Time to look at central heating again.

My 2c here as just moved into a new build and had 2 zones on a Honeywell system with wired thermostats for each zone. Found that I couldn’t get a constant temp across the house and the boiler was firing up all the bloody time. Really driven by the fact that to warm anything up, I needed one of the zone thermostats to be set to a higher temp.

I dabbled with all the various systems and last weekend got the Tado kit and a bunch of TRV’s.

I have 18 rads in this house and OMG it gets expensive to be honest but so far I have 6 rads with the smart TRV’s and so far I’ve already seen an improvement in the temperature across the house; a constant 19c. I have another 8 TRV’s arriving this week and will ultimately get to the point where all the rads are TRV controlled.

What I like is that each room can call for heat on demand …. I’m yet to go down the route of balancing the rads but am new to all the stuff, so it’s a work in progress.

As for the power cut; well I have a APC 1300 UPS that all my internet gear is wired too and just added the USB powered Tado bridge to that.
 
I have noted Hive has come down in price, so will likely fit Hive in parrellel with the Nest, what is upsetting the balance I think is daughter living in flat below main house, and heat comes up through the floor.

As to balancing, mothers house I simply use the TRV heads reported temperatures so if current exceeds target close lock shield a little. Worked great with modulating gas boiler, but here with oil boiler, and micro bore, balancing does not work that well, have needed to open the lock shields again, can't find a by-pass valve or radiator, but hot water does return when no radiators are up to temperature, so seems likely there is one hidden some where.

I only have 14 radiators, flat and house independent zones, but house just use the 9 programmable TRV 's.
 
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