Hive - what do you do with it?

[museumum]

I’m convinced by the heating. It’s good. We turned it on remotely last winter from holiday during snowmageddon. I use the app to adjust settings and timer.

But so far that’s all we have - is anything else actually useful??

We are getting it in the new house.
The camera we will use to keep an eye on the little one in bed. Remote viewing on the phone means the wife can see him from work.
IFTTT commands interest me down the line. The ability to open the front door and have the lights come on when struggling with bags of shopping, or pairing window sensors to turn lights on when opened as a security feature.
It can also be linked to Alexa, so plenty of future use as a hub, rather than just a heating control

We have a lot of the HIVE lights around the house. They are on schedules to go on and off in the evenings, the fish tank light is on one as well. It's useful in everyday life but also if we are away the house still looks like someone is home.

We also put the heating thermostat in our daughters room overnight so that she is kept at a nice temperature.

We have a hive socket attached to a lamp in our lounge. It is also Alexa enabled. This means I can schedule it if I want, and also turn it on and off without having to faff for the floor switch that is behind the sofa. I expect us to get a few more of the sockets too, as we're getting some more lamps and I like having that functionality.

I'd like some hive bulbs too, but they don't make them compatible with our light fittings as yet.

I do love the Alexa compatibility for the hot water and heating though. As we have several Echo Dots around the house, I can just tell it to boost if I'm a bit chilly, or I remember we have guests. It's great.