Hi,

We are greatly extending our house and with it fitting a new heating/
hot water system. In summary it will consist of the following..
- 2 system boilers
- Megaflow tank
- One room (zone) with water UFH
- 3 zones (1 per floor) for the heating
- 1 "zone" to cover the towel rails in the bathrooms so that they can
be warm in summer with the heating off
- secondary loop for the hot water to reduce draw down time of the hot
water in the other side of the house
- all rads with TRVs

The question is how on earth do I control all this???

Having looked her and search the web a lot, I have seen the following
"possible" solutions and was wondering if anyone here has a fairly
cost effective solution?

Option 1 - programmable room stats
The thought here was to have a programmable room stat per zone
(assuming the UFH is an additional zone) located in the hallway/
landing of each floor and in the room with UFH. Centrally control the
hot water and towel rails on a timer.

Seemed a good solution until my wife thought about the scenario where
we come in during a time when the heating is off and want to turn it
on again. We would have to go to each room stat and turn it on....

Option 2 - use some X10 controllers
I have not had any experience with these but in theory I guess you
could control them via a timer and also in the scenario of coming in
when everything is off, switch them on with a central controller(s)
from anywhere in the house. Has anyone used these? Is this a good
idea?

Option 3 - a comercial controller.
I saw that Honeywell seem to do a fancy controller which optimises the
bolier firing and timing based on your temperature requirements and
the outside temperature. I couldn't get a great deal of information
(nor find anyone who sold it!!) but believe it is called an AQ2000.
This would resolve the issue of managing the 2 boilers and the central
control when you get into the house but then provides the flip side of
how do you switch the heating on when you are upstairs?

In summary, despite a great deal of searching, I haven't been able to
come up with anything that is flexible and resolves the problems
above. Wouldn't it be great if you could call it to turn the heating
on on your way home (like you can with alarms to switch them off)??

All ideas and thoughts appreciated. Also, any issues with the current
design?

thanks in advance

Lee.