Heatmiser NeoHub Installation — Hampstead Heath

Five bedrooms. Five heating zones. Five different programmers from three different manufacturers, installed at various points over 20 years by various engineers who had added zones as the house was extended and improved. None of them were synchronised. None had remote access. Two of them still used physical dials rather than digital displays.

The homeowner — an architect who spent three weeks every month travelling internationally — managed the heating by leaving notes for the housekeeper. "Turn zone 3 on at 7am on Tuesdays." "Zone 1 can go off at night in April." It was functional in the way that a hand-written tide table is functional. What he actually wanted was to manage the heating from his phone from an airport lounge in Singapore.

Beyond the control issue, there was a technical problem that the previous arrangement had been hiding. The ground floor had engineered oak flooring over a wet UFH system installed four years earlier. The zone programmer for that circuit had no floor sensor input — so the UFH had been cycling based on air temperature alone, with no protection for the timber floor. RARE's engineer confirmed during the survey that the floor temperature on cold mornings had been reaching 32°C — above the manufacturer's recommended maximum of 27°C. The floor wasn't visibly damaged, but it had been operating under risk that needed to be corrected.

The specification was a Heatmiser NeoHub 2 with five NeoStat thermostats — four for the radiator zones on floors one through three, and one NeoStat configured in floor-sensing mode for the ground floor UFH zone, with a floor temperature probe installed in the existing conduit in the screed.

Installation was single-day. Each existing programmer was disconnected and removed. The NeoStat thermostats were wired to the existing zone valve wiring — no new cable runs required on any zone. The NeoHub was positioned in the utility room, connected to the router and commissioned. Floor sensor calibrated and maximum floor temperature limit set to 27°C in the NeoStat configuration for the ground floor zone.

Before the engineer left, five individual heating schedules had been programmed — different for each zone, each tailored to the room's function and the household's actual routine. The homeowner's phone had the Heatmiser Neo app installed with all five zones visible, the housekeeper's phone had a limited-access account showing zones one through three. The property manager had a read-only view of all zones.

Four weeks after installation, the homeowner sent a message from Singapore to confirm everything was working perfectly — he'd adjusted the ground floor schedule from his hotel at 11pm the previous night.