Talk to me about..... Smart thermostats

tek-monkey said:

Interesting, effectively each radiator becomes its own thermostat so no longer needs a main one? Doesn't that mean you can only measure temperatures next to the source though?

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Yes as you say each radiator valve would in effect become an independent room thermostat. The hub would replace the main programmer.
Whilst nest and hive are interesting to really save money you would want more granular control.

I would also imagine that using such a valve you would be less likely to get stuck pins. Since you could ensure that each valve was opened and closed on a regular basis (eg maybe open and close all radiators once a day in a single cycle of 2 minutes as a preventative measure to stops pins sticking in the body of the valve)

Using something like the above you would be able to create many different zones and control the heating according to your usage of the house. Let’s face it you can only use one room at a time.

E.g you might decide something like the following.
- on weekdays heat the bedrooms and bathroom from 6am-730. Heat the kitchen from 7am-8am. Heating to lounge and dining room off at all the above times.
- in the weekdays in the evening turn on heating to the lounge at 6pm. Start heating the kids bedrooms and bathroom at 7pm. Heat your bedroom from 9pm
- at the weekend during the day turn off all upstairs radiators but enable heating to kitchen and lounge. heat kitchen from 11:45 - 1pm and again from 5-6
Etc...

I would be very wary of any kickstarter IoT product - they have a habit of never making it very far.

You would also really need their boiler controller which is supposedly releasing "Feb/March 2018" (we'll see...) to actually make use of these properly. Without that, they're really not much more useful than a bog-standard TRV as they're still at the whim of the boiler being on.

I'm still waiting for the Tado ones to drop to £35 on Amazon or Very again, I'll buy a house's worth at that point.

Cue said:

I would be very wary of any kickstarter IoT product - they have a habit of never making it very far..

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Like I already stated your are funding a company not making a purchase so therefore need to conduct due diligence. The company already have a smart air conditioning unit on the market and are part of eon a multi billion dollar firm. Personally I would say Tado is a smaller entity more at risk of going out of business and their servers going offline than eon. For £35 you can a pop down to screwfix and buy a Drayton Smart TRV and easily return / replace if anything fails.

hardwood said:

Like I already stated your are funding a company not making a purchase so therefore need to conduct due diligence. The company already have a smart air conditioning unit on the market and are part of eon a multi billion dollar firm. Personally I would say Tado is a smaller entity more at risk of going out of business and their servers going offline than eon. For £35 you can a pop down to screwfix and buy a Drayton Smart TRV and easily return / replace if anything fails.

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Indeed, I'm just saying from experience on IoT kickstarters - they often don't go down well. They aren't part of e-on, they're just using their accelerator programme. This doesn't mean they'll be guaranteed to succeed post-kickstarter, it just means they have a bit more backing behind them. Even Nest could just up and disappear one day just because Google get bored easily and have a history of shelving things.

For £35 I'd have a TRV that doesn't tie into my thermostat controls and can't demand heat from the boiler. As far as I'm concerned that's useless as a smart heating device.

Cue said:

They aren't part of e-on, they're just using their accelerator programme.

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Except they actually are owned by eon perhaps if you actually read the FAQs you might be better informed.

hardwood said:

Except they actually are owned by eon perhaps if you actually read the FAQs you might be better informed.

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At no point does it say they're owned by e-on. If they were they wouldn't need to be crowdfunded because an electricity supplier going through Kickstarter would be absurd. They are funded by e-on through their accelerator programme and have a "strategic partnership" with them. Nothing in their KS or site FAQ says they are owned by e-on in any way. They're going through this programme but make no mistake, e-on aren't going to bail them out if they fail. The closest e-on get to owning them is being a shareholder in the company under their Agile LLC. They don't have an officer on the team, just a voting share, and Novo is not a subsidiary of them.

I have nothing against Kickstarter, I have a VR headset coming early 2018 from a KS. But people should absolutely be made aware of the risks and should have a clear picture of what they're funding and that there's 0 guarantee they will receive their product if the company bails.

It's a good product, I'm sure. But don't mislead people (even if unintentionally) into thinking that this is guaranteed to happen and there's no chance it could fail - because it's just another startup in an accelerator programme, and it could fail like any other. Especially if it's an existing company with existing products (Novo do healthcare things) then it raises some red flags about why they can't fund the £25,000 goal themselves.