Smart Home shenanigans

They look good, but still it needs to feed the info to a central smart control system.

The thing then is making it financially worthwhile. I could probably save money with a smarter heating system, but in my case I’m usually home, so many of the benefits are lessened.

My current system is actually very effective for us: we can choose several different temperatures over the day, and it keeps it very close to the target temperature (not within about 5 degrees like the old one). With family spread around the house, it’s near perfect for how we live. So while I do fancy the whole smart system, I don’t think it would actually make much of an improvement.

In my experience the easiest and most cost efficient system, generally speaking, is a condensing boiler with weather compensation.

Heat loss is king when installing a good system as Graeme alluded to earlier. Nest etc are gimmicks… mere shiny baubles for crayon eaters that want to show off.

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In my experience the best system is the one you understand , most people I come across have no idea how to optimise their heating system to their way of living

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For some, inc my MIL. being prepared to atleast try to understand how the timer and thermostat work together would be a good start.

Boiler on, thermostat rotated between min and max as a simple switch.

House too hot? Just open a window and turn down (off) the 'stat.
Too cold? Close window and turn up (on) the 'stat.

And then moan about massive gas bills.

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Just like my Mrs with the rad stat valves - I keep telling her that they are sensitive, so if she’s cold, turning the valve a small amount will increase the room temp to the level she wants.

But no, she thinks the amount of turn is related to the amount of time it takes to warm the room, so she whacks it right up :roll_eyes:

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Our old thermostat was awful though - if the heating wasn’t on, you’d have to advance it about 5 degrees to click it on. It would then merrily heat the house to 25 degrees unless you had thought to reduce it.

The new thermostat measures to within half a degree (allegedly), and maintains a very steady temperature.

Lols, have the same challenge here.

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Yep, the coup de grace is usually “anyway, you don’t even feel the cold - I’m bloody freezing” :smile:

Er … I may be wrong, but aren’t the ladies correct ? The thing is that a rad stat isn’t like the wall stat which switches your boiler on and off. In the case of the wall stat the moment it switches on you get the boiler’s full power heating your home. So the place will warm up just as quickly as it can. But with a rad stat (at least the primitive non-intelligent ones) if you only rotate the setting a bit then it will only open the valve a bit and you’ll only get a trickle of extra hot water. So it will eventually end up at the few degrees higher temperature that you want, but it won’t get there quickly. If you want a quick but relatively small change then you have to open the rad stat fully and then shut it down to ‘open just far enough to maintain the temp’ when you get there. It’s exactly like the accelerator on your car. If you depress it very slightly then your speed will increase from 25mph to 30mph but it will take an age to get there. If you floor the pedal then you’ll be at 30mph in the blink of an eye at which point you need to wind your foot back.

VB

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Not sure Greame :thinking:

Thing is, my Mrs wants to go from 30 to 100 and then switch the cruise on :rofl:

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With our rad stats on 3 they heat up quickly and keep the room at a decent temperature. Turn them to 5 the rads heat up quickly and then keep going until the stat turns off the boiler. Leaving them alone on 3 works just fine.

This is where hive and nest are a joy to use, no matter what twinkle thinks. Easy screen, changeable from your phone and much better for holidays and also my wife and I work from home 3 out of five days so the control is easy to keep the house at an exact temperature…

Exactly Graeme my point earlier, you have to learn and understand how your system works

Yep. Learning to balance it all is key. Buggering about with valves on the fly makes a mess of things.

Yup Hive is brilliant, have it on two houses and one house has two zones (up and down)…

Meanwhile at the underfloor heated townhouse, which admittedly has 4 floors, four manifolds each with a pump, plus 2 pumps to circulate the water over the house, oh and the hot water system has its own pump (so you almost get instant hot water at any tap) (7in total!). … one of the pumps is playing up! :dizzy_face:

You’ve obvs never been in an Astra.

I was coming from an economic angle with weather comp not from an ease of use.

We just installed a Nest today along with the new boiler, seems very easy to use albeit not much heating going on at the moment with the nice weather.

Our smart home system:

House too cold - light the fire

House too hot - let the fire go out

I’ll get the hang of it one day.

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When is that ever going to happen?

Frequently, the fire is rated at 9kw A couple of hours of that and the whole house is toasty. Any more and it becomes too hot.