Finding the chase and cutting to it

It’s been a busy few weeks and this is the first chance I have had to sit still at the computer and write something which is, hopefully, interesting.  This is one of two blogs looking at things you can do to improve your house.

I am a huge fan of Grand Designs.  There are some amazing tools for your house that allow you to be comfortable yet save energy.  Under floor heating, solar PV cells, rain collectors, glass which cleans itself and light pipes.  Clever control systems that allow you to control the lighting and heat levels in any room of the house.

Retro-fitting these can be a complete nightmare, but some of these ideas are instantly available for any house.  In 2006 I discovered a source for one of these: a thermostat which not only set the heat for a room or zone but allowed you to programme different temperatures at different times.

Why on Earth would anyone want that?

To be honest, before Grand Designs and having a baby, I didn’t think you would.  One of the things you quickly discover with a small baby is that they will wake up in the middle of the night when the ambient temperature gets below15 degrees C.  In a traditional boiler, timer and single thermostat , that works out at around 2:30am every morning in October/November.

We moved house in 2000 with a very young baby to a house where we were recommended to keep the heating on all the time but use the thermostat to set the level for the house.  At night we set it to 16 degrees C so the baby didn’t over heat and from the second night, we had much better nights.  The baby woke around 4am instead for a night time feed.

Yes, we slept better too.  It was never boiling but not freezing in the middle of the night meant we had a great night’s sleep.  We were both dreading the first gas bill.  That too was a surprise: the house never got cold, so the bill was more than reasonable.

That’s when I knew I wanted a thermostat I could set the levels to – warmer in the evening, cooler for breakfast and much cooler for the night time.  Heat miser had just the thing and I ordered one, hoping that it would be really obvious how to replace the mechanical thermostat had been fitted to our house built in 2000.  I followed the instructions and three hours (it took a bit of figuring out), it was fitted and running.
It was lovely.

So why are you talking about this now?

We moved house last year, to a self-build (not by us). It had five zones of heating, all controlled by Honeywell thermostats.
Having done the job once, I could do it again and actually why not go for a centrally controlled one.  As we all have tablets, wouldn’t a wi-fi controlled one be great?  After all, we are living in 2014.

We liked the quality of the Heat miser one, so that was my first port of call last August only to find these were “premium items” and carried a price to match 🙁

So I bought one: we could live with it and decide it that really was the way we wanted to go.  I replaced the upstairs one and compared to last time, the job was a bit quicker.

Although at this stage, you could see the difference between the mass produced estate house to the individually built one.  Every Honeywell had had the inside of the back box filled :~  No worries, I have chisel and I am willing to use it.

The Heat miser’s protrude into the room a few millimetres: but the back box is packed with the digital control unit as well as the power and control wires.

The photo montage below shows why this is not a trivial effort.

However, once installed, the wi-fi units are a joy.  Secured with a password, we can control them from the internet allowing us to make a last minute decision to stay out longer and not bother switching the heating on as soon as normal.

We did keep two off the internet but come the winter not only will we have the right temperature in the house, but it looks bang up to date too :).