- Posted on
Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:16 am
-
jrcitizen
offline
-
- Posts: 26
- Joined: Jan 04, 2017
For a bit of contrast...
I also have an Evohome and am in the UK. If I was buying today, I don't think I would buy an Evohome.
I agree with the others on both battery life (excellent, only change around every 18 months) and cloud outages (a bit annoying). It has been – on occasion – handy to open the app and turn on or off the system remotely. Thats about it.
There are several things I don't like about it.
I don't like that I cannot speak to the modules locally – it all has to be through the cloud. Evohome does have an Alexa skill, but I have had to disconnect and reconnect several times. There have been outages for days where it did not work.
I don't find the system to be terribly smart. Temperature is read from the TRV itself... and being right next to the radiator, that temperature does not often reflect the rest of the room. As a result, I feel I am sometimes having to manually adjust the temperature in the room – it is akin to fighting with the system. I didn't mind that per se on a manual thermostat, but what is the point paying all this money for the Evohome when I am having to battle it myself?
One thing I had looked at doing was to adjust the settings based on outdoor temperature. In other words, the colder it was outside, use the Indigo plugin to raise the temperature in specific rooms. I did not have much success. Between having to depend on the cloud (which, again, is prone to too much maintenance) and not being able to take room temperature inputs from other than the TRV's, I felt like I was fighting a losing battle.
Finally, the ability to set schedules within the app or physical console is quite limited. For example, I can only set six schedules per day for the hot water. Each on/off pair uses two schedules. That means I can only turn the hot water on/off three times a day. I could say more money if I had greater flexibility, but alas, am limited.
I haven't looked into other options, but in theory, I would use all Z-wave based TRV's and boiler controls. This way I have no dependancy on the cloud, I could have more room temperature inputs, and better controls on each room (which in my house, having varying levels of occupancy throughout the day, and varying levels of insulation).