What Is Hive Heating, and How Does It Work With Your Boiler?

Hive is a smart heating control system. It replaces your existing programmer and room thermostat with a wireless Hive thermostat, a receiver wired in at the boiler and a small hub plugged into your broadband router, so you can set schedules and temperatures from a phone app wherever you are. Hive is a brand of Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, but you do not need to be a British Gas customer to use it. It works with most gas combi, system and regular boilers. What it does not do is make the radiators or pipework heat any better. It controls when heat is asked for, not how well it gets round the house.

What Is in a Hive Heating System?

A standard Hive heating setup has three parts that talk to each other by radio, plus the app.

• The thermostat. A wireless, battery-powered unit that sits in a room and measures the temperature. You can change settings on it directly, as with any thermostat.
• The receiver. Wired into the boiler or the heating wiring centre, usually where the old programmer was. It switches the heating, and hot water where there is a cylinder, on and off.
• The hub. A small box plugged into your broadband router. It connects the thermostat and receiver to the internet so the app can reach them.

There are single-channel receivers for heating only, which suit combi boilers, and dual-channel versions that also control a hot water cylinder on a system or regular boiler.

How Hive Works Day to Day

Hive works like a programmable room thermostat that you can also reach from your phone. You set a weekly schedule of times and temperatures, and the thermostat asks the boiler for heat whenever the room drops below the target.

The app adds the smart part: changing the temperature on the way home, boosting the heating for an hour, switching to a holiday mode, and seeing the current temperature when you are out. Hive can also work with some voice assistants. Features and any optional paid extras have changed over the years, so check what is currently included before relying on a particular function.

If the internet drops out, the thermostat and receiver keep following the schedule stored on them. You lose remote control from the app, not the heating.

Hive Radiator Valves and Room-by-Room Control

A single Hive thermostat controls the whole house to one temperature, measured in one room. Hive Radiator Valves add room-by-room control by replacing ordinary TRV heads with smart ones that follow their own schedules.

They screw onto most existing thermostatic valve bodies and connect through the hub. That lets a spare bedroom stay cool while the living room warms up, without rewiring anything. Whether it is worth doing depends on how the house is used. Our guide to how TRVs work covers what a standard valve already does, which is often more than people expect.

Will Hive Work With My Boiler?

Hive works with most gas boilers that use a standard on/off control connection, which covers the majority of combi, system and regular boilers in London homes. The thing to check is how your existing controls are wired.

• Combi boilers. Usually straightforward: the receiver replaces the old timer or switches the boiler's thermostat connection.
• System and regular boilers with a cylinder. Need the dual-channel receiver, and the wiring to zone valves has to be understood before anything is disconnected.
• Boilers with their own built-in programmer or a manufacturer's own control system. May need a different wiring approach, or may be better served by the manufacturer's own controls.

The receiver connects to mains wiring at or near the boiler. That is electrical work that should be done by someone competent, and any work on the gas side of the boiler itself must be done by a Gas Safe registered engineer.

What Hive Will Not Fix

Smart controls decide when the boiler runs. They do not change how heat is distributed, so they cannot fix cold rooms caused by the system itself.

• One room always cold. Usually an unbalanced system or an undersized radiator. A smarter thermostat in the hall will not change that.
• Radiators cold at the bottom. That is sludge. The fix is cleaning the system and fitting a magnetic filter.
• A thermostat in the wrong place. If the Hive thermostat sits in a room warmed by the sun or a kitchen, the rest of the house will be cold. Moving it is free and often the best improvement you can make.

If the heating does not heat evenly before Hive goes in, it will not heat evenly afterwards. It is worth sorting the system first.

Is Hive Worth It?

Hive is worth it if you want to control your heating remotely, your schedule changes from week to week, or you want to stop heating an empty house. It adds less if someone is home most of the day and the existing programmer is already set sensibly.

For homes that need different temperatures in different rooms, radiator valves or a zoned system can add more than the thermostat alone. Our comparison of Hive, Nest and Tado installation covers what affects the installed price. We fit and set up smart controls through our smart heating controls service, and we check the radiators and system balance at the same time, so the new controls have a system that can respond to them.