Hive Thermostat for Heating and Hot Water control

 

After a LOT of research I went for Hive.
I bought a “heat and hot water” one and an additional single zone one, as I needed upstairs rads, downstairs rads and hot water. It works great but there is a slight delay between turning heating on/off on your phone and the switch actually working. I’m guessing this is normal for the hive but it’s something that I wasn’t expecting.
On the plus side, you don’t have to run any wires to the room thermostats themselves as they’re battery powered.
I wired up the two receiver units close to the boiler in an s plan system.
For the hub, you just plug it in and link it to your Internet using the cat5 cable. I plugged mine into a TPlink deco mesh WiFi unit.

 

I’ve been using Hive for a number of years so I have plenty of experience with this product. I recently moved house, which has multi-zone heating, therefore when purchasing a secondary thermostat, I also needed a second receiver for the second heating zone (unfortunately you need a receiver for each zone since Hive don’t currently make a multi-zone receiver).

I managed to map the wiring of the old multi-zone programmer to split the zones into separate Hive receivers, and also remove the wired thermostats to use the wireless Hive thermostats, but if you’re not confident with electricity or central heating systems I highly urge to get a professional installation.

I had slight issues with one of the receivers my original Hive receiver would not pair with the hub after moving to new house. However I received real-time support from Hive Customer Support team via WhatsApp and I was very impressed. They stayed with me until the system was fully working. 10/10 for support.

I am however disappointed that only one of the Hive thermostats can control the hot water boost function, so you need to select which zone’s thermostat will have that. I think Hive could fix this in the Hive app, just by using smart rules by enabling the secondary (non water) thermostat to also boost the water. I also think that Hive should allow the use of the water boost / heating boost buttons for other smart home scenes.. not everyone uses those buttons to boost, but they could be mapped to other smart home scenes to reduce the number of smart switches in the room “Dear Hive team, please contact me for smart home development ideas” 😉