Best Wifi enabled thermostat

[dickymint]

1st World problems can be a right pain eh? Buy an extra boiler and bridge or better still invite your kids to come and live closer to home

[Jambo85]

Am I still in the minority using Heatmiser Neo? The stats set up a mesh network and generally (apart from the Air series) need hard wired back to the boiler so house size is no issue. And they sell repeaters.

[xyz123]

A question for nest users..

I am trying to figure out how to come to a "warm home" after work. Nest home/away sets to Away when we lave the house. When coming back, until we r home it doesnt change to home.

We end up having to manually set to Home mode when 30 mins away from home. Other than disabling home/away and relying on schedule to set low temperature are there Any uther alternatives... Wish I had gone for Tado especially with individual room temperature control as well..

[AJB88]

Think you can set it to use phone location to set

[number2]

xyz123 said:

A question for nest users..

I am trying to figure out how to come to a "warm home" after work. Nest home/away sets to Away when we lave the house. When coming back, until we r home it doesnt change to home.

We end up having to manually set to Home mode when 30 mins away from home. Other than disabling home/away and relying on schedule to set low temperature are there Any uther alternatives... Wish I had gone for Tado especially with individual room temperature control as well..

Same here. I just turn the home and away function off and adjust the schedule depending on what I/we are doing.

Re. geolocation, how would geolocation work with pre-heating? It doesn't know whether I'm coming home or just nearby, or how fast I'm travelling?! Hence I don't think it does!

[aww999]

Trying to research this idea, but it seems hugely complicated. The earlier quote I read of "I just want it to work, not become a hobby!" certainly applies to me.

I have a big 5 bed house, which is currently controlled by one thermostat in the hall. If the hall drops below 18C, the boiler and all of the radiators turn on. That means that upstairs is normally sweltering at 22C and the kitchen and conservatory are chilly at 14C. (I haven't measured, but one area is too hot and the other is too cold!) I just want a setup where every room can call for heat, and maybe have different rooms at different temps as well. I am not really worried about having different rooms on different schedules but I suppose that may be helpful.

What are my options for this level of control, which would you recommend as reliable, set-and-forget, trouble-free.

I really don't want to get into bindings and IP and Zigbee (wtf?!?), I just want to unbox it and plug it in.

[lobsterliberation]

dmsims said:

You do realise that with Evohome you can have more than one controller ?

Yes but then you can’t have a unified controller, right? A single screen?
One thing with Wiser is having a large room with multiple TRVs, it doesn’t seem to figure out an accurate temperature for the whole room. The documents hint at an algorithm dealing with the interaction between multiple TRVs and wall stats bound to the same room but does anyone know any detail on this ?
Lounge is 8m square with 4 rads and gets very confused whereas the playroom at 7x5m with a single large rad is fine.

[lobsterliberation]

aww999 said:

Trying to research this idea, but it seems hugely complicated.

I'd say it's not as complex as it once was. Either Tado, Evo, Wiser or others with TRVs and Stats linked to a hub work fine. The only complexity comes in ensuring signal strength is adequate for all devices and good wifi for the hub, plus a little time on install.
Depends if you want to DIY or not. If you have a standard wall clock controller and TRVs, especially if they are Drayton already makes Wiser a good DIY choice as it's utterly un technical - plug in this, press that when the light flashes etc.
If you don't want schedules then set all the rooms to a single temp but guaranteed you'll see the value in timing them once you're over the hump of setup. Took me all of 3 hours to fit the whole lot once i'd figured the right locations.

[pmanson]

aww999 said:

Trying to research this idea, but it seems hugely complicated. The earlier quote I read of "I just want it to work, not become a hobby!" certainly applies to me.

I have a big 5 bed house, which is currently controlled by one thermostat in the hall. If the hall drops below 18C, the boiler and all of the radiators turn on. That means that upstairs is normally sweltering at 22C and the kitchen and conservatory are chilly at 14C. (I haven't measured, but one area is too hot and the other is too cold!) I just want a setup where every room can call for heat, and maybe have different rooms at different temps as well. I am not really worried about having different rooms on different schedules but I suppose that may be helpful.

What are my options for this level of control, which would you recommend as reliable, set-and-forget, trouble-free.

I really don't want to get into bindings and IP and Zigbee (wtf?!?), I just want to unbox it and plug it in.

We had a bosch easy control installed earlier in the year (we replaced the boiler and tado setup we had previously).

Main thermostat is in the hall, and then we have the bosch TRVs in the lounge and one of the bedrooms (to be expanded to three of the four) once the plumber has been to replace the old existing TRVs (direct replacement for the new TRVs but not on some of the older rads).

Seems to work well. Just remember that all the rads without the bosch TRVs will get hot if one of them calls for heat

[princeperch]

I've been happy with my beok WiFi thermostat.

You can buy a beok branded one for 35 off Amazon or an unbranded version for 29.99.

It's a bit fiddly to pair it all up but when you do it's great.

[ben5575]

Gary C said:

Not sure if it was a fault with the unit, or it was fighting the hall stat which runs in the hall with a radiator without a radiator valve. Removed it and currently gone back to TRV's in the living room and the house temperature has become stable again.

Think I need to try it with a valve in the hall.

I missed this post. The answer is yes, you need a TRV in the hall.

If you don't, your room TRVs will call for heat, which will uncontrollably heat the dumb rad in the hall which will raise the hall temp, which will switch off the main thermostat in the hall, which closes the room TRVs. Those rooms might still be cold, so the TRV's call for heat again, the dumb rad heats up etc and you're in a loop.

If you have a TRV in the hall, it's the main hall thermostat that measures (determines) the temperature. So you could (for extreme example) have your Hall set to 12 degrees and your TRV rooms set to 21 degrees and all the TRV rooms would hit the 21 degrees. The loop is avoided.

[BigBen]

I am about 3 weeks into using Wiser and really happy with it so far. I have every radiator in the house fitted with the valves so only heat the rooms I use. As a guide I am in a big ish house and there is usually just me so the ability to target heat on a room by room basis is very important

Will wait and see what the gas bill looks like but am expecting great things

Ben

[kambites]

BigBen said:

I am about 3 weeks into using Wiser and really happy with it so far. I have every radiator in the house fitted with the valves so only heat the rooms I use. As a guide I am in a big ish house and there is usually just me so the ability to target heat on a room by room basis is very important

Will wait and see what the gas bill looks like but am expecting great things
Ben

Let us know how you get on. I'm interested to know whether the early issues with Wiser have been ironed out.

[shady lee]

S6PNJ said:

You do realise that with Drayton Wiser you can have more than one controller?

You mean relays?

As with wiser that's what's talking to all the actuators and so forth.

Can you add another "heathub r" to the same boiler? that's 2 separate demands switching the boiler.

Edited by shady lee on Sunday 10th November 21:59

[shady lee]

lobsterliberation said:

Right now I'm looking at maxed out rooms (had to combine several due to 16 limit) and 27 TRVs.
The only ballsache is no way to group rooms by zone, eg all kids ensuites to a single zone, right now I have to tweak every single one individually.
.

With evohome you can set multi room schedules and pair zones together, if I remember right the line of sight for evohome id 30mtrs, but then that will drop based on what's in is way etc.

Most who have mahoosive houses and evohome seem to run 2 controllers, often needed anyway when there's so many rooms.

Also bdr91 relays can be sited anywhere for better signal simply by running some 3 core flex.

There's a guy on here with a huge Victorian house, I think he runs 2 controllers, can't think of his name though!

[S6PNJ]

shady lee said:

S6PNJ said:

You do realise that with Drayton Wiser you can have more than one controller?

You mean relays?

As with wiser that's what's talking to all the actuators and so forth.

Can you add another "heathub r" to the same boiler? that's 2 separate demands switching the boiler.

Yup, ah but with a caveat! I have 2 Hub r's on my system as I cant run a single dual channel Hub r on my system as I a) need zero volt switching (which I could have achieved with a relay or two) and b) I need more TRVs than one Hub r can support. The caveat is that I have 2 separate pumps which control my heating water flow - I'm on biomass with a 2000ltr thermal store, so the Hub r's control the pumps which flow the thermal store water. My hot water is handled by my boiler directly rather than through the Wiser system.

But on a 'conventional' system, I see no reason why 2 Hub r's can't control a single pump/boiler, after all, all they are telling the system to do is switch on. One Hub r switching shouldn't affect the other Hub r and as each Hub r will be linked to its own TRVs, it shouldn't get confused. The other caveat is that you need 2 Wiser accounts, so have to log out of one to log in to the other - or run a 'second space' on your phone - which is what I do, so each one is always logged in and I just switch 'spaces' on my phone to look at one Hub r or the other.

[shady lee]

Interesting,

Although still abit more complicated than adding a 2nd controller picked up cheap off eBay.

That's a complex setup you have, am I right in thinking with biomass you have to have the thermal store because there's little modulation (on/off) once it's burning pellets?

[S6PNJ]

Mine's a combination log/pellet boiler - starts off on pellets (less than a handful) which then ignites and burns a batch of logs which heats 2000 litres from around 45 deg to 80 deg over 4 hours or so! I can run it solely on pellets but then it only heats the top 30% of the thermal store. Keeps my garage nice and warm! It's a 25Kw boiler.

[BigBen]

kambites said:

BigBen said:

I am about 3 weeks into using Wiser and really happy with it so far. I have every radiator in the house fitted with the valves so only heat the rooms I use. As a guide I am in a big ish house and there is usually just me so the ability to target heat on a room by room basis is very important

Will wait and see what the gas bill looks like but am expecting great things
Ben

Let us know how you get on. I'm interested to know whether the early issues with Wiser have been ironed out.

A colleague and I bought the kits at the same time when they were on a very good deal from Wolsely plumbing (I paid something like £350 for a dual zone controller and 16 valves). He is a few months ahead of me in the Wiser experience because he got of his arse and installed it before I did. The main problems encountered have been:

i) A puppy chewing one of the valves so turning the heating on in that room
ii) The batteries supplied with the valves are utter garbage, replacing them with better quality Lithium AA cells has paid dividends.

When installing my system I had a problem (my error) connecting to WiFi, I phoned the Wiser help line on a Saturday afternoon and was able to speak to someone who knew his stuff straight away, very impressive level of support.

Ben

[tomsugden]

We have something called an Owl Intuition, which was installed as part of our solar install. It's controllable from an app, but what is really handy is the ability to have different temperatures in different zones at different times of the day. My wife an I don't like upstairs to be too hot when we go to bed, so in the morning the whole house heats to 22, but in the evening downstairs is set to 22 and upstairs to 19. I can also boost either zone by an increment I choose.