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Hi All,
Before I go into a little detail, thanks in advance for anyone willing to read on and offer their thoughts...
The "executive summary" of what follows is to ask for opinions and advice, please, on whether I should (a) spend more money and go down a Honeywell-only route to add their significantly more expensive smart TRVs on to our existing Honeywell Evohome system, or (b) for a substantial saving, operate a setup that blends together two essentially independent heating control solutions.
Our Honeywell Evohome setup has five separate zones for underfloor heating in different parts of an extension and a sixth zone to cover all the radiators in the remainder of the (original) house. We have a thermostat in the hallway to provide overall control for the radiators zone and the individual radiators have non-smart TRVs. We have a fairly beefy Worcester Greenstar 42 CDI combi boiler too.
The heating has worked well for many years and continues to do so, but I am thinking of putting smart TRVs on all the radiators now that the kids are not around as much and to provide a bit more control around when individual radiators come on and off, mainly for comfort but also potentially some cost saving (I am not expecting to recoup the investment as an objective though).
I’ve been looking into this and the Evohome smart TRVs to add to the existing set up are pretty pricey at about £60 per TRV, but on the other hand I know that they will hook into the rest of the Evohome set up and be able to call for heat from the boiler as required, without relying on a central thermostat.
I’m thinking, however, that one of the cheaper smart TRVs such as the Tado or Kasa would probably be as good – each radiator would have its own smart TRV, and as long as the existing thermostat for the radiators remains in the hallway (coldest room in our house) and has a reasonably high set-point (say 19 or 20 degrees) when we want the radiator heating on, the radiator TRVs will then just throttle the flow into each individual radiator according to their separate schedules, keeping some rooms a bit warmer in the morning and others warmer in the evening for instance, with the ability to remotely turn some radiators on and off easily as we often have rooms unused for a while as the kids are dashing around or away for university and so on. The disadvantage of course is that an independent TRV system would not directly control the boiler, so we would rely on the central thermostat for basic on/off control of the all the radiators together, and when this is "on" the boiler would just modulate as required based on the collective demand across the entire set of radiators and underfloor zones. There’s the slight disadvantage of needing to use a separate control app and aligning between two systems, but it feels pretty workable and as the underfloor heating is separate anyway, the demand is very variable across the entire system as the underfloor heating zones have their own separate schedules.
Do you have any experience / opinions that you would be able and willing to share please? If this set-up seems feasible (and I don’t see why not with a modern modulating boiler), the TP-Link Kasa system seems to be a front runner (about £25 each) as I’ve found other TP-Link products to be pretty good, with Tado possibly next (about £45 each). There’s also SONOFF (£25) but I’m not so sure from the reviews. I reckon we will want nine of the things (plus associated hub) so it won’t be cheap even at £25 each, and I’ll keep the hallway radiator non-smart TRV fully open (as I do now) to enable the central thermostat to be the “master switch”. I’m assuming that we won’t need to fiddle around with balancing the system, it would just be a straight TRV change for each radiator and a DIY job? As well as the hall radiator that stays fully open, there is a towel rail that has no TRV and remains open, plus a boiler bypass loop too, just in case there are concerns raised about closed TRVs whilst there might, on rare occasions, still be a call for heat from the boiler whilst the smart TRVs are closed.
Many thanks for reading this far - I'm aware that smart TRVs are an oft-discussed topic, but was hoping to get some expert thoughts on my specific use case if anyone is able to help please?
Andy.
PS Ideally, I don't want to add room thermostats as well - I accept that radiator TRVs have their limitations in sensing the actual room temperature where it matters, but with appropriate offsets I think that is likely to be manageable to keep costs down.
Before I go into a little detail, thanks in advance for anyone willing to read on and offer their thoughts...
The "executive summary" of what follows is to ask for opinions and advice, please, on whether I should (a) spend more money and go down a Honeywell-only route to add their significantly more expensive smart TRVs on to our existing Honeywell Evohome system, or (b) for a substantial saving, operate a setup that blends together two essentially independent heating control solutions.
Our Honeywell Evohome setup has five separate zones for underfloor heating in different parts of an extension and a sixth zone to cover all the radiators in the remainder of the (original) house. We have a thermostat in the hallway to provide overall control for the radiators zone and the individual radiators have non-smart TRVs. We have a fairly beefy Worcester Greenstar 42 CDI combi boiler too.
The heating has worked well for many years and continues to do so, but I am thinking of putting smart TRVs on all the radiators now that the kids are not around as much and to provide a bit more control around when individual radiators come on and off, mainly for comfort but also potentially some cost saving (I am not expecting to recoup the investment as an objective though).
I’ve been looking into this and the Evohome smart TRVs to add to the existing set up are pretty pricey at about £60 per TRV, but on the other hand I know that they will hook into the rest of the Evohome set up and be able to call for heat from the boiler as required, without relying on a central thermostat.
I’m thinking, however, that one of the cheaper smart TRVs such as the Tado or Kasa would probably be as good – each radiator would have its own smart TRV, and as long as the existing thermostat for the radiators remains in the hallway (coldest room in our house) and has a reasonably high set-point (say 19 or 20 degrees) when we want the radiator heating on, the radiator TRVs will then just throttle the flow into each individual radiator according to their separate schedules, keeping some rooms a bit warmer in the morning and others warmer in the evening for instance, with the ability to remotely turn some radiators on and off easily as we often have rooms unused for a while as the kids are dashing around or away for university and so on. The disadvantage of course is that an independent TRV system would not directly control the boiler, so we would rely on the central thermostat for basic on/off control of the all the radiators together, and when this is "on" the boiler would just modulate as required based on the collective demand across the entire set of radiators and underfloor zones. There’s the slight disadvantage of needing to use a separate control app and aligning between two systems, but it feels pretty workable and as the underfloor heating is separate anyway, the demand is very variable across the entire system as the underfloor heating zones have their own separate schedules.
Do you have any experience / opinions that you would be able and willing to share please? If this set-up seems feasible (and I don’t see why not with a modern modulating boiler), the TP-Link Kasa system seems to be a front runner (about £25 each) as I’ve found other TP-Link products to be pretty good, with Tado possibly next (about £45 each). There’s also SONOFF (£25) but I’m not so sure from the reviews. I reckon we will want nine of the things (plus associated hub) so it won’t be cheap even at £25 each, and I’ll keep the hallway radiator non-smart TRV fully open (as I do now) to enable the central thermostat to be the “master switch”. I’m assuming that we won’t need to fiddle around with balancing the system, it would just be a straight TRV change for each radiator and a DIY job? As well as the hall radiator that stays fully open, there is a towel rail that has no TRV and remains open, plus a boiler bypass loop too, just in case there are concerns raised about closed TRVs whilst there might, on rare occasions, still be a call for heat from the boiler whilst the smart TRVs are closed.
Many thanks for reading this far - I'm aware that smart TRVs are an oft-discussed topic, but was hoping to get some expert thoughts on my specific use case if anyone is able to help please?
Andy.
PS Ideally, I don't want to add room thermostats as well - I accept that radiator TRVs have their limitations in sensing the actual room temperature where it matters, but with appropriate offsets I think that is likely to be manageable to keep costs down.
