Mr Roe, his wife and parents live in a lovely rural home near Durham, in Northeast England. It was built in the 1750s. Fireplaces originally provided heat throughout the house, as you can see from the 12 chimneys along the roofline. Fires were lit in the rooms as necessary. Now, the house is heated by an LPG-fired boiler, but heating the entire 6000 sq. ft property is very expensive. Roe was looking for a way to heat their home that had the individual room control of the original fireplaces, with the convenience of central heating. The Genius Hub provided the ideal solution.
Why switch to smart heating?
“For me, the decision to get smart heating was primarily an economic one. Smart heating provides an intelligent way of controlling the house, without overheating or under heating individual rooms. With smart heating, you only heat rooms when you use them. I admit there was also the ‘cool factor’ of being able to use my phone to control each room from anywhere. I was definitely attracted to the ‘zoned’ systems that control each radiator. It’s much more convenient than having to go throughout the house to turn radiators off when the rooms are not being used. You really need do that in a home this size; otherwise would cost a fortune to heat!”
Why did you choose the Genius Hub?
“I looked at some comparison reviews of smart systems, including Honeywell, Nest and Tado. In those reviews, people glowed about The Genius Hub. They were incredibly effusive and said that The Genius Hub was the most capable system on the market. No other system on the market had as many features, or was as flexible, as The Genius Hub. The other systems limited the number of zones we could control and lacked the automatic footprint mode. Also, the other products were “clunky” with bulky valves or controllers that wouldn’t fit into our home. For larger houses, there is simply no other system that can do as much as The Genius Hub.”
Were there any concerns?
“Yes, I was worried that as The Genius Hub is a wireless system, it wouldn’t work well in our house. We can’t get our cordless phone to work across the house even with two range extenders, so we were worried about the range of the signal. I spoke to the Genius home technical team and they assured me that it would be fine, as each radiator valve and smart plug repeats the signal, and they’d installed it in large homes before without any problem. We went ahead with it, and it does indeed work perfectly well; there’s a strong signal everywhere.”.
What were your first impressions of the Genius Hub?
“Before ordering, I rang up with a number of questions about the installation. The guys on the phone were incredibly helpful and talked me through the configuration of the system. In one room we have 6 radiators, but the team sorted it all out, so I knew exactly what to order. We bought it through the website and then liaised with the local installer. When the kit arrived, it was already labelled and configured, so the components just needed to be installed. It was very easy; I didn’t need to do anything. The installer did experiment a bit with positioning the smart plugs, to find the locations that gave the strongest network signal. But apart from that, it was completely straightforward. I loved that I could let the Genius home technicians log into my system, so they could give us remote support if we needed it. More importantly, though, it just worked!”
Has Genius Hub lived up to your expectations?
“Yes, absolutely. It’s given us the control we need so that we can easily stay comfortable without wasting money. I also particularly like how it looks in our home. The Genius Hub is clean, white and smart, which fits in very well in all of the rooms, even the more formal rooms. For example, there is not much to see on the radiator valves, they are very discreet. The room sensors are much smaller than we expected – we thought that they would be the same size as security sensors but actually they are tiny, so no one notices them. The other systems look utterly dated and very poor in comparison. Another thing that’s great about The Genius Hub is the ability to chop and change; moving radiator valves from one zone to another was easy to do. We did that because we realised that we didn’t need control of one room that we had bought a valve and room sensor for. We easily moved the valve and room sensor to another room and then assigned it to a new room on the app.”
