I agree - Netflix can stream better quality over ADSL than DTV manages, which is a travesty.
The moral is - you are right, but it depends very much on the product. 2 identical (in the glossy boxes) products, similar pricing, one is a piece of crap and the other works really well.
My ZWave outside temp sensor (Aeon labs) was tricky to get working, but now it does it too seems to have remained reliable, even down to -5C when I thought the batteries would give out.
don't you understand ? your house needs x amount of energy to heat to a particular temp, you can only change that amount of energy to maintain that temp if you insulate in the various ways there are. If you allow your house to lose energy, i.e. temperature, then it will need to replace that which is lost.This means it will stay on longer to replace the lost energy.
My homebrew system uses the house alarm setting, and also the alarm's sensors as occupancy sensors.
Likewise, and accessing it remotely. When I used to work in an office, my work colleagues were always intreagued at me turning on my home heating I left the office.
that the use of these "systems" to control central heating, either at a distance, internet or whatever negates what they are supposed to do, which is save money. Turn heating off or down and then back up to operating temp costs money.
It's the myth that will not die - even though it barely needs a knowledge of physics to see why it is wrong - a bit of applied logic is more or less enough.
All that is needed is to think, even very slightly, about switching it off for one minute, one hour, one day, one week, one month, one year, one decade, ... And if you haven't seen any savings, give up and get someone else to think for you.
You could engineer a system where it was true, like a boiler that ran non condensing while warming the house up and condensing when it was just keeping it warm.
Thats why it would have to be engineered to minimise the sweet spot.
Physics says the energy lost will be less if you turn off the heating. Putting the energy back in depends on the system being used and the relative costs. For nearly all houses in the UK it would be cheaper to heat it up rather than keep it hot as you already know.
Hmm - just found that you can play with a demo website/phone app:
formatting link
I spoke to one of their tech guys yesterday (they're English). Seems impressive. The question I put was:
If I have 2 zones, day areas and bedrooms:
Can I be cheap and put ZWave TRVs in the bedrooms and a temperature sensor in say the living room - as teh bedrooms are used less but when they call for heat, it's fine to heat the rest of the house.
Answer - yes. And you can add more ZWave TRVs and/or room sensors as you like later. The TRV they use is the Danfoss one which have good reviews for being fairly well built and reasonably good at compensating for temperatures despite being next to the rad.
So it seems you can add, to any room:
Room stat with local knob for direct control (but the TRVs apparantly allow for direct control too)
-or- PIR/Temp sensor for occupancy detection and temperature sensing.
and ZWave TRVs
Then you can add 1 one or two channel receivers to either the whole house to control the boiler (CH and HW), and, it *seems*, additional 1 channel receivers to a single room to control UFH manifold valve.
It certainly looks massively flexible. The only downside I can see is access to programming looks like it requires a company "portal".
It will take a fixed input of heat to raise the temperature of a house by a given number of degrees, or require the loss of the same amount of heat to lower the temperature by the same number of degrees.
At the same time, the house will lose heat whenever it is above the outside temperature (because it is not perfectly insulated). If the house is unheated, this loss of heat will cause the temperature to fall.
So you have a choice: either you trickle feed the heat in to maintain the temperature, or you let it all escape and then feed it all back in again to bring the temperature up to the desired level ... and for short periods of time, the costs will be identical (because the amount of heat involved is identical).
*HOWEVER* Once you have left the heating off for an hour, the temperature of the house will fall, so *less* heat will be lost in the second hour, and less heat will be required at the end of the second hour to bring the temperature back up. If, on the other hand, you leave the heating on, then the heat loss (and hence the cost) in the second hour will be the same as in the first.
Now, in the example above, I have talked about "hours", but actually the relevant time period can vary hugely. A highly insulated house with a lot of masonry inside the insulation will only lose a little heat, and the temperature won't change much when it does lose that heat. A very draughty light-weight house on the other hand, will lose a lot of heat, and the temperature will fall fast when it does so.
Timers and smart controls make more sense if you are away for a time which is long compared to how long it takes the house to cool down. Remote control makes sense if the house takes a long time to heat up (and you don't leave the heating on, and the time of your return is not completely predictable).
This isn't *completely* true. Most boilers are most efficient at turning fuel into "heat in the home" if they are running flat out, so there is a slight advantage to letting the temperature fall and then rise again even if the amount of heat required is the same.
What worries me about this type of product is that it is NOT standalone but requires an internet connection and some sort of access to a central server ? I understand this is probably necessary for remote control and access but not if all one wants is control from within the house. I would not want any system which could be come useless if a company stopped trading or a system which falls over if the broadband connection goes down.
"You can login by either connecting through the Heat Genius Website ? this gives you access to your system through their server. However, you can also access your Heat Genius System through your Mobile devices (Android or iOS) and this will connect you directly to your local Heat Genius Hub.
I know for a fact that the guys at Heat Genius are working on a upgrade that allows you to control your heating without having to login either through their server or use your mobile device."
The first para is ambiguous.
The second implies they are going to offer the option to cut out the middleman.
Yeah I've got a Nest - now backed by Google which is nice! Have to say I've had no problems at all really, it's easy to use and actually does what it's supposed to (learns when to adjust heating to what temperature).
I love the way I can set up the home heating on my phone for when I get home, really fab that. I got mine from STL Heating because they're price was the cheapest I could find - unlike the big name energy firms you see on TV who wanted a lot more !?
5 posts today in this group from this spammer for STL - "amazed at how much I'd ended-up saving " "blog that someone made" "rang some local North West based firms"
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