Changing boiler. New radiators all at once or gradually as we decorate?

[Toblerony]

We’re buying a house that needs a new boiler. We’d like to replace the radiators, and also get a heating control system that lets us control things from our phones. (But not bloody Hive, which came with our current house.)

We’ve only owned one house and haven’t made these changes, so this is new to us.

Are we best off getting this all done at once so we can ensure everything works together and only drain the system down once, both in terms of cost and practicality?

I’m wavering just because we plan to redecorate the house gradually and this will mean decorating around new radiators and possibly finding we want to change some.

Would appreciate any advice, experiences etc. Thank you!

Thank you! This is exactly what I was hoping to hear, to be honest, I’m just not sure of my own judgement.

Economically it is best to replace all in one go also. You only pay the plumber once for several days rather than a day here and there. You might get a discount on buying several rads.

Are you happy to replace the radiators for new ones of the same width ?
If yes, are you confident with YouTube videos to do that yourself in the future?
If yes, then just make sure the system is flushed when the boiler is changed ( it was my understanding that the boiler manufacturer would insist on this any way ) and the correct amount of inhibitor applied after plus make sure you have a magnetic filter installed too.

I would do them all at once. It is cheaper. Make sure you get chance to re decorate behind much easier with radiators off the wall.

Why is Hive so bad ? For most people it seems to work OK ? I would be surprised if there are many solutions out there that work better. Maybe things like Nest are similar, but have the same number of issues just different problems.

Hive for me has always worked fine.

We aren’t going to redecorate immediately though - need time to figure out what we want in each room and don’t want to rush it. But generally it sounds like all at once is the way!

Regarding Hive, we’ve found it quite clunky and annoying to use. They only have an engineer in our area once a month which was a nightmare when our receiver box stopped working.

Also our sellers didn’t transfer it properly so we couldn’t access it when we moved in. Hive had to contact them to get them to release it, with various delays, even though they’d left the property.