UK Electric Underfloor Heating and Smart Things?

General Discussion
1

Hey all,

I keep putting off getting my downstairs hall floor tiled since I also want Electric Heating but need it to be compatible with SmartThings as I’m assuming it’s not going to be something I can easily retrofit later.

Last time I checked there wasn’t really much out there in the way of Electric Heating and Smart Things compatibility; has anything changed / improved?

Or is there any suggestions of specific types of underfloor heating that I can fit and in the future it would just be a change of the thermostat / controller opposed to having to rip out tiling and redo it all?

Many thanks!

Mike

2

It depends what type of underfloor heating you want, Electric or Water (like a giant radiator)

If you’re putting pipes in, then talk to your plumber about fitting a new zone and stick a Nest, Ecobee, Hive etc in there.

If you’re doing it using an electric mat, then I believe there are 2 options. The first option usually comes with a thermostat, however you could use something like this I think.
http://www.vesternet.com/z-wave-heatit-thermostat-white

If you’ve just got an on/off system, then chance are it goes to a fused spur. If so, you can just use a Z-Wave Relay and a Switch to allow for phone and manual control

3

If you have the opportunity to have wet underfloor heating, then I’d go with this. It is a LOT more efficient than electric underfloor. You can also make it compatible with items like evohome, or nest etc as stated above.

However, if it has to be electric, then there are options from Warmup that have a smart thermostat. While there is no direct integration with smartthings, there appears to be the possibility of having it communicate, although its going to take some custom code/applications and working with other members to sort it. One such thread is below.

4

Hey Mike,

I installed a 5 m^2 electric heat mat in our bathroom while we were renovating our home. As you say there’s not a lot of options out there at the moment and our existing Tado thermostat wasn’t able to deal with the switching current. As ghesp suggests we could have installed a switching relay on the Tado output but decided to go with the Heatit device from vesternet.

While there isn’t a ST device handler AdamV has written a custom device handler that works pretty well.

There’s currently no option to control the thermostat based on routines or with smartapps to only turn on under certain conditions or turn off if there’s no motion in the room but it does allow you to check the current floor temp and adjust the heating set points. As for running costs i’m still working on getting the Aeon Labs HEM v2+ to work to be able to report on this…

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