Bosch Smart Home room climate starter kit: Temperature control in connected homes for perfect feel-good conditions

I find these invaluable in my use case, where I’m in a house with several small rooms that I use at different points of the day. Probably not as useful if you are using most of your rooms for most of the day Had a new Worcester Bosch combi installed with a CT200 thermostat/screen, and this system has slotted in just fine with that. The app is simple to use, and gives you really granular controls over how you hear specific rooms at specific times of the day. The TRVs do make noise when in operation, but we got used to that fairly quickly. If you are a light sleeper, this might be a problem for you in a bedroom, although the fact you don’t need to keep your bedroom massively hot when you are asleep means it turns off around the time I goto bed, and seldom goes on again until I have programmed it to in the morning, around the time I wake up. I settled on this because: - Tado at the point of point of purchase, didn’t support “modulation” on my boiler properly, just on/off controls which would have impacted efficiency slightly - Price wasn’t ridiculous when on offer - It has APIs which give you the ability to link in with your smart home, such as Home Assistant

I am trying to be as eco-friendly as possible and I decided that being able to limit or turn off heat to certain rooms from my phone would let me save energy and money. These look great at first and you would expect high quality from Bosch but sorry they are just terrible, first for the high cost they are made of the cheapest horrible feeling plastic in the world and they are just creaky and should be more like £10-£20 each for this sort of quality. The fittings aren't too bad but you definitely don't get everything you need for every situation and again for the cost you should get everything that you need and not have to purchase anything extra. Luckily I managed to fit my five thermostats but two did require a little known 1p coin trick, basically on some radiators the valve is to low and the unit can’t travel far enough to close and open the valve so the unit won't calibrate or work, if you put a 1p coin in between it will then be able to reach. By the way the controller takes forever to get setup, it could be downloading firmware but honestly it's like 20-30 minutes from plugin for the thing to be ready to go and the units themselves say updating firmware for like two days, everything is just very, very slow. So after finally getting the units to calibrate I started to play with the different features and set the temperatures that I wanted in each room but when I set temperatures on two of the thermostats from my phone they didn’t do anything and they just went offline. I waited a while and one came back on but then disappeared again, so I waited a good while longer but nothing else happened so I removed the batteries and restarted the units, they then showed online and everything seemed fine but then I would set the temperature and they would once again go offline. It can’t be signal as it’s not a huge house and the other thermostats were further away with walls in between and they didn’t have any issues at all, moved the controller anyway but they still had constant connectivity issues. There's a booster that you can buy but once again it’s spending even more money on something that should just work at this price point! Another problem is that they don’t detect the temperature very well, they can be 2°C-5°C out,I get that you can adjust the temperature but again at these prices you shouldn’t have to be correcting the temperature. The next issue is also to do with temperature, it always goes higher than what you set it to, I can set the radiator in a completely different room that isn’t affected by another room's temperature and it will end up a good chunk higher, for example I set the radiator to heat up to 18°C but it would keep going to 22°C. If I went to the settings for the radiator it would show the valve position still open at a certain percentage for example 30%, surely if the room was warm enough the valve should be closed?? I was really hoping these were going to be fantastic for the cost but they are just rubbish, even if you manage to get past all of these issues and the messing about, I have now read all the bad reviews about constantly needing the batteries replaced, units suddenly dying, units falling apart after a few years etc it just seems like a product that is going to be a constant headache. These are definitely all going back to Amazon for a refund, I was going to purchase more thermostats and some door sensors which in total would have been about £800 but no way.

Our radiator is behind cupboards so it not easy to change heating. With this life is so muchceasier and i can control it when when out. Just make sure you buy the whole thing as without the main hube you cannot use. Also got it on a promo price which im very happy about

Purchased from the Warehouse and it had clearly been used before. Whoever had used it had password protected the Homebase. Resets didn't work and Bosch Customer services were worse than useless in helping to resolve. No Homebase no operating system. Returned and credited, not exactly sure how Amazon could have checked the unit had been password locked but at the end of the day they sold an unusable item. Since then the cost of a new Homebase has gone up by £50.00 so its cost me quite a lot.

Perfectly working, we love it!

Disvlaimer...received this to review for Amazon. Initially the thought of this tool seemed modern and time saving but the reality becomes a sanity check to establish just how lazy you are. If you own a mansion I can see that this might save time but in any normal family home it takes seconds to go to any room and adjust the thermostat on any radiator. And while you're at it, adjust the thermostat that monitors the whole system. The build quality isn't bad except for the long window monitor. It lightweight and feels cheaply made. The rest of the kit feels more quality. Here's the kicker though...the two radiator thermostats don't fit our radiators bar 1. In summary...I really don't see the point of this other than for showing off to friends and being lazy.

We ve been using the smart thermostats and their window companion for a few months in our bedrooms seeking to have good control of the temperature for our newborn baby. PROs: - seems to be working without bugs. - The app is quite well designed. - The open window detector function is really useful, it shuts down the valve and reminds us when to close windows for good ventilation. - remote control when we re away from home is really useful THINGS FOR IMPROVEMENTS: - the temperature measured by the valves is not precise despite it can be adjusted (calibrated) and we did it. The result is that it works ok until the outdoors temperature changes substantially (e.g. from 4°C to 12°C). We ended up with a bedroom at 21.5°C while the target was 19°C, which is too much for a bedroom. Perhaps the problem arises from the closeness of the valve and the radiator. Perhaps it would be more precise with the separate room smart thermostat (~£60). In our view this is too expensive for a product which should be sold as part of the bundle. Alternatively, Bosch could make the smart hub compatible with an existing (cheaper) smart thermometer located in the room. - The hub is not able to communicate with the boiler controller which means the boiler must be set to always ON to ensure the radiators get heat when required. This is potentially a massive impact on consumption and might cancel all benefits of having smart valves. - The valves design is not (very) appealing for a period home. - Likewise, the window opening detectors are bulky. - for the sake of the planet, the valves should allow for rechargeable batteries. In conclusion, you might want to look at the other similar products, including the ones proposed by the boiler manufacturer.

This is s starter pack for the Bosch Smart Home system. We already have four rooms fitted with Phillips Hue lights so I was a bit sceptical that this would integrate fully and not mean having two separate apps to control heat and lights. The kit comes with the home hub which plugs directly into the router (no Ethernet cable supplied), download the app and then hey presto away you go, controlling radiators and checking access via the door contact. The app is easy to use and includes controls to set up hue lights within the app. although its not as good on the options front as the hue app it does offer a certain amount of functionality. A neat starter kit for the smart home.