TechReport (UK)

Verdict

You will no doubt have gathered from the review above that we are fans of the evohome system here – it does what it sets out to do, giving you full control over the temperature of every room in the house throughout the day from anywhere and bringing commensurate savings on domestic heating bills.

Set-up is a little technical – some items would need to be installed by a ‘Gas-Safe’ engineer whilst the remaining items would suit a competent DIYer (they are not physically difficult to install, but do require a level of technical understanding).

Once installed, however, control is relatively straightforward to understand, albeit setting up a timing schedule for each individual zone does take a little longer than setting up a normal central heating programmer.

The problems that were encountered along the way were, perhaps, inevitable with such a leading-edge control system, but were generally easy to resolve and have diminished in number considerably as the system ‘beds-in’.

So is installing an evohome system worth it?

If you are making a major upgrade to your heating system anyway (for example, installing a new boiler) then without a doubt, yes – much of the extra cost of adding the evohome system to the upgraded heating system would be countered by the cost of installing upgraded / new tradiational controls anyway.

If you are installing to gain a greater degree of control flexibility, lower your ‘environmental footprint’ and willing to look long-term for any payback, then again, this is still one of the best options for achieving these goals.

If you are simply looking for short-term cost savings, perhaps with some improved degree of control over your heating system then either the traditional TRV route (installing all TRV valves and making temperature / timing changes manually) or one of the new ‘Smart’ single zone controllers (e.g. Nest or Hive) would probably be a better option, albeit the overall flexibility and long-term cost savings on offer are probably not as great as can be achieved by a multi-zone system like evohome.

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