A while ago I had a few conversations here about what to do with my new heating system, so thought I'd post details of how I did it and a few glitches I had to solve along the way:
My system: 2 Worcester Boilers into a low loss header with 3 outflow channels: DHW, Central Heating 1 (lower 2 floors), Central Heating 2 (upper two floors). Approx 15 rads on each of the central heating circuits. Each circuit on has a zone valve and it's own Grundfos circulator pump on it. All a completely brand new install in a large victorian house over 4 floors.
Wiser system: Wiser 3 channel Kit, 2 x Room Thermostats, TRVs on all rads apart from the towel rails (3 of them, all on heating circuit 2).
Wiring: This was the first time that the heating company that fitted our heating system had installed a Drayton Wiser system, and they needed to get in a little extra help for wiring the box to control the zone valves and pumps and 2 boilers correctly, but didn't seem to be too much of a problem in the end. They sorted the system to the stage where it was powered on and worked 'manually' and then I did all the smart stuff.
TRV Bodies: I installed 30 odd new rads, and so needed TRV bodies to match up with the drayton TRV Head - I bought the Drayton TRV4 valve bodies on their own - found them on eBay and they were £8 each.
Initial set up via the app.
This was tricky, and has a number of glitches that got me quite angry at the time. My problem: Could create a local account (part 1 of the setup, ie. set up the system in our own house), and could set up an online account (part 2 of the setup), but then got errors every time their system tried to pair the online user account to my house/hub account. The Drayton customer service team were excellent on this front, and eventually made enough suggestions that it worked. They are very good at answering the phone (usually get to speak to a real person within 30seconds), and the same person called back or emailed frequently until the problem was sorted, so I didn't have to explain it over and over again). If you get this problem, the things I did that ended up sorting it were:
- Put wifi router into manual channel mode, rather than auto-channel
- Disabled mobile data on my phone while in setup mode
- Used a separate laptop for the email verification part.
- Deleted anything on the registration form that was 'Autofilled' by my phone and re-entered it manually, and entered house name as only a number, and place I live as ONLY the first word, and the Postcode with NO spaces
Once I got passed this hurdle, it's worked perfectly.
Signal issues
My house is victorian, has thick solid walls, and takes 6 google wifi hubs to get my wifi-signal around the house satisfactorily. Signal was therefore high on my list of worries! I have been very pleasantly surprised...
I have 3 'smart plugs' , One on each of the ground, 1st, 2nd floor, acting as signal boosters. I have had zero problems with signal, and they all work nicely! Have been really pleasantly surprised by it.
TRV Noise
I don't know how loud the honeywell/tado/heatgenius ones are, but the Wiser ones certainly don't wake me up, and i'm a light sleeper.
TRV Look
They look a lot less intrusive than the Honeywell ones
Wall Thermostat
Key info on this: it overrides any TRVs in the room, so good if you've got a room with multiple rads in when the TRVs are hidden behind sofas or something.
Anyway, hope that is helpful to anybody looking at what to do; I would certainly recommend the system, as long as you're willing to get a little bit hands on at the start.