Honeywell Evohome
Price £204 + £55/rad + installation / stuff.tv/evohome
What’s the story? When we last weighed up the smart heating market two years ago, Honeywell’s Evohome system went into that fight with a very powerful secret weapon up its trouser leg: individual control over the temperature of every room in the house. at weapon isn’t secret any more – others now offer it too – so is Evohome still a winner?
Well, Honeywell has made some improvements of its own in the interim, including Alexa and IFTTT support, in-built Wi-fi (so you no longer need
a second router) and the option of controlling your hot water as well as your radiators. ere’s also a new desktop app, though the smartphone version is all you really need.
Is it any good? ere’s no clever habit-learning tech here: it’s all about letting you control everything yourself. You can set heating schedules for every room, for every day of the week, and then manually override them from your phone or just by turning the radiator valves. e system will adjust its timing according to how
quickly your rooms heat up and cool down, but it still takes a few weeks of tweaking to really feel that you’ve got the whole house exactly as you want it in all weathers.
e only issue? It’s more expensive than the numbers might suggest at first glance. A three-bed house could have eight or nine rooms in all, and if you want each to have its own heating zone then that’s almost £500 on valves alone – and installation is no small job. For larger houses this is an investment that will take a few years to pay for itself.
STUFF SAYS A solid option o ering complete control over every room