"Three years in and wish I hadn't spent the money"

Been using their system for nearly 3 years now. If you really really like putting out software and hardware fires, this is the system for you. The fact that you have to pay for support says it all. For free you get access to the forum where every single customer they've ever had is doing their best to support each other through all the spurious calls for heat you get or lost connections with the hub or whatever.

The system really isn't fit for the average user. Device ranges are really awful so radiators lose connections, the system is really behind the times with for example no app notifications for simple things like when a battery goes in a rad valve.

Support is so useless that we have had requests for notifications as a "feature request" (why it's not standard I have no idea) open for over three years. seriously... these people have no clue.

When it works, it heats the house and can be tweaked to your heart's content as well as integrated with Alexa etc. But most of the time, you are dealing with issues and if I wasn't tech savvy, I'd be utterly lost. Once I die, the wife will throw the lot in the bin and go back to normal valves.

"Awful, fed up with this horrible system"

We’re so fed up with this system, it is so unreliable. I am constantly resetting and readding things.
It’s been nothing but trouble since we installed it.
Different elements constantly having issues and the app is so glitchy, we’re lucky if it connects to the system. If I want to connect to the system I need to turn off my wifi and press the reset button on the hub… every time.
We can’t stand it any longer.
We’re livid to be honest, spent an absolute fortune on it. It’s embarrassing when we’ve guests and the heat or hot water doesn’t work.
Ridiculous.

"Great idea, but fails to deliver in practice"

In theory, this is an awesome system. It allows you to control each radiator and then an intelligent system learns your usual movements around the house over 2 weeks and automatically pre-heats only the rooms you will be using, when you use them - in theory saving huge costs as you only heat the rooms you are using.

In practice, however, the system is so glitchy that it keeps falling over, and then the heating system either doesn't come on at all, or gets stuck in permanent 'on' mode. Customer service is poor, as they have not factored in the cost of having to constantly fix people's system failures over time. I signed up to a £5.00 per month phone support system otherwise it is impossible to get any service response beyond 'look at the help pages' and even then it is very un-responsive. I feel Genius Hub's business model is essentially broken as their system is inherently unstable and, if they charge enough to allow proper ongoing customer service, that will eat up the theoretical cost savings the system was meant to deliver, which makes the whole thing pointless. Not to mention the ongoing cost of having to buy batteries for all the radiator and room sensor valves, which actually adds up to a significant cost over time and also eats away at the savings, when added to the necessary phone support subscription. Despite the high initial cost to install, I am on the point of scrapping the whole thing - the only thing that keeps me using the bloody thing is the high sunk cost of the initial purchase. In the meantime my mother-in-law bought a Honeywell zone system which appears to be much more stable so I think I just have to bite the bullet and scap the Genius Hub and change to Honeywell.

Bottom line: would I buy this again, having now had it for 4 years or so? Absolutely no way.

"Difficult to configure and does not save you money!"

I've had Heat Genius for 3months, spent over £1000 on the kit (for a 4-bed house), instead of spending £200 on Hive or Nest. Note that I had to spend a further £500 on my plumber kitting out the house in Thermostatic Radiator Valves (TRVs) to cater for the Genius valves to mount on. Also note that I fitted Heat Genius at the same time as getting a new Viessmann combi boiler installed.

My main problem statement was that my wife and I work from home in two separate rooms but using conventional heating, we are heating the whole house unnecessarily. Heat Genius' premise (and main draw to me) was that you only heat the rooms you want and therefore save money on your heating bills.

If you're thinking about buying Heat genius, please consider my views below:

Pros:
1) The app isn't bad at all (I'm using Android). You are presented a decent overview and then for a given room, it is straight forward to set the timings or to create a simple override.
2) Installation wasn't rocket science and apart from the boiler receiver unit, I did the lot myself

Cons:
1) Installation instructions are ambiguous, to the point that my plumber suggested I should get everything set up myself and become accustomed to the installation instructions (as he didn't want to be called out repeatedly for something that he hadn't recommended)
2) Very quickly it became apparent that the rads were not heating up quickly (or ever reaching temperature). In one bedroom, the rad was set to 21degrees for 2.5hrs and could only rise from 18 to just over 20. The solution to this was one of several things:
a) Increase the 'hidden offset' to make the valve think the rad needed to be hotter (so if you set 21, it will try to reach 23 if you change it by +2). The issue with this is it's hidden, so you have to remember valve-by-valve what you've set it to.
b) 'Pre-heat' the rad (so it aims to reach temperature earlier in the day). Obviously one problem is that it increases your heating bill. The bigger issue was that because it never reached temperature, it 'cleverly' started pre-heating hours before it was meant to!
c) Set the valve to think the rad is too small for the room (thereby increasing the flow rate). The problem with this is that it doesn't seem to have made a difference.
Note that I'm yet to find a way that the valve can be set to 'full on' (so that it allows maximum heat, instead of a controlled flow).
2) It doesn't save money! The boiler receiver works like Nest or Hive; it switches the boiler 'on' or 'off'. This means that it sends the hot water through the same pipes to try to heat the same rads. Therefore if you have two rooms that need heating through a cold day, the boiler will stay 'on' to heat the pipes for as long as it takes to hit temperature (no matter how many valves are 'open'). Turning off rooms that aren't in use would only save you money if those rooms were colder than the ones you're trying to heat; it doesn't have a way of focussing more heat on the required room.
3) To control the temperature 'properly' (read "accurately for where people are; not rads"), you really need a motion sensor (£45) or thermostat (£90) in addition to the valve (£60). This makes it very expensive per room.
4) There is no simple way to turn the whole house (or active rooms) up or down 'a bit' (eg: it's a sunny day, meaning I want to heat to 2degrees less than each room currently is). Instead I either have to set an override for all rooms at a particular temperature (ie: act like a Nest or Hive) or go into each room and configure them separately.
5) Customer service is only provided for 3 months and you have to wait for them to call you back. Apparently after this, I can read posts online or read the manual. If I want to pay £2 per month, I can wait up to 24hrs for a response (which is fantastic if I'm without heating for a day).
6) After about a month, the heating stopped working (on a cold morning). After investigation, I found that the hub had no power and because it was 7am (after trial and error), I found that the provided USB plug had given up. Replacing the plug with another USB plug worked and everything kicked in but this shouldn't happen after less than a couple of months!

I've tried to steer away from its complexity, as (to be fair to Genius) it's what you knowingly sign up for.

I haven't got to the point where I've thrown it in the bin just yet (as I've spent a lot of money). However, I'm not a million miles off and if it goes wrong, I would find it very hard to justify spending money putting it right (instead of reverting to Nest/Hive again). I'm also reluctant to throw good money after bad in paying for further additions (point 3 above) if there's no cost saving to be had.

Bottom line - heating two rooms during the day takes my boiler the same effort as heating the whole house (so I'm not saving any money)!

"Brilliant system"

Brilliant system! Learns your movements over the pervious 2 weeks and heats rooms accordingly.
The simple fact that you can have multiple temperature settings on one radiator is great. Always keeps room at correct temp with motion detectors if you wish and maintains a level of warmth over night, etc so no huge heating time during occupied times of day.
Another great benefit is that the radiator valve modulate to keep all the system warm, thus when a radiator is called for it doesn't flood the system with cold water and delay any heating to the now occupied room.

"Really disappointed."

I have had this system a few years now. Nothing is simple with this system. The documentation is not clear nor helpful. All the components are expensive and although it uses and open protocol of Z wave it doesn't seem to operate with non heat genius hardware and you need more than you think even in a small house.

It really has been nothing but disappointment the whole time I have had it.

I have been trying to get this sorted and paid for email support. The more I talk to these guys the worse my opinion is of this system. Their suggested solutions. 1) Buy another room thermostat and have two in the living room. 2) Wet underfloor heating can't directly call the boiler for heat so create an even more complicated solution that still won't work. I can't even set a timer on the whole house.

"Too complicated and expensive support."

Summary
If you want a clever smart heating system that needs to be continually monitored and have problems fixed then this system would suit you, if you want a system that you can set up and leave then don’t install Heat Genius.

Detail
I’ve had a two zone plus HW system installed for over a year now and so I know how it works in practice.

When it’s working it’s excellent but I have had a lot of issues with it usually due to faults with the system but sometimes due to a complex setting I was not aware of.

The two most serious issues are -
1. Spurious overrides
• From time to time at random the system decides to override all the settings and heat the entire house to 30deg for an hour (not much fun at 0300 in the morning).
• The workaround for this is to disable manual overrides which means that you lose this useful function.
• I was particularly annoyed that they don’t warn you about this bug you only find out when the house gets very hot!
• They’ve known about this issue for several years and seem unable to fix it.

2. Smart radiator valve batteries going flat
• They don’t warn you that when one of the smart radiator batteries goes flat that radiator turns full on and tries to heat the room to maximum heat > 40deg (I know it happened to me!).
• To avoid this problem you have to log on to the hub every few days to check the battery status.
• It is apparently a feature of the system and not a fault.

Finally it really is essential that you have support from Heat Genius due to the complexity of the system. The only free support is to report bugs through the app, otherwise you have to pay.
Email support is £1.99 pcm per hub and Telephone support is £4.99 pcm per hub, this means that for my two hub system I’d pay £119.76 pa which is probably more than any fuel savings.

"Smart heating done properly"

I've had this system for over 5 years now, controlling my boiler, 10 radiators and 3 smartplugs. It senses each room and can turn off the heating when no one is around but can also learn when the room is most used and warms it in advance. It's definitely paid for itself several times over and crucially is constantly updated. If I ever get into the rental/student property business I will definitely be using their HMO solution to balance comfort with economy.