3 Weeks, my goodness how time flies.
In any new relationship three weeks is often a pivotal point. Should we think about meeting the parents or first get that all important "best mate approval" out of the way?. Thankfully it's just heating so a lot simpler, anyway we've already been living together for three weeks so we can just carry on as we are.
We've settled into a comfortable routine, get up, go to work, come home or do what we like when we want without a thought for Evohome. Evohome just does it's own thing making sure different rooms are warm or cool as required and the hot water is, well, erm...hot.
Alexa occasionally get's involved but she won't ever come between us!.
It's like we've always been together, we've certainly got to the point where we take each other for granted and all after just three weeks. Normally that would be a relationship heading for the rocks, but this is the life we wanted.
If we had to keep thinking about Evohome then it would simply not be working. You don't constantly think about your radiators (well apart from that one we all have that always seems to need bleeding) so you should not be thinking about the rest of the system. Home "automation" should be exactly that, automated, doing things by itself without being "needy".
If you've got a system controlled by a single thermostat you might consider it to be "needy". In our old house before we installed Hive (our first venture into smart heating) we probably "thought" about the heating more times than we realise. It was not uncommon to be in a room and decide heat was needed, turning up the TRV did nothing if the boiler was off. A trip to the lounge would ensue to turn up the thermostat and kick everything into life. Typically the thermostat would be "whacked" up higher than perhaps needed which would mean 45 mins later you'd be sweltering and thinking about opening a window. The whole house would be red hot when the aim was to nudge the office temperature up a few degrees. If that sounds familiar then you know where I'm coming from, turning on the heating like that felt like opening your bank account and letting a thirsty beast have it's fill.
With Hive in control that process changed as firing up the system was as easy as pressing boost on the app or asking Alexa to boost the heating (even easier since the new Alexa skill has been released for Hive). This saved a trip to the lounge and the call for heat could be easily done with a time limited boost, however everything else was basically the same. We still spent time heating rooms we did not need to as like most people we did not constantly change TRV's so rooms were not always at the ideal temperature or were heated when empty. I've said before I've got a lot of time for Hive as it's a great system if you only need 1 or 2 zones. This certainly felt like ensuring the thirsty beast used a straw when feasting on your hard earned bank balance. It was also proven out by lower bills.
Since living with Evohome we don't even think about the heating in the way I've just described any more. The rooms are all set to a schedule and after the fine tuning are all working as we would like, our approach to heating is totally different. Out is the swing from hot to cold and in is rooms being maintained at a steady temperature and only when in use.
We do adjust the evening temperature in the lounge sometimes but it's as simple as "Alexa set lounge temperature to 22 degrees" and it's done. Done without having to consider what warming up the lounge will do to the rest of the house because quite simply nothing else happens anywhere else as each room (zone) is taking care of it's own temperature according to it's own schedule. It feels like the heating is now sipping on the bank balance rather than knocking back the shots like it was in the old days.
Whilst everything is well we are still working on those niggles we've mentioned before.
After no response from the Honeywell team re my question asking if Alexa should be able to report hot water temperature I decided to tweet them again as they are quite responsive on Twitter. Sure enough I got a lightning fast response to tell me they were going to check (apparently it was "a good question!"). A few days passed and my good question had not yet turned into a good answer so I chased it up to be told they are still working on it.
What I'm a little confused about here is Honeywell don't seem to understand their own product. It's just a case of them asking someone in the Evohome team the question and getting back to me with the answer. Even in a large global business (I've worked for a few so understand how these things work) it does not take very long to track down who you need. I'm beginning to assume the lack of an answer means it probably should but no one realised it did not. Anyway, let's not jump to conclusions and see how things go with a response. Honeywell have had 3 weeks already so not really sure what they can find out now that they could not have found out over the last 21 days but we shall see.
We also still have the hot water actuator fault showing, and yet it continues to work as expected.
This week the weather has started to turn towards winter so as the nights draw in and the mercury drops the system will have a chance to show us what it's really made of.
We've been so impressed with Evohome that we are thinking of trying to work an Evohome system into some other projects we've been working on. It's a very exciting project for us that is taking quite a bit of organising but more on that once we're at a point we can share (there will hopefully be a video about it).
As with some other relationships I'm just hoping that in a few years time Evohome does not turn into her mother....she's sat on the wall looking at us disapprovingly and it's not pretty!.
If you have any questions or information you'd like about the system and our experiences so far please leave a note in the comments and we will response as soon as we can.
In any new relationship three weeks is often a pivotal point. Should we think about meeting the parents or first get that all important "best mate approval" out of the way?. Thankfully it's just heating so a lot simpler, anyway we've already been living together for three weeks so we can just carry on as we are.
We've settled into a comfortable routine, get up, go to work, come home or do what we like when we want without a thought for Evohome. Evohome just does it's own thing making sure different rooms are warm or cool as required and the hot water is, well, erm...hot.
Alexa occasionally get's involved but she won't ever come between us!.
It's like we've always been together, we've certainly got to the point where we take each other for granted and all after just three weeks. Normally that would be a relationship heading for the rocks, but this is the life we wanted.
If we had to keep thinking about Evohome then it would simply not be working. You don't constantly think about your radiators (well apart from that one we all have that always seems to need bleeding) so you should not be thinking about the rest of the system. Home "automation" should be exactly that, automated, doing things by itself without being "needy".
If you've got a system controlled by a single thermostat you might consider it to be "needy". In our old house before we installed Hive (our first venture into smart heating) we probably "thought" about the heating more times than we realise. It was not uncommon to be in a room and decide heat was needed, turning up the TRV did nothing if the boiler was off. A trip to the lounge would ensue to turn up the thermostat and kick everything into life. Typically the thermostat would be "whacked" up higher than perhaps needed which would mean 45 mins later you'd be sweltering and thinking about opening a window. The whole house would be red hot when the aim was to nudge the office temperature up a few degrees. If that sounds familiar then you know where I'm coming from, turning on the heating like that felt like opening your bank account and letting a thirsty beast have it's fill.
With Hive in control that process changed as firing up the system was as easy as pressing boost on the app or asking Alexa to boost the heating (even easier since the new Alexa skill has been released for Hive). This saved a trip to the lounge and the call for heat could be easily done with a time limited boost, however everything else was basically the same. We still spent time heating rooms we did not need to as like most people we did not constantly change TRV's so rooms were not always at the ideal temperature or were heated when empty. I've said before I've got a lot of time for Hive as it's a great system if you only need 1 or 2 zones. This certainly felt like ensuring the thirsty beast used a straw when feasting on your hard earned bank balance. It was also proven out by lower bills.
Since living with Evohome we don't even think about the heating in the way I've just described any more. The rooms are all set to a schedule and after the fine tuning are all working as we would like, our approach to heating is totally different. Out is the swing from hot to cold and in is rooms being maintained at a steady temperature and only when in use.
We do adjust the evening temperature in the lounge sometimes but it's as simple as "Alexa set lounge temperature to 22 degrees" and it's done. Done without having to consider what warming up the lounge will do to the rest of the house because quite simply nothing else happens anywhere else as each room (zone) is taking care of it's own temperature according to it's own schedule. It feels like the heating is now sipping on the bank balance rather than knocking back the shots like it was in the old days.
Whilst everything is well we are still working on those niggles we've mentioned before.
After no response from the Honeywell team re my question asking if Alexa should be able to report hot water temperature I decided to tweet them again as they are quite responsive on Twitter. Sure enough I got a lightning fast response to tell me they were going to check (apparently it was "a good question!"). A few days passed and my good question had not yet turned into a good answer so I chased it up to be told they are still working on it.
What I'm a little confused about here is Honeywell don't seem to understand their own product. It's just a case of them asking someone in the Evohome team the question and getting back to me with the answer. Even in a large global business (I've worked for a few so understand how these things work) it does not take very long to track down who you need. I'm beginning to assume the lack of an answer means it probably should but no one realised it did not. Anyway, let's not jump to conclusions and see how things go with a response. Honeywell have had 3 weeks already so not really sure what they can find out now that they could not have found out over the last 21 days but we shall see.
We also still have the hot water actuator fault showing, and yet it continues to work as expected.
This week the weather has started to turn towards winter so as the nights draw in and the mercury drops the system will have a chance to show us what it's really made of.
We've been so impressed with Evohome that we are thinking of trying to work an Evohome system into some other projects we've been working on. It's a very exciting project for us that is taking quite a bit of organising but more on that once we're at a point we can share (there will hopefully be a video about it).
As with some other relationships I'm just hoping that in a few years time Evohome does not turn into her mother....she's sat on the wall looking at us disapprovingly and it's not pretty!.
Dear Evohome, please don't turn into your mother!
If you have any questions or information you'd like about the system and our experiences so far please leave a note in the comments and we will response as soon as we can.
Comments
Post a Comment