Netatmo Thermostat for Smartphone
Alongside some of the big names in smart thermostats – Nest and Hive to name just two – is Netatmo. We’ve already tested out the company’s Urban Weather Station, and now it’s the turn of the simply named Thermostat for Smartphone.
There are two types of smart thermostat. One controls the heating in the entire house and the other lets you adjust temperature in different zones. Netatmo, Nest, Hive and Tado fall into the former category and systems such as Heat Genius and Honeywell Evohome (page 68) fall into the latter.
This means you’re likely to be considering the Netatmo alongside Nest, Hive and possibly Tado. All four systems allow you to control your heating remotely via a smartphone or tablet app (and in most cases on the company’s website) and are more intelligent than the programmer you’re likely to have in your home right now.
The Netatmo thermostat lets you set a different schedule for each day of the week, with no limit on the number of heating periods. It’s possible to create, name and save different schedules and switch between them, so you could for example have a ‘normal’ schedule and ‘off school’ for half terms and holidays when you might want a different heating schedule.
Over the first week or so, the system will learn how quickly your home heats and cools and then offers you to switch to a new PID algorithm (proportional integral derivative). Instead of merely looking at the current temperature and comparing it with the set point (your desired temperature at that time), it will also take into consideration your home’s insulation effectiveness as well as the exterior temperature, by using weather data from the internet or – if you have one – an Urban Weather Station outdoor module.
This means it can fire up the boiler early if it’s colder than usual, or later if it’s warmer. It can also more efficiently maintain temperature as it knows how long it takes before your home starts to cool down.
App
You can install the free app on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet (4.0 or later) or Windows Phone (version 8 or later). If you own none of these devices, you can use Netatmo’s website.
From the app, you can adjust the temperature (set point) and put the system into ‘Away’ mode which essentially turns the heating off. There’s also a Frost-Guard toggle, which maintains a minimum temperature even if you’re away to prevent pipes freezing. At the bottom, you can see a summary of the current heating period, but you can also use a slider to manually override the current temperature with a different one for a certain amount of time – this can be changed in the settings. There are advanced settings for temperature offset and hysteresis threshold, but few will need to adjust these.
Turn your device from portrait to landscape and you’ll get a graph showing your home’s temperature history. This is almost identical to the feature in the Urban Weather Station app. It shows your room temperature, the set point temperature and the amount of time your boiler was on (the orange bars).
While all this sounds advanced, other systems offer more. For example, the Nest display can sense whether or not anyone is in the house. This means if you go out and leave the heating on, it will automatically turn it off after a while to save money. Similarly, Tado uses your phone’s GPS to detect when you leave home as well as when you’re on your way back, so it will turn the heating on and off based on your location.
Installation
There are two ways to install the thermostat. One is a wired replacement for an existing wall thermostat, the other as a wireless thermostat. We were replacing a wireless thermostat, which meant connecting the relay box directly to the boiler. Using Netatmo’s forum, we were able to establish which terminals to connect two relay wires inside the boiler; the other two wires connect to the mains supply inside the boiler.
The kit includes everything you need to mount the relay on the wall by the boiler, so you need to