Owning your own home

How come?

Needs periodic cleaning and refinishing which will be a bit of a bitch to do. Maybe. There’s a place on our street with some wild timber cladding going on. It does look ten billion times better than everyone else’s basic bitch set ups tho.

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Been using the Honeywell EvoHome for over a year and think it’s great. Each room is individually controlled so I only heat the ones I use, when I use them. Controlled from and app on my phone or the main hub..

This is paired to a Viessmann Vitodens 200w 35kw system boiler and pressurised cylinder, we have also had a weather compensator fitted (only recently). The evohome / Viessmann is not openTherm compatible, hence why we have the weather compensator. It heats the house from a curve based on homes heat loss / outside temperature and target temp.

I have Nest, I like it a lot. Excellent at "reach temperature by a point in time" and "learn when I manually change the heating and modify my schedule in future like that". It works when the internet is down (i.e. locally), and has nice thermostat, etc.

Drawback to Nest... it's really "boiler on" and "boiler off"... and that can be crappy if you have a large house and lots of radiators as you're always heating the whole house.

Tado is a radiator TRV that will automatically adjust radiator TRVs and turn the boiler on/off... such that you can control which rooms are heated to what temp and when.

I'd argue Nest is better for US style HVAC systems and smaller UK properties (where you don't care if the whole space is heated so much), and Tado is better for larger UK properties (multi-level 3+ bed homes) where you don't want to heat the whole thing.

But all of these can be changed in future, as they're just a control that adjusts boiler on/off.

Is that like Tado in that it controls the TRVs?

Also what is a Weather Comp?

Yep

Lifted from the website

How does it work?
A small temperature sensor is located on the outside of the building, on a north facing wall. This is wired to the internal controls of the boiler and information about the outside temperature is sent to the boiler controller constantly.
When the temperature changes outside the boiler responds and starts to increase or decrease the radiator temperature to compensate.
This pro-active mechanism means that people inside the building won't even notice that the temperature has changed outside.
For example, when the outside temperature drops at night, more heat is lost through the walls of the building.
Because the outdoor sensor detects the fall as soon as it happens, the boiler is able to raise the radiator temperature and keep the inside temperature stable.
With a conventional system, the temperature is dependent on a room thermostat, which will only take effect after the inside of the building has become too hot or too cold.
In summary, weather compensation controls enable the boiler to respond to outside temperature changes and adjust the radiator output, to maintain a constant temperature indoors.

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Needs periodic cleaning and refinishing

Not if you use the right wood and treat it right. We used Siberian larch treated with Seasonite new wood protection, it's been up five years and shouldn't ever need any attention really.

Drawback to Nest... it's really "boiler on" and "boiler off"... and that can be crappy if you have a large house and lots of radiators as you're always heating the whole house.

You can do zones though, we have two in our one bed flat, works well but our bedroom radiator is always off so we effectively have three zones but two Nests, if that make sense.

I'd agree Nests don't seem ideal for large houses which is a shame as I really like ours too.

I'd argue Nest is better for US style HVAC systems and smaller UK properties (where you don't care if the whole space is heated so much)

I keep getting tempted by the Hive TRVs but always decide it's not worth it in a 2-bed flat. Before WFH it may have been useful to just heat the bathroom on a morning, but not so much right now.

Looks good. Priced it up and it’s spendy but we need zoning.

Hive I found awful.

I had Hive... ripped it all out the first time the internet went down and I couldn't control anything.

It suits our needs, ours is a 3 story Victorian Semi with 5 beds. The tops floor is not used, so all 3 rads are kept at 18 degrees for 22 hours a day. They only heat up to 21 degrees for a couple of hours in the morning to keep the chill out. The middle floor is only heating above 18 degrees for a few hours in the morning and in the evening (Wake up and bed time). The Bottom floor and underfloor heating is on through the day. These are the rooms we use the most, the underfloor goes on at 4am, this is because its a solid concrete base and takes time to heat up. the temp then reduces through the day as the base retains the heat...Since we finished the kitchen at the beginning of the year the house has never been warmer.

i have also just spent £300 on coal for the open fires though....but they look pretty.

You can do zones though

Done a google - you can but only if your heating is piped to have zones. If it’s just one big ring then you can’t unless you put TRV controllers on from another brand.

If you're not planning on going in-depth and getting a boiler to pair with it or integrating it with other systems then it pretty much seemed to boil down to whether you want a single thermostat or multiple radiator valves and the cost of them.

They all offer pretty similar functionality otherwise.

They are all the same Nest, Hive and the wiser system. We fit more wisers as they are UK made by drayton and find the support is a bit better from the installer POV.

Weather comp is absolutely pish imo but they want you to fit them im sure in england.

Nah master bed with a bath front and centre.

Correct, sorry if not clear. I guess not so helpful unless you're putting a new system in. One of our zones is underfloor so had to be a zone anyway.

Waiting to hear on an offer we've put in but either way I sense Tado in my future...

TBH we are on a bit of a voyage of discovery with ours. I wanted openTherm originally but only after it all got fitted did we discover that Viessmann and EvoHome don't play together well....something about the protocols of the systems. So we installed the compensator a few months ago, trouble is the heating takes priority so the hot water was not getting above 35 degrees on warm days...so we've had to steepen the curve the ensure that the water gets hot enough as the outside temperature differential was not great enough. Solution is in the post from Germany (separate the hot water heating from the EvoHome). None of this was a problem until i had the weather compensator installed.....

I never expect to see the benefits of this outlay....

That was fast

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Wow

trouble is the heating takes priority so the hot water was not getting above 35 degrees on warm days...

What’s happening here?

It can be used in court, and telephone records used to support it.

So it’s like an email, then?

Maybe you accidentally hired a demolition man, not a builder. :)

This

I have to set the curve to 3.4 to ensure that the flow temp for the water is hot enough for the hot water tank. Ideally it would be at 1.8....we are going to separate the hot water heating from the heating circuit and the boiler will control that independently, as regardless of outside temp we need hot, hot water.

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I’m jaded from standing on a scaffold all day today fixing rotten timber cladding.