Internet Of Things / IoT / Connected Home / Smart Houses

Any recommendations for a home wireless mesh? I'm looking to add a firewall into my connection as there's so many bloody devices kicking around. Looking at a firewalla gold if it makes any difference. It'll be connected up as follows:

Modem (currently also AP) -> firewalla -> wireless mesh (+ another port to the TV DNS unblocker)

TP Link Decos (Deci?) are the forum choice.

I have M5s and initial results are very positive. Velocio made a great post a few pages back in response to me asking about Deco vs Eero

I’ll get a 3 pack of the m9 so I can get rid of my increasing stack of extenders and power line devices. Don’t suppose you know if it’s possible to assign ssid to VLAN as I’d like to have separate dns for each ssid (dns based géo-service dodging). Will help me bin another router :)

LOL nope that is far beyond my ability

I still need to set up one of mine in the shed, connected via ethernet backhaul over powerlines.

Can someone point me to a comparison of nest Vs other smart thermostat Vs a plain old thermostat. Ta.
Because I figure for it to work properly I'm going to need valves that talk to nest.
Right?

This is all measured against : just put a fucking jumper on.

Nest has no radiator integration... it's really just on/off control for the boiler. Smart yes... adapts schedule, learns how long it takes to get the room with the thermostat to a specified temperature, can learn how you manually override the schedule and make those adjustments for you... it makes set it and forget it complete... but it also is just an on/off switch. The best on/off switch for sure, at least this works when the internet is down (I switched from Hive to Nest precisely because an internet outage rendered my heating useless).

The smart integrations from boiler manufacturers are also on/off switches. Typically tuned to the boiler to make them more efficient in their ramp up of heating. Not as intelligent as the Nest, but if you're using a static schedule then they do this via a nice app and allow you to trigger heating out of home and will ensure the heating is fractionally more efficient.

The real difference comes when you jump to Tado. Still an on/off switch for the boiler, but now with individual radiator control. This is done by having the TRVs on the radiator be motorised, and it will combine enabling the boiler with adjusting radiators to give per-room control. Some reports in this thread of Tado TRVs being noisy when they adjust (i.e. when you're sleeping and they adjust to enable heating before you've woken)... but you get per-room control.

What I believe the decision chart looks roughly like is this:

• Small apartment and deep pockets? Buy Nest
  
• Small apartment and shallow pockets? Any smart thermostat will do, the boiler recommended one is good, the cheaper Nest is good
  
• Large home and radiators but only desire whole home on/off control? Buy Nest or boiler recommended smart thermostat
  
• Large home and air-con? Buy Nest - this is the only time you'll fully utilise a Nest, it was made for the US market and now it will keep each room (air-con unit zone) within a lower and upper temp/humidity range
  
• Large home and radiators? Buy Tado - this is the only time you'll fully get per-room control with radiators. No point doing this on a single level 1/2 bed flat as the internal temps will even out and the benefit is hardly there
  
  

You can also read between the lines and realise that in the UK market, with radiators... all of the above are a little bit shit.

The biggest advantage is merely an app to turn the stuff on before you get home on cold days and to turn it off automatically when you've gone out. But it's hardly life-changing.

(I switched from Hive to Nest precisely because an internet outage rendered my heating useless).

Just reminded me to test this. With no internet the app doesn't work, but the thermostat still controls the heating as normal.

Was your Hive the first gen?

2nd Gen.

The scenario was that Hive had the outage on their APIs but my internet was up... Hive doesn't like this failure mode. It checks internet and if it's available assumes the APIs must be available... when they aren't, the only thing you can do is fully manual boiler control.

It was a multi-day outage last Autumn.

Just to add to that, there are plenty of options that let you start out at the whole home on/off and expand to room control. Drayton Wiser (which is what I'll probably end up with) and Netatmo both allow that.

You can also add it to Nest with Energenie valves but I have no idea how they perform.

Yeah that's what my thoughts were.
The vaillant controller looks about right. Will talk to the installation person.

Why aren't smart showers more of a thing? Stabilising the temperature when someone turns on the dishwasher and whatnot?

I looked into Energenie valves, annoyingly they have really poor reviews!

The other thing that makes a difference is if you are having a new system installed then you can set up zones in the old fashioned way with pipes. So we have seven zones in our house, one for each upstairs floor which are rads, then the UFH on the ground floor is set up in 5 zones. Each zone is controlled by its own thermostat, with nest on the top floors, the UFH is just using old fashioned on the wall thermostats as I couldn't justify putting 5 more nests in... But I am tempted to get some of the cheaper nests when they come on offer to control the UFH, if only to avoid having to set the timer on the old school thermostats.

How many floors is that?

3 floors.

Top floor: kind of attic conversion, one bedroom, one dressing room, 3 rads all on one nest
Middle floor: 3 bedrooms all on one nest
ground floor: UFH on old fashioned thermostats (for now)

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Isn't that just a thermostatic shower valve?

The room I worry about is my daughter's room, it's the last rad on the circuit and can be noticeably colder

What type of rads do you have?

Modern alu rads have low water content... pretty much meaning it takes less water to heat the rad, resulting in faster heating throughout the house with the speed being how fast you can convey the hot water to the rads, rather than how fast the rads can push it to the edge to radiate.

Radiators like this: https://www.theradiatorcompany.co.uk/product-pages/sectional-aluminium/vox/ are ridiculously efficient and fast, and even manage to act as air pumps to the heat by directing it into the primary space.

Tado doesn't like it when your internet goes out either, although it does allow manual local control of TRVs / thermostat, and does act as a regulator - it's just the programming that stops, and everything switches to dumb mode.

I've not checked what happens to water though - I guess it defaults to the last known stated (i.e. on or off).

I'd love it if they released a self-host option.

Smart showers exist... https://nebia.com/ I doubt you want them.

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The room I worry about is my daughter's room, it's the last rad on the circuit and can be noticeably colder.

You need to balance your radiators. Close the lockshield a bit on the ones that are warming up quickly and open it up on the ones that don't. Takes hours to do it properly. Some people like to measure the input and output temperature of each radiator with a thermocouple while doing it. Heating engineers will never do it properly because it takes far to long for anyone to want to pay for their time to mostly drink a lot of tea.

Why aren't smart showers more of a thing? Stabilising the temperature when someone turns on the dishwasher and whatnot?

My Combi boiler fed shower has no problem doing this. It's a bog standard 10 year old Bristan thermostatic bar shower. It's had one new cartridge in its life (actually, it's probably due another cartridge failure soon as the water here (SW15) is harder than ten hard things).

Not a problem when someone turns on a hot water tap in the kitchen, the flow just dips a bit. (The dishwasher and washing machines are cold water feeds only.)

Yes. This has been a thing. I thought I had them sorted this season of "turn the heating on!".
Now it's "get the fucking boiler working" episode in the season.