Heat Genius

Heat Genius offers smart heating control that learns when you use each room of your house. It allows you to automatically and remotely control each radiator. And it lets you do so from any webconnected device. Then you can either set your desired temperature for each room according to the time of day, or let the system watch and learn from your room occupancy, and set temperatures and timings appropriately.

In effect, Heat Genius makes any home a smart home, allowing you to remotely control the heating in every part of the house, as well as the hot water. It also offers other connected devices such as smart plugs and sensors, all controlled by a central hub and accessed via a mobile app or web page. And it lets you view historical usage. So – critically – it should mean you have a warm and comfortable house, with hot water, without using any more power than you absolutely need. Thus, in principal, over time Heat Genius will save you money.

Price

That’s important, because Heat Genius isn’t the cheap option in this space. At £249 for the ‘Genius Kit’ base system that comprises Hub and Thermostat, it compares reasonably well with the £200 Nest smart thermostat, and £179 Hive active heating – although the price goes up to £294 if you want to control the hot water. And the costs add up as you add zones, with each radiator valve costing £59, and room sensors £34. You don’t need a sensor in every room as the radiator valves can measure temperature, but the sensors are required to measure room occupancy.

So it can soon add up. Even more so if you want smart plugs at £29 a pop, or you have underfloor heating to control. The Heat Genius website has a smart ‘Create my system’ tool that allows you to spec up your home. Through this you can see that to fully zone a fourbedroom house with a separate hall, kitchen and dining room (and with one radiator and one sensor in each room) will cost around £1,100 just for the kit. In that instance installation is free as there are more than six valves, but Heat Genius will charge £99 to send it all out to you. (If you fit it yourself postage and packing is a more reasonable £20.)

That’s £1,200 inc VAT to get a fully trained Heat Genius central heating engineer in your house, who won’t leave before the system is installed, tested and working to your satisfaction. Not a trivial amount of money, but if you have a large house and parts of it are regularly unoccupied, Heat Genius estimates it could save you 20- to 40 percent on your annual heating bill. So at some stage it will pay for itself.

And, in our experience, you don’t need to zone everything. You can collect up into a ‘Rest of house’ quasi-’zone’ all the rooms that are incidental (like hallways) or rarely used (guest bedrooms). These can be heated only altogether or not at all, but in the case of a guest room you can just turn down the radiators when no-one is in there. In our current setup we haven’t got smart valves in either the dining room or several of the bedrooms, so we have to control them all together. Basically, if it is cold they need to be heated, and they take their temperature from the thermostat in the dining room. So it is virtually as good as separate zones.

How it compares to alternatives systems

This is not a Nest or a Hive - it is much more sophisticated, and somewhat more expensive than those products. Hive or Nest is, in essence, a dumb on-off switch that allows you to remotely switch on and off your heating. It will let you set a temperature, but only from a single thermostat. For a smaller modern house, that is generally sufficient. And it is a lot more efficient than a timer-based heating system.

Heat Genius is better, though. For one thing the company tells us it has yet to find the house within which it won’t work, regardless of type of boiler.

A true IoT system, it creates a network of connected devices around your home. That in turn allows you to zone off living areas. Then you can set desired temperatures for each based on your occupancy of those areas. What’s great is the modular nature of Heat Genius.

You can get the Hive or Nest experience by simply buying the Genius Kit base system at £249. Adding in valves and sensors as you desire to zone off additional areas of the house. So you are paying only for the tech you use – not forgetting that you can move the zones as your needs change.

The only system that offers anything like the comprehensive control of Heat Genius is that of

Tado. Tado started with a bells and whistles central controller and is now adding networked control of individual radiators. Heat Genius has always been a network product, and is now getting really sophisticated and stylish with the central hardware. And unlike Tado, it does work with every type of boiler. Honeywell EvoHome is the other product that gives Heat Genius a run for its money, and is worth your consideration.

But, basically, if you have a large property, with areas that are regularly unoccupied, Heat Genius is the ideal product for you.

What’s new

Late last year, Heat Genius started shipping its new ‘Genius Hub’ system to consumers. This builds on the existing zoned heating system and offers some significant upgrades. For one thing, the kit looks better: the new thermostat is small and stylish, and connects wirelessly. It replaces an older thermostat that was wired into the wall and didn’t do a lot other than confuse guests who presumed it controlled the heating. With the new thermostat you can stick it anywhere in the house and in effect create a new, movable zone.

As well as measuring the temperature, it allows you to manually set the temperature for a particular length of time. So when Granny visits it is trivial to make things warmer. Going wireless and being able to be placed anywhere means you can measure ambient temperature at a sensible point that accurately reflects the feel of the house, rather than a fixed point in a drafty hallway or above a radiator. (And it really is small: ours mostly lives in the unzoned dining room, behind a picture frame on a shelf.)

The Genius Hub itself is also smaller and more attractive. This matters as the previous model was somewhat bulky and resembled the mini PC that it truly was. Given that it needs to be connected to the router this wasn’t ideal in terms of space and the attractiveness of your home. The new slimline device is, if anything, an advert for Heat Genius, as curious visitors may be minded to ask just what is that slick piece of digital home kit.

Critically, the improvements aren’t skin-deep. The smaller Genius Hub now has a longer wireless range, coping easily with our old house and its solid walls. In our previous, smaller home the last-generation Genius Hub needed a smart plug to be in situ in order to reach around the whole house. The new system effortlessly reaches throughout our current abode, despite having to go further and through thicker walls. (It’s better than our Wi-Fi network that is still a little flaky with an extender installed.) This is important, given that Heat Genius’ core constituency is large, older properties.

The app

The main improvement is in the app via which you control your Heat Genius network. In the past this was functional without being pretty, and some of the language was a bit technical. Function is everything in an app that controls a system, and even the old Heat Genius app was simple to use in terms of operating the heating and setting a schedule.

If everything worked it was great, but if a device dropped off the network or wasn’t responding understanding how to fix it required support. And it looked pretty rough. Plus it didn’t scale well on mobile: have more than a few zones and you were doing a lot of scrolling. Finally, although you could access some pretty hard core installer settings, you had to hunt to find them.

You can access the new app on Android and iOS devices, and via the open web. It looks great, and is very easy and intuitive to use. Heat Genius has managed to pull off the clever trick of putting installer-level settings into the app, but making them easier to use. This is principally because of the ‘Settings’ and ‘Doctor’ areas of the app, accessed from the main menu.

‘Settings’ gives you access to a list of all the devices on the system. It shows you when each device last communicated with the hub, and shows its battery life where appropriate. It also allows you to Ping the device, which will often kick into gear a valve that isn’t playing for some reason. Other options include configuration, updates and removal of the device. You’re not going to need this page often, if at all, but knowing that this level of control is available and easy to understand is a good thing.

As is the ‘Doctor’. This is a series of in-app wizards that allow you to solve problems in natural language and with no technical knowledge. Simply by answering questions about the issue you are looking to solve, the Doctor points you in the direction of a solution, taking you through required remedial action step by step. And the app alerts you to issues that your system may have via a large red ‘Issues’ pane at the top of the app home screen.

We used the Doctor to fix a problem with a radiator valve that

had been incorrectly set up in the factory. Simply by answering the questions asked it showed us how to reset the device and reconnect it to the network. A really smart result, that will give end users a lot of confidence in the system (and keep them off tech support phone lines).

Heat Genius does offer on the phone tech support 24/7, however.

In use

We had Heat Genius in our previous, three-bedroomed semi-detached home, and we loved it. We just love the level of control over heating and – via smartplugs – lights and the kettle, to the extent that any money-saving aspect feels like a secondary issue. Being able to remotely control the heating is useful and cool. And it definitely reduces our power usage. Over time you heat only what you need to heat. And because you know that you can set a temperature in advance you don’t waste time and energy pre-heating spaces. (Plus, with a burgeoning family being able to heat the kettle at 5am to make a bottle at 6am is a life and sleep saver.)

Aside from the cost, the only negative associations we have ever had with Heat Genius were the relatively ugly, relatively big and relatively bulky Hub, and the fact that on the very rare occasions on which things went wrong the app wasn’t particularly helpful (phone-based support was). Neither was a huge issue, but in digital kit visuals matter, and as you can’t tune in a digital radio you need to be confident that any digital system will just work – or be fixable when it breaks.

The only other thing to note was that in a smaller house we needed two smart plugs to ensure the network was sufficiently robust. And we had to use Powerline adaptors to place the hub in the kitchen away from the router, but closer to the radiator action.

Moving to a bigger house at exactly the same time as the updated Genius Kit is launched was serendipity, honest. But it was great to get the new system up and running, testing a beta of the new app with the all-new hardware.

The (minor) issues with the old system are all solved here. The new hardware is discreet and stylish. Being able to move the thermostat around, and use it to set the temperature, adds a new layer of intuitive functionality. And the app is – as outlined above – a massive improvement in all aspects, but in particular with the control and problem-solving capability it offers.

The major improvement is connectivity. Our house is a largish four-bedroom house with playroom, utility room, garage, front room and dining room. Parts of it were built in the 1880s, and parts in the 1980s, so it is a connectivity nightmare: for all but the Genius Hub. It just works, and works well.

The future

One intriguing aspect of Heat Genius is what the future may hold. Once you have the central hub in place, and you start adding valves, sensors and smart plugs, you are creating an IoT network around your home. Heat Genius hasn’t announced any concrete plans to add to the main heating focus of the network, but says that the new setup’s use of If This Then That (IFTTT) makes it easy to set up ‘recipes’ with third-party devices.

It says you can ‘easily set your Heat Genius system to interact with 376 other devices and online services’. So you could use your location-enabled smartphone to switch on your heating when you’re close to home and off when you leave, or set up a sensor behind the front door so that you know when someone else walks in.

This gets interesting if, and when, Heat Genius persuades hardware manufacturers to make or adapt other devices to its system. It can’t be long before customers with zoned heating systems are able to set up IP cameras, or other connected devices that can be controlled remotely and set to a timer. In our house we use two smartplugs to remotely control lights in the front room and the kettle. So moving forward it may be sensible to think of Heat Genius as a true smart home network in the making.

Verdict

Heat Genius is very good at a very useful thing. It is easy to use and efficient, and over time it will save you the cost of installation. And it is fairly priced. How long Heat Genius takes to pay for itself will depend on your circumstances, and it may be that dropping £800 to £1,200 or more is too much of a long-term investment for you. But it is a great product, and if you are looking to install in your home a zoned smart heating system, we are happy to recommend Heat Genius – not least because of its potential as a true smart home network for your house.