• In my mind smart central heating should save money rather than keep the entire house at a constant temperature.

    In your case - presuming that you work in a room notionally labelled as study - you need a TRV in the study but if you use Tado you'll also need TRVs in your living area because otherwise when the study TRV requests heat you'll be heating your living area unnecessarily (this is my current situation because I'm waiting on an offer on TRVs).

    I like Tado but it isn't quite smart enough for me - being asked to pay for the home/away assist grates (shakes fist) and schedules are all very well but our routine varies too much, so I reckon we're still paying to heat house we don't need to heat.

    I'm planning on installing this to my Home Assistant to get free home/away assist:
    https://github.com/sabsteef/Tado-home-away

    But even then we'll end up heating rooms we aren't actually using. So I'm thinking about using Hue motion sensors to check someone is actually in a room, then if nobody has been in a room for a certain amount of time the Tado TRVs won't start heating it up, unless someone goes into the room for a little while (not quickly popping in), then they'll heat it for a bit before turning off again if they haven't detected movement.

    I need to work out how to do this but it should all be doable in Home Assistant as the Hue motion sensors work well with it.

  • So I'm thinking about using Hue motion sensors to check someone is actually in a room

    I'm sceptical about that approach. If you have a cold and draughty house like me then the time to heat a room is too long to usefully do something when someone starts using it. If you have a well insulated house then heating the room if someone is likely to use it isn't a big problem.

    I basically want three modes:

    1. Not in the house - heating reduced to very low level (eg 14)
    2. Family in (weekends, after school) - all rooms heated to comfortable level (eg 20)
    3. Working from home - just heat my study, rest of the house at low level (eg 16)
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