Smart Home help - 2 controllers and 5 thermostats

[R8SSO]

Hi all

I was just wondering if anyone on here has had their home installed with a smart heating system?

I'm moving into a new build and the existing setup is slightly more complex then my current property. There is a boiler in the garage, a tall cylinder water heater plus a controller on the wall for setting a timer. This controller is for the downstairs underfloor heating and there are 4 thermostats controlling different rooms.

In the utility room I have another controller which is for the upstairs radiators and there is 1 wireless thermostat to control that.

I had a British Gas engineer round to install Hive and he looked at it and said it's too complicated for him. If it was a simple Hive installation he'd be fine but wouldn't know where to start on this setup!

I presume you have wet underfloor heating rather than electric?

Could you post a photo of the 2 controllers or their details / model numbers?

You should be able to get the Drayton Wiser system to work with your setup, but you would need 2 controllers and I'm not certain their app supports that.

The fundamental problem you need to solve is having 'smart controllers' (like the Wiser system) rather than a 'smart thermostat's (like Hive).

Forgot to ask.. what are you looking to achieve by having 'smart' control of your system.

1. The ability to turn on/off the system remotely?
2. The ability to set temperatures remotely?
3. Both :)

Yes wet underfloor heating.

My primary aim is to have full remote control of my downstairs heating. So the 4 underfloor heating zones, with independent timers for each zone. At the moment the controller in the garage allows me to set windows for the heating to come on (6-8am) and if all the downstairs thermostats are set to 19 degrees then all 4 rooms heat up. I only use the kitchen in the mornings so I don’t want the other 3 to come on. I could turn them down but when I set the second window for (4-6pm), so it’s warm for when I come home, they wouldn’t switch on...

Hope that clarifies it, will take some photos and post the controllers. (Honeywell)

Not an expert but I believe Nest can cope with these kinds of setups. As I understand it you need a whole raft of motorised valves and you'll need an initial mid-position valve so that the thermostat that controls the radiators upstairs can choose to divert where central heating water gets sent.

The challenge you have is that each of your thermostats will need to be replaced with a 'smart' thermostat, so this might get expensive quite quickly.

I believe the Tado system and the Honeywell Evohome will support what you're trying to achieve. Might be worth asking them if they have approved installers in your area you could talk to.

My British Gas engineer husband said the best thing would be to have the hive Control the hot water and the upstairs heating. And leave the downstairs as it is.

I saw your later reply, he basically said no, it's would be hell of a complicated. In theory you could have 4 zones, but that would be massively expensive and very complicated. So in theory yes, it could be done, but you will probably struggle to get someone to do it, and it just may not work.

A little unsure why you want to control the underfloor heating though, I thought the idea was that it was a slow steady heat so it was on low and constant?

Hi we have just renovated a large property and had wet ufh installed downstairs ours is also Honeywell. As others have said ufh is really to be left on from experience what you propose may not work. I've turned our ufh down at night to come on to warm the kitchen in a morning it takes an age to heat back up so I simply lower it now to an ambient temperature 18 to increase to 20 which seems to work but my heating engineer says I should really leave it on one temp full time. Apparently it will also heat the rest of the house this way. It's a bit of a game to try to find what works for you and it's still a work in progress for us save that I have learnt switching the ufh off doesn't work for a quick turn around to reheat. Hope that makes sense!

It does make sense, I wasn't aware that was the best way to use underfloor heating.

This could still work with my original ask though, it just means the default "off" would be 15 degrees then between 6-8am it would be at 20 degrees then slowly drop back down to 15 until it kicked in again at 4-6pm.

Like you say though, it's probably going to take some trial and error to find out what works for us.

ST9400C Is the controller Parkview - see attached