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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

"Most UK heating systems don’t even have thermostats."

Is that true? It's a long time that I've owned a property that didn't have both a central thermostat and per-radiator thermostats.

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In my experience, almost certainly not. I even find it kind of offensive that they would say that.

There is some old and poorly maintained housing stock here, so there are definitely some homes that don't, but I would bet the majority of these are rentals and a lot of them student rentals. My instinct would put the upper bound at 20%.

I can assure them that people in these properties (old, poorly maintained and usually rentals, correlating to low income) are not going to be buying a nest thermostat. I would be amazed if more than 1% of UK nest sales are going to homes without a thermostat.

I live in an area with no gas, so all our heating is electric. We have storage heaters, but Nest wouldn't work with them (there is no temperature setting once it's on).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater

Yeah, I reckon the only houses that wouldn't have one are ones owned by someone who was too cheap to splash out for one of the existing wireless thermostats.

It's hard to even imagine a radiator-based central heating system (whether gas- or home heating oil-fired) that doesn't have one of those cheap little bimetallic-strip thermostats, at least. Now lots of UK homes don't have per-radiator thermostats, or don't have central-heating timers: maybe that's what Nest meant to say.

My heating system's got a proprietary wireless thermostat/control box (I guess what Nest refer to as a "programmer"), but it's a newer combi-boiler, less than 5 years old. The previous heating system had no thermostat, just a timing system. Similarly, my parent's old heating system didn't have a thermostat, and neither did most of the places I rented before buying... so it depends on the age of the system. I could easily believe the "most don't have" claim.

But every radiator I've known to be fitted in the last 20-30 years has had individual valve thermostats.

I think by "programmer" they mean the heating timer that most UK central heating systems have. (Unless they have features they're not advertising, the Nest isn't a full replacement for one - the timers also turn off hot water semi-independently or even totally independently in the case of many newer ones.)

3 of the houses I rented during my time as a student (2006-2010) had no thermostat. They weren't even that bad as houses go, this was in central Guildford and all of them were probably quite valuable but at the same time old. 1 even had a fairly modern combi-boiler but whoever put it in was obviously like "thermostat? who the hell wants one of them"

So you would have to manually regulate the heating - turn it on and the place just gets hotter and hotter and you manually turn it off?

Mind you, if its anything like our flat even if you left the heating on permanently with the thermostat turned full up it wouldn't get that warm. Although the impact on our gas bill would no doubt be spectacular.

Given how expensive rent is in Guildford it made more financial sense just to try keep it from freezing using the weird timer things that came with the boilers and wear lots of clothes. Yeah, they were all old fashioned single paned/sash window/broken-glass-with-holes type places so getting past 15 degrees in winter was impossible.

Not sure why you're down voted. I find this is at least somewhat accurate today in.

That said, never lived in a house in Scotland that didn't have central heating, gas being the fairly obvious choice. I doubt thermostats are uncommon at all.

"never lived in a house in Scotland that didn't have central heating"

My parents house in Moray didn't have central heating - the halls of residence I lived in when I first went to University had central heating and felt tropical to me. No sooner had I got used to that then I went home again for the Xmas break and felt like I'd moved to Siberia...

Sometimes people see the word "Guildford" and swell with rage. Its almost understandable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3_EYVznn1A.

And when you consider the type of owner (Who gives a toss they are only students landlord) are they ever going to upgrade to a normal system let alone nest.

When you think about it this product is so badly thought out on every level!

Ill-informed and condescending. Radiator thermostats are very common (whether they work or not is another matter), boilers also have a maximum temperature setting.

Not from my experience, you normally have a thermostat, and then a boiler with a timer on it. The boilers often have temperature settings (for the boiler not the house), which allow you to set a seasonal output.

It's absolute rubbish. Most heating systems installed in the last 20 years or so have required them due to assorted building/env regs, and they were quite common place before that. Some low quality housing stock with old systems won't have them, but if the owners were to want one they would likely splash out the twenty quid for a standard one, or take advantage of the substantial grants available to those on low incomes for new heating systems.

I really hope for their sake Nest haven't bet the (UK) house on this "fact".

My rented flat has the worst heating system in history (electric cable in the ceiling) but that manages to have a heating thermostat on the wall. Every house I can think of (parents, sisters) has a thermostat for the hot water and central heating.

I saw this and was going to comment, it's outrageous. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a thermostat. I've lived in 5 houses myself and always had a thermostat.

I'd love to see the data on that claim.

I have been looking for a flat in London recently. A lot of the purpose built set of flats built since the 90's use electric heaters. Even brand new one are still the same ( lot of those are buy-to-let, and if you are going to rent your property, nothing beats electric )

Thermostat are not common with those ( actually I have never seen one ), and would probably be quite tricky with off-peak storage heaters.

I have hard time to belief that this is the majority of houses though.

edit: each individual electric regular heater has a thermostat. Off-peak storage one that are tricky to control because of said storage of heat. So it get controlled by an input and output control.

I have lived in a number of complete dumps, and they all had thermostats.

Personally I've only ever really seen them in commercial buildings and abroad!

I've have been renting 2 flats (new development) and they have electric radiator with build-in thermostats. Same situation with my friends' places.

I actually would be disappointed to have a central one.

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