperature that the TRVs report might be artificially high (naturally they are right next to the heat source) - however with a few handheld electrothermometers you can easily calculate the differential for each room - and there is a setting per TRV that allows you adjust an offset.

Both of my heating zones previously had a single room stat and programmer - so it really is child's play to wire the controls into the TADO controller. I have 14 TRVs now - the system works perfectly in winter to warm my office up from 08:30 so it's cosy the moment I set foot in there, whilst the rest of the house can remain cold without unnecessarily heating.

Each TRV also continually reports room temperature back to your TADO portal micro-site - as well as outside temperature/weather - so you can go back months/years once the data is captured to see usage trends.

I've not tried any other smart heating system - and I'll probably go for TADO again in my renovation property when the time comes - absolutely can't fault it as a device!

 

[Xeynon]

We have a Tado smart thermostat. Our house is small, so having the thermostat in the living room and using that temp as the temp for the rest of the house works for us.

If we had a bigger house or there was a great disparity among the room temperatures, Tado also offers smart TRVs. Each room with a smart TRV could have an individual temperature automatically maintained by the Tado app.

Because my wife and I are both freelance and don't work set schedules, the main benefit for us is Tado knows when we're home and when we're away, and it adjusts the temperature of the house accordingly, so we don't have to remember to turn the heat down when we're leaving, and the house is warm when we return.

Because you have rooms with different temperatures in them, I'd look at getting individual TRVs to control the rooms independently from each other.

I hope some of that made sense and is helpful.