Is Honeywell Evohome for me?

[bigup]

Hi all

We currently have a Worcester 37cdi Gas Combi boiler with a Honeywell CM927 thermostat running at around 21c throughout the day, single zoned.

We have a total 12 Rads in a detached 4 bed house, my elderly mother lives with us so she is home all day and we have a 11 month baby so the wife is home all day too.

I am looking at cutting some costs as we are heating rooms that are not being used during the day

I would like our living room, 1 bedroom (where baby sleeps) to be on during the day then the others to come on in the evening for when the other kids go to bed.

I looked at Nest/Hive but these are more geared around when no one is at home so heating switches off then on again when your close by to home, is this correct?

i want multi zoned so can have full control and also would like smartphone access (just cos its cool to have )

As we already have the CM927 fitted, i have the BDR91 relay box already in and working, so it would be a case of just binding the new Evohome controller and then adding the Rad trvs to each radiator?

Should I be looking at other systems for what i want? there is the tada system also which can be rented.

thanks

 

[flameport]

The 4 letter named products including Nest / Hive / Tado are basically designed for lazy persons who inexplicably switch their heating to maximum and then go out to work.
They save money by using smartphone(s) to determine when the occupants have left the building and then switching the heating off.
As most people generally go out to work or wherever at the same times each day, a basic timer would achieve similar results.

The Hive / British Gas one was advertised with the feature that you can go to the park and then switch your hot water on and off. It was not explained why any sane person would want to do that or how that could save money.
The Nest one contains the All Seeing Eye of Google which might be used for other unspecified purposes. It can interact with other devices such as the talking smoke alarm and the home surveillance camera which remains permanently on even when you have switched it off.
None of them will provide zone control, unless you already have that feature. In the case of the Tado one, you must buy one of the expensive devices for each zone.

Evohome will do zone control and plenty more.

 

[mattice]

I guess it depends in the period you would want a return on investment. I 'invested' in eve home and made my money back in just under 2 years. We were also far more comfortable in our home as we could tailor the fuel to heat the rooms re required to a temperature my wife appreciated That said, my ROI was based on massive oil prices at the time. That aside, EVO home has never failed on me, just set an annual calendar entry to replace the batteries.

In answer to your question, yes. We put honeywell trv's on all Rads, with exception of the two bathrooms to ensure there's always a route for heat release in the system. That said, it's possible to detach the thermostat from the trv and programme a zone, leaving your manual try's in place if you don't want to go the whole hog.

The system works brilliantly in our old draft house... I chose to ignore all the doubters about having heat isolated/insulted rooms.... we saved a fortune

 

[ironsidebod]

The Hive / British Gas one was advertised with the feature that you can go to the park and then switch your hot water on and off. It was not explained why any sane person would want to do that or how that could save money.

I've no interest in the boxed products as routing all of my data through their networks is not for me I will roll my own controller at some point when I get round to doing some home integration software etc

The use case I always use for controlling the heating when not at home is for the animals. If at work and it drops seriously cold I can switch the heating on for a bit to warm the house but not get it too warm as to overheat said animals. Other than that I quite agree, almost every other scenario can be done by existing timers, temp sensors and the complex scenarios could be taken care of automatically using the right software.

 

[SimonH2]

The use case I always use for controlling the heating when not at home is for the animals. If at work and it drops seriously cold I can switch the heating on for a bit to warm the house but not get it too warm as to overheat said animals.

For that I'd have assumed you'd simply program the TRVs to maintain a minimum level - so if it turns cold they'll come on a bit to avoid freezing your livestock. Eg rather than having on-off heating - you'd set the rads to (eg) 18˚ background level.

Personally I'm waiting for OpenTRV who seem to be on track to having the first "finished" systems available before too long.

 

[ironsidebod]

The use case I always use for controlling the heating when not at home is for the animals. If at work and it drops seriously cold I can switch the heating on for a bit to warm the house but not get it too warm as to overheat said animals.

For that I'd have assumed you'd simply program the TRVs to maintain a minimum level - so if it turns cold they'll come on a bit to avoid freezing your livestock. Eg rather than having on-off heating - you'd set the rads to (eg) 18˚ background level.

Personally I'm waiting for OpenTRV who seem to be on track to having the first "finished" systems available before too long.

True enough, not looked into it in any great detail yet, lots to plan. I guess controllable was the plan but a TRV based system Z Wave or similar is likely to be what I go for. Pattern based monitoring and activity (as we're all creatures of habit to a certain extent) would be interesting from a doing point of view, whether that translates into efficiency and/or savings I'm not sure.

 

[SimonH2]

I guess controllable was the plan but a TRV based system Z Wave or similar is likely to be what I go for. Pattern based monitoring and activity (as we're all creatures of habit to a certain extent) would be interesting from a doing point of view, whether that translates into efficiency and/or savings I'm not sure.

Well the OpenTRV project claims significant potential savings, and knowing how badly our system at home works I can believe that. You may find the presentation over at http://www.earth.org.uk/OpenTRV/talks/BCS/ interesting to flick through.

According to Damon's email at http://lists.opentrv.org.uk/pipermail/opentrv-interest/2015-December/000285.html, they were over in China last month sorting out tooling up for the first batch of production valves for trials. So that's looking promising.

 

[ironsidebod]

Nice one cheers, I'll take a look.

 

[SimonH2]

There's just been a short exchange on the OpenTRV-interest list where it's come out that at present they only have one-way comms (from the valves to the boiler interface (or anything else listening for data)). Damon has said that he's working on the security code to allow two-way comms at the moment - it's only a security thing, he didn't want "insecure" comms for controlling the TRVs.
I've asked for clarification on how the units are set in terms of heating schedules etc ...