Heating remote control: recommendation/views please?

[Allan]

What is the view of assembled company on re remote control for domestic heating (certainly CH, not necessarily HW, but both would be nice)

I've seen

• Heatmiser

• Nest

• Hive

Ideally controlled from a web browser (but if it must be a phone app, I s'pose it'll have to be). Would be good to be able to set on and off timings, and manually over-ride.

Would be nice to have a couple of temperature sensors (to check what the temperatures in the house are).

The house is 250 miles away (in Suffolk), and has broadband. The boiler is a Vaillant ecoTEC plus condensing boiler with in-built frost protection, with a Honeywell programmer and Honeywell wireless room thermostat.

Any views/recommendations/gotchas please?

TIA Allan

[Andrew Gabriel]

I can't comment on specific commercial products because I made my own 15 years ago. However, I can assure you they are really valuable things to have. Quite besides the convenience of being able to control your heating and hot water remotely, it has probably saved me vastly more fuel than many other energy saving measures could have done. Obviously that depends on circumstances - how many people are in the house, how predictable/repeatable their occupancy is, etc.

Mine initially was voice prompts and DTMF response over the phone, but over the years, I added internet access (ssh with dial-up initially, and web with ADSL).

Another key aspect is occupancy detection. i.e. don't bother bringing house up to room temperature when no on is in. When you are on your way home, you can tell it remotely, and have the heating come on then.

I have one in each zone which control the call for heat, and one in the loft for frost protection. Then there are some others which are not used by the heating system, but just for my information, such as fridge, freezer, outdoors (actually that can be used by the heating compensation).

[Andy Burns]

I have one of those, they're not cheap, but it does the job well.

The only "intelligence" it has is predictive start to get it to the set temperature by the set time, it doesn't try to learn when you're home/away by GPS tracking etc

Programmable and overridable from a web browser or a mobile phone app.

Here's some 3rd party monitoring from it a couple of years ago, the blue lines are the set temperatures varying though the week, dotted blue lines with (P) being the predictive starts, green (H) and (M) are manual hold or modify, red [T] are water timed periods, the orange bands are the boiler run periods, black line is temperature from a nearby met office station.

[RJH]

Very good! How did you do that?

[Andy Burns]

I take no credit, just installed this in a Linux VM

I notice that he's added a voice interface for iThings now ... "Siri, turn the heating on"

[Chris French]

Note, it says it doesn't work with the current Neo Heatmiser stats, and they don't sell the old ones anymore it seems.

There protocol is published and there is an API, so presumably something similar could work, but I'm not aware of it

[Andy Burns]

I wasn't aware they'd moved onto the Neo units, looks like they have added geo tracking.

TBH I doubt they've changed the API much, so it could soon be persuaded to work with them.