One of the important goals for this project is to create warm spaces withing the home without heating up unused rooms causing ruinous fuel bills. With the rise of “intelligent heating” systems like Honeywell Evohome or Hive I thought this would be a simple thing to achieve. But unfortunately I was wrong. Smart home heating systems all suffer from one major floor: they are proprietary. The main draw back from that is that you have to buy into their system along with all the limitations that come with it. For example, Evohome comes with a limitation of 12 heating zones that can be added to one controller. Our house is going to have 5 bedrooms each with it’s own bathroom (wet and electric heated towel rail – 2 separately controlled “zones” in Honeywell speak) making 15 zones. And yes I want to be able to control each of these zones independently. I can’t imagine that there is some kind of fundamental electronics limitation for this so I can only assume it is a deliberately created restriction.
So what is the solution? Well I like the smart TRVs then can be individually programmed according to the usage pattern of the room so I will be installing them. I can also get individual controllers for the towel rail electric elements so that is good. Unfortunately it won’t be one fully integrated smart heating controller that turns the boiler on when the heating is needed. It will have a traditional boiler controller with two or three time zones that work like they have for the last 50 or so years.
In the mean time I live in hope of an open interoperable home automation solution that will allow smart TRV to interface with an intelligent boiler controller in a way that is easy for the consumer to, well, consume. Right now what we have is a pigs ear and this insistence on proprietary controllers is holding the whole industry back, stopping mass adoption and helping no one.