I fear you’re right. For anyone whose lifestyle involves wanting to turn the building’s temperature up and down on shortish timescales (hours or even days) UFH’s advantages do start to evaporate.
I would dearly love to run a heat pump here. But ours is a relatively large (4-bed) house with relatively poor insulation (Victorian detached with uninsulated solid floors and walls) and just 2 people rattling around inside it. We turn the heat up and down a lot. A heat pump really wouldn’t cope with this.
The advantage of not having to dedicate quite long lengths of wall to radiators would be appealing though.
I’ve got a dual zone heating system and have seen an improvement already, it is quite clever how it learns patterns and the amount of time it takes to heat a room.
Whether you have a zoned system or not, the Nest Thermostat works with most types of heating, but it’s not compatible with electric radiators or underfloor systems.30 Aug 2017
Heating control systems still have a way to go IMO - they need to understand your diary better (assuming you keep an online diary well). They also really need to allow individual control of each room, and ideally allow heat to be transferred from one room to another, as well as into storage. But it will come, soon. Quite exciting really.
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.
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
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
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.