Please explain smart heating/ multi room to me?

[GerbilsForever24]

Another thread has inspired me. Our radiators are old and have those old fashioned controls that supposedly go from 1-5 in terms of how much heat the radiator puts out. But frankly, there's about as effective as a chocolate teapot. we generally find we have two settings - On and Off.

The problem is that heating upstairs is much much easier than heating downstairs so we are constantly either freezing downstairs or sweltering upstairs depending on where we leave the wireless thermostat.

The obvious solution appears to be multi-zoning. But I can't work this out - does it have to be done with smart meters and smart hubs and all the rest? Often installed by a professional? I can't find anything that suggests I can just replace my existing valves with better ones that will then figure out what temperature THAT room is and turn THAT radiator on or off as needed. So is that it? I have to get a whole fancy system, replace all the radiator valves, get a hub and multiple thermostats?

Please can I get the Idiots Guide To Better Home Heating? I've googled my heart out and got nowhere.

I’m renovating at the moment and putting in a smart heating system from scratch. Involves a KNZ system (whatever that is) smart radiator valves, a thermostat in every room and a control panel. Means we can program each room individually and change each room individually at any time. Sounds complicated but very flexible and I can’t pretend I understand it 😳

Ok, we have smart trvs on our radiators. Controlled by a hub (comes all together in a set). The hub just plugs in anywhere, connects to your wifi. Then you put the smart trvs on your radiators and bind them to the hub. Each one has its own thermostat - I think you can get additional thermostats if you like but we don't have. The system we have then lets you create a schedule for each individual radiator. So eg, we have the ones inf he bedrooms come on in the morning but downstairs is later.
you can override the controls on each radiator of you want by just turning the trv up or down. Or you can control any of them from the hub or from an app.
the only bit we couldn't do ourselves is install the hot water thermostat - maybe we could have but we didn't!

We have a Honeywell system because it came with up to 12 zones, other systems I think you can add zones but pay more. It probably cost £1k to get all the kit.

If you get good themostatic valves for your radiators (Drayton trv5s) then it would allow you to have upstairs rads turned on so that they automatically turn off at a lower room temp. However the best set up is zoned heating where you have a separate thermostat for upstairs and one for downstairs. Then you can just have upstairs heating on for an hour when you get up and an hour when you go to bed and switched off for the rest of the day. downstairs could just be on in the evenings. Valves are easy to fit. Should take a plumber about a day to fit them on all radiators in a house. Zoned heating I think would involve seperating the pipes for upstairs and downstairs so would be more work and you need to have some magnetic switching valves put in.

We have Hive which has thermostat in hall and smart valves on the radiators. You can control/schedule each room individually and each room's radiator can turn the boiler on when it needs heat. The valves we just installed ourselves as they just click on where the old ones come off. We did get an electrician to install the Hive thermostat boiler controls.

Here are a couple of screenshots to show what I mean.

If you want your smart radiator valves to be able to call to the boiler individually you'll compatible boiler controls installed.

The thermostats are built in to the trvs in case that wasn't clear. So you just have the smart gubbins on the rad and the hub and that's all that's needed.

"that supposedly go from 1-5 in terms of how much heat the radiator puts out. But frankly, there's about as effective as a chocolate teapot. we generally find we have two settings - On and Off."

Over time those 1-5 things reach the "On or Off" stage as they age, and then you can just replace the end bit and restore the 1-5 control, where each room will heat to a certain temperature and shut off. I've done this on several older houses I owned, and it is a cheap, simple, diy fix. From memory it was about £10 per TRV, but this was a while ago.

There is nothing wrong with zones and linked TRVs it would also solve your problem. We have a similar system, and you can fiddle with settings to your hearts content, just you problem sounds like old stiff TRVs not the need for a multi zone system

Okay, this is all helpful. Thank you.

@Akite When you bought the Honeywell - you selected the hub and the various radiator valves together and then installed it yourself? I'm not worried about adding a smart timer or anything to our boiler. At the moment, our heating comes on and off based on a timer and the thermostat is a wireless one that sits wherever we want. Would the new hub override the original timer or would the original timer still control when the heating is on/off?

@Hugasauras If I'm reading it right - your system basically means an electricial installs a new timer/control and you then just added the smart valves? So we'd lose the current timer/control in favour of a smart one? Which would mean we do need to get for the boiler I guess as the current timer/control does both.

@WithManyTot that is useful to know. thank you. Might well be a good short term solution. Poor DD's room is a particular problem at the moment. Luckily its also a very big room so the fact that the radiator is on at full blast is less of an issue than it could be.

@GerbilsForever24 Yes, that's what we did. We added them separately so we had the electrician do the Hive hub and controls, so we had one thermostat in hall,and then at a later date we added the radiator valves, which was just a case of unscrewing old ones and screwing on the new ones.