Owning your own home

dem10 is on sale for £79.99 on Amazon at the moment as well http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000BP81DW

@stevo_com : Hive looks great. COSTS $£$££ though.

Seeing as we had no controls whatsoever beyond turning the boiler on or off I reckoned I'd be spending near that to get a basic thermostat installed. It's great to be able to control the heating from wherever you have your phone, which is usually everywhere.

Yeah, the new one is £250.

Convincing the financial controller this is a good investment is a bit, er, tricky.

Thanks fellas! Ordered the dem10.

The ease of use is the biggest win for me and not having to just blast the boiler indiscriminately until I think the house is warm enough. I used to forget to/not be arsed to get up and turn it off again so we were doubtless wasting gas.

The app even has a load of widgets, I mainly use the boost one which sets the desired temperature to 22degrees for an hour. Just one tap on the widget that looks like a vulva.

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Or you can jet set the desired temperature using an easy scrolling interface. If that is higher than the detected temp at the thermostat, the boiler fires until they match.

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And the schedule is also a piece of piss although I'll only use it if I need to get an early shower so the bathroom isn't baltic. Just set the time periods for the week and the desired temperature. 7 is effectively off and is just for frost protection.

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How many out of 10?

For me, 9.5

The actual thermostat isn't amazing. It's easy to knock the boost on when you pick it up and it could do with a quick release wall mount. I might just end up using Velcro wall fixings. It just sits on the chest of drawers in the living room next to the hall

Have you got Hive 1 or Hive 2?

http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/000033cdf/2efb_orh350w620/Hive-Active-Heating-2.jpg

5/7

It also shows history for temperature inside your home.

The one thing that I'm not having must joy with is the advance feature (i.e. skip to the next scheduled temperature change), but shifting the temperature manually is an easy enough workaround.

I only paid £150 though (for Hive 1 - I don't see any real increase in utility from Hive 2), as it was on offer, and tacked onto the end of a regular boiler service.

How much do you think it would cost to have a bell mouth drip sorted on the render of a property, where it currently just joins the ground? Google's not giving me much joy

5/7?
Perfect.

British gas been out. Showed me where refill loop is and haven't charged me. Hot water is now working but radiators are not. Le sigh.

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I was looking at a honeywell smart solution where you could have wifi connected thermostats on each radiator but it was quickly becoming very expensive. I couldn't bring myself to get the thermostat and then not get the rad stats for each room, it felt like I would be constantly annoyed I didnt go the whole hog. Stupid reason but it worked in my brain.

I got Hive 2 through BG, I didn't even know you could get Hive 1 at the time so I don't really know the difference. I think it was a shade over £200 installed.

On this subject...looking to get central heating serviced. We haven't had the radiators flushed in the 9 years we've lived here so probably time to do that. Would like existing radiator valves replaced with thermostatic ones too (no wifi nonsense required) whilst we're at it.

Combi boiler (Alpha CB28) serviced semi-regularly with 9 individual radiators. 3 bed flat in SW15.

They're mostly fine now (just in need of being bled again) so should I wait until the summer when it could be cheaper (or less annoying if the heating isn't working for a few days)? What kind of price for flush and valve replacement?

Might also be the time to replace the ancient Honeywell brown analogue thermostat (T6060 stylee) with something a bit more modern. I do not need Hive/Nest or anything else that has an app. Don't really need to be able to program it either (it's quite a warm flat as we have upstairs and downstairs neighbours) but being able to see the current temp in a digital display is a must. No remote sensors required as the current thermostat location (the hall) is central.

I was in a similar situation with my heating. Combi boiler only had one of those mechanical timers with the in/out tabs so didn't even know which day of the week it was.

Got Hive (2) installed in Sept and am very happy with it. Regularly working late at the moment so it's only scheduled to be on from 6.30-7.45 and 21-22.30. If I'm gonna be home any earlier I just stick it on advance before leaving work.

Zone control would be very useful, I could easily get away with just the bathroom heated in a morning. Am hoping that there might be such a thing as a hive duel-fuel bathroom radiator which you could just schedule to come on electrically rather than bothering the central heating.

Think I paid £1800 a couple of years ago for a Vaillant ecoTec 831 including install, flush and I think 5 new valves. Have got 7 radiators in a 2.5 bed house. Install was done in a day, guy based in Brixton.

I have my remote control for my thermo in my room next to a stand alone digital thermometer. Its funny but sometimes 16'c feels cold and sometimes 10'c feels warm...

The free smart meter gives me the current internal temp - I'm with Brit Gas but they should all be rolling them out soon.

This morning I got a power-flush of my radiators as they have been gunking up some part which was giving me false pressure readings, so system would be too high or too low.
I saw the water, phew weee....dark and stormy.
Powerflush and a filter fitted by BG - £800 something. Same price for up to 12 radiators in a house. I spread payments over 6 months. And there's now a guarantee on it.

sorry should have replied to @Greenbank

First thing I did when we bought this place was get hive 1 installed. So easy to manage the heating around my shifts and with the temperature tracker graph thingy you can see when her indoors has left the back door open while she pegs out the washing.

Words were had that night, believe you me, words were had.

"Fucking hang up your own fucking washing..."

lol