Hive, load of rubbish. Any better alternative?

D

dragonfly101

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My quibbles with Hive are many:

1. Half the time when I login on PC or phone app, the hub or receiver is down, and something needs restarting - so useless when I'm out of the house.
2. The website, try logging in to https://www.hivehome.com/ and finding a link to where you set your thermostat. There isn't one, you have to bookmark the URL my.hivehome.com.
3. Setting temperature and timings in their website is the fiddliest and least user-friendly thing I've seen on a website in years.
4. Despite clicking 'Save' to save my changes to temperature settings, when I go back into the website they have reverted to the old ones, seems my thermostat is stuck with what I set before fuel prices shot up.
5. Now they want me to buy their new hive hub. Are they deliberately messing up my existing one to make me buy their new one? It actually wasn't always this bad.
6. The hub, and even the new one they want to sell me does not support wifi, it has to plugged into the router - which is a pain for me where my router is located.
 
Plenty available and reading your other post you might (boiler permitting) be able to get weather compensation, or install something like Drayton Wiser with matching TRV heads ?
 
Wiser, Tado, Hive, Evohome, Nest, Netatmo all seem to have their supporters and detractors. Personally I looked a Wiser, Tado, Hive and Nest, I quickly dismissed Nest as I found it to be all form over function with its major issue being that it doesnt support smart TRV's. Tado put me off because from what I read if the internet goes down so does your heating! Hive just seemed to have too many issues, especially with the smart TRV's. In the end I have gone with the Drayton Wiser system which I installed a couple of weeks ago and so far so good but clearly it is still early days.
 
Is it just grass other side of street is greener, I have problems with Nest, claimed worked with Energenie TRV heads, it doesn't.

Drayton Wiser seems to get good reports, but functions like geofencing seem to vary a lot, and little info as which system will do what.

I would like to be able to set distance, but Nest only allows one to set Eco and Comfort temperatures. But it does have built in PIR, so walking past the thermostat sets it to comfort even if phone battery is discharged.

When people say they have fitted Hive, I ask how well the TRV heads work, only to be told, we did not fit those, so why did they fit Hive?
 
As we needed the Combi install done fairly quickly after we completed we went along with the installer's choice of Hive with bog standard TRVs, I've not found it too bad but we're not using the geofencing.

I've since put in a Home Assistant install for temperature/humidity monitoring which has an add-on for Hive which means I've not needed to pay them money for history at least and means I don't need to login to the website every 5 minutes.

Now I'm pondering slightly cleverer controls on a couple of the bedroom TRVs and finding their TRVs look a bit meh so I'm getting a tough of "grass is greener", the ideal would be to be able to integrate individual components well rather than proprietary systems, might be able to do some of it with HA but I still want a simpler thermostat bit as a fallback.

David.
 
Yeah, I'm currently pondering whether to go posh and get a Shelly or the like, or get a cheaper zigbee one or an epshome one, I'm not bothered about the privacy element as much as reliability (of the devices and the setup overall), Home Assistant should be able to glue the two together but it's another bit that I'll have to look after.

David.
 
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