Hive
Written Dec 9, 2022, tagged under post
Our household energy status is in something of a limbo right now. We changed supplier a couple of days ago, but our smart meter doesn't seem to have caught up yet. Or at least that's my assumption, as I can't think of any other reason why our gas would be showing up as being free.
The new Hive system that was fitted on Monday still seems to be "bedding in"; a few of the room thermostats say they need calibrating, which requires the heating to be on for four hours. I'm therefore looking forward to some guilt-free heating at some point over the weekend.
Overall the system seems pretty good, but has a few particular quirks that seem a bit annoying. For instance, even though most our radiators now have a Hive thermostat on them, the boiler is still primarily controlled by a central thermostat in our hallway - the one place we don't really want to heat, as it's a bit of a waste. And the radiator near it doesn't have a thermostat - otherwise the boiler could be going full tilt without the it ever finding out. One side-effect of this is that even if you turn a room's thermostat up, if the hall is the right temperature then you're out of luck.
The system is flexible in terms of scheduling, but rather tedious for execution, with lots of navigating through menus, picking time periods and temperatures, and copying day configurations around. It feels to me like it ought to be possible to draw a line with your finger to set up a schedule, or something a bit easier than a formal navigate / edit / save cycle for a time period, followed by menu / copy to other days / all / save.
Tweaking the schedule is also a bit fiddly. There is a "boost" button that sets the temperature to 22C for an hour, but temperatures I want for a short-term tweak will be either about 18-20C (if I want some warm) or something very low if I want to turn the heating off for a bit. So that's a load of extra clicks.
The boiler itself seems very good, though - it's small and quiet, and is presumably using a load less gas than the last one. I expect there will be workarounds we find over time to deal with the minor annoyances, and overall we will be very much liking the system. It does have some strengths such as being good at modulating heat output to avoid overshooting a target temperature.
After writing the above, and doing some digging, it is beginning to look like maybe there are options here to explore. Let's see how this plays out!
Photo by Henrique Sá on Unsplash