Hive Heating

[Grumps]

Hi, If I install a receiver+thermostat+hub package, will this allow me to control my home heating remotely or do you also need an active subscription? I cannot find a straight answer on the web. Ta.

[Andy Bennet]

Connect your hub to your router and you can read and control your home heating - including changing the schedules, manual control and turn it on/off manually. No you don't need a subscription. I have 3 receivers/thermostats (2 zones and one outside in a sealed box to measure outside temp)and hub and it all works fine.

[Grumps]

Many thanks Andy.

[NY]

You need to create an account as part of the device setup, but this is free of charge. We've found Hive to be excellent: they've now included a facility in the app (but not in the web interface) which shows the temperature at the thermostat as a line of many points (as opposed to bar chart in 1-hour chunks) and with details of when and for how long the heating has been on in a 00:00-23:59 period.

It's been great to be able to control the heating when we are away from home: for example we manually put the heating into holiday mode (nominal frost-free temperature) and then manually go in and resume the normal heating programme when we are several hours from arriving home - so the house is warm.

The diagram of when the heating is on and off is most interesting: unless you are near the boiler and/or near a radiator, it's difficult to know how long the heating is one for, except by looking at the "On" light in the app frequently - or looking at the usage graph.

We find that the room temperature is a lot more constant than it was with a bimetallic thermostat - apart from the effect of outside heating from the sun and outside cooling if the temperature outside is particularly cold. But on an average cool-but-not-freezing autumn/winter/spring day, the temperature is fairly constant.

One thing: make sure that the Hive hub has good connectivity over its private wireless connection to the thermostat(s) and good Ethernet/wifi connectivity to the internet. We have had a few cases where the heating has remained on after the temp has risen to the setting on the thermostat, and it coincides with loss of internet connection from the hub to the internet (even if hub-stat and hub-boiler comms is fine) - and that's due to our damn mesh network devices not always re-connecting to the parent node after a power cut, of which we are getting a lot (typically just for a second or so) at this time of year because of overhanging branches shorting out high-voltage lines somewhere in the area, according to Northern Powergrid.

[Brian]

As NY posted, a free account for remote access etc but it is free and not really a subscription. You can get other functions ( not sure what) if you pay but I find the basic functions perfectly adequate. For example, we’ve just returned from holiday. As we arrived in Folkestone, I turned on the heating and hot water so the house was warm etc by the time we’d driven up the M20 etc.

[Tim+]

I have a couple of Shelly 1 relays (£12 each) that lets me do that. Of course I can’t adjust temperatures but more than adequate for controlling remotely when returning from holiday etc. Also a lot easier to program that the original boiler controller.

Tim