Please describe your home automation setup...wife needs to be convinced about the benefits!

[flameport]

what am I missing here?

A room thermostat.

The boiler heats the water to a set temperature and will then switch on/off at intervals to keep it at that temperature. It has no way of knowing how many radiator valves are open, or what the air temperature in the building is.
If the valves are all closed, it will continue to cycle on and off to heat the water which will just be pumped through the bypass, wasting gas and causing unnecessary wear to the boiler components.

TRVs with electronics will control the boiler as well, so if all are closed, the boiler will be switched off until heat is required again, so the boiler will only be on when heat is actually required.
Better systems will have a central controller which will activate the boiler based on how quickly the air temperature changes, how many valves require heat, how long it has been since the boiler was last activated, etc.

If you currently have no room thermostat, installing a £10 one will immediately save money.
The Zwave or similar systems may well save more, but will also cost a substantial amount to buy and install.

 

[jtonthebike]

I appreciate this is an old thread, but it piqued my interest.

I was involved in installing Creston and AMX kit a long time ago, I run a small AMX system here which is excellent! One remote control controls my tv, media server, amazon fire tv and turns my Steam machine on/off, it also handles my RAKO lighting system too. (and it's very capable of handling loads more too)

I bought everything from eBay, used a freelance amx programmer to sort out that side of things and did the rako stuff myself, it's fairly straight forward stuff.

Anyway, in terms of what it does for me. All lighting that's in the RAKO system (not all of it is as I haven't renovated the other rooms yet) can be grouped together in 'scenes' so that, for example, at dusk, low-level LED lighting comes in in the bathroom + kitchen as well as over-cabinet LED in the kitchen. Scene 1 in the bathroom (at dusk) puts on ceiling lights at 70% brightness leaving the other lighting alone. Scene 2 switches on the towel radiator and ceiling lights on at 70% brightness. Scene 3 switches on the extractor as well as ceiling lights + towel rad. The towel rad is switched on at 5:15am (we get up at 6am) and low/high-level lights go off approximately an 30mins after sunrise.

Not one light in the house comes on at 100% brightness. It's all 12v LED's and our electricity usage has gone down a little which is most helpful.

I suppose it depends on what you think you'd like Home Automation to do for you.