Drayton Wiser Review

Room-by-room heating systems, which give you control via smart radiator thermostats, are usually very expensive to get started with, as you can see from the Honeywell Evohome. Not so with the Drayton Wiser, where a starter kit that includes a smart Room Thermostat and two Radiator Thermostats controls costs less than a Nest Learning Thermostat.

Fortunately, as well as being cheap, Wiser’s easy controls and apps make it one of the simplest systems to use. Since launch, Drayton has improved the app, fixed some of our initial issues and has now added in a smart plug, which can act as a range extender, too.

Drayton Wiser Design and build – A good range of accessories and controls

• Works with OpenTherm and on/off controls
• Simple radiator valves
• Standalone room thermostats available

Wiser controls your heating via a wireless relay that has to be wired into your boiler. As this uses mains voltage, you’ll most likely need professional installation. You can hook up a simple relay, although you can also use OpenTherm for boiler modulation (see, What is OpenTherm? for more details).

It’s important to choose the right relay for your system. The cheapest option is the single-channel kit, which is designed for a combi boiler. If you want hot water control, there’s a two-channel kit that can do this and your heating (£200). If you’ve got two heating zones and you want hot water, you’ll need the three-channel kit (£200), which ships with two thermostats, but no Radiator Thermostats.

As we have a combi boiler, we went with the single-channel kit. This ships with the neat relay, plus a wireless thermostat and two radiator valves. The Room Thermostat is a small square box with an LCD panel, decked out in white plastic. It’s fairly unobtrusive, so you can place it anywhere without it dominating a room.

Wiser’s simple Radiator Thermostats are similarly unobtrusive and look like smart, regular TRVs.

Drayton Wiser Features – App overhaul makes it easier to control

• Can set schedules and apply them to multiple rooms
• Simple boost settings let you adjust heat for a set period
• Rooms all display in one place

Once the relay is connected to your boiler, you have to use the simple app to connect it up to your Wi-Fi network. Once joined, you can start to add your devices to the system. Wiser works by creating rooms, each of which can hold multiple heating devices. For example, you may want to have two radiator valves in one room.

If you’re sticking with the starter kit, it makes sense to place the Room Thermostat where your old one lived for whole-home control. It’s battery powered, so there’s no need for external power, and you can have it either free-standing or wall-mounted.

The two radiator valves can then be placed in the most-used rooms to give you individual control, such as for the living room and bedroom. There’s nothing to stop you buying additional radiator valves if you want to control more rooms. Priced at a reasonable £40 each, they’re around £20 cheaper than similar controls from rival systems.

Fixing the Radiator Thermostat onto a TRV is easy enough, and Drayton provides plenty of adaptors in the box. I had no problems connecting the Radiator Thermostats to my radiators.

Wiser doesn’t support geolocation to automatically turn your heating on and off when you go out. There is an ‘Away’ mode that you can set manually, with all rooms dropping to a pre-set temperature when it is activated. However, having to remember to turn this mode on and off means that you’re likely to forget and could miss out on potential savings on your fuel bill. Thanks to an update to introduce IFTTT support, you can implement this feature yourself. I recommend using the Life360 service if you’ve got multiple people in your home. Alternatively, you can combine a smart alarm with IFTTT, setting Away mode when the Alarm is activated and going back to normal when you unlock the alarm.

Drayton has additional modes available, too, including the Boost All option that can increase the temperature throughout your home with the press of one button for one hour. If you prefer, you can set the Boost for a set period on a room-by-room basis. There’s now a button to turn off all heating overrides.

You can create multiple schedules and then apply them to the rooms you want. For example, you may want a Bedroom schedule with all of your bedrooms in it. This also gives some flexibility, as you can set a simpler schedule for a guest bedroom, where it’s heated less, but then add the Bedroom schedule when someone comes to stay.

Schedules are set on a day-by-day basis, but you can copy one day’s settings to another to speed up the job. It’s a shame that you can’t copy settings from room to room, though; this is something that Evohome lets you do.

An Eco mode can be turned on. With this, Wiser takes into account the external temperature and also learns how long your house takes to warm up. That way, it can adjust when your boiler fires and turns off so that your home doesn’t warm up past the set temperature. It takes a week or so for Wiser to learn.

More recently, Drayton has added Comfort Mode, which makes your heating come on early so that your home hits the set temperature at the time you want it.

Where Wiser misses out compared to Evohome is in advanced features. With Honeywell’s system, there are a few advanced profiles that you can apply, such as ‘Economy’ mode which reduces the temperature of every zone by 3°C. Honeywell also has a custom mode, which lets you apply a temporary schedule to the zones you choose. I use it as a guest mode, warming up the spare bedroom and bathroom when people come to stay; when there’s no one staying, these rooms are kept cooler to save energy.

There’s now a Drayton Wiser smart plug, which connects to the system using the same proprietary wireless protocol. It handily acts as a range extender, too, which could be useful if you have a larger house and were struggling to get a radiator valve working.

The smart plug does everything that you’d expect, including the app letting you toggle it on or off. You can also set a schedule. Other smart plugs connect with more systems and give you more features, but if you’re after simplicity and don’t want to add more apps, then it’s a decent choice.

Drayton Wiser – Performance

Simplicity is the name of the game, and nothing demonstrates that as well as the Radiator Thermostat’s control. With no screen, you can’t choose a room’s temperature. Instead, you twiddle the control to the ‘+’ icon, and your heating is boosted by 2°C above the current temperature for an hour. Similarly, the ‘-‘ position drops the heating by 2°C for an hour.

While other heating systems give you more control, Wiser’s simple operation is quite pleasing, as you don’t have to worry about which setting to use: you just make the room warmer or cooler.

Using the Room Thermostat, you get a higher level of control, as you can pick a temperature set point and choose how long you want the temperature boost to last for (30 minutes, one hour, two hours or three hours).

A similar level of control exists within the app, letting you boost each room to a set temperature, with the same timer intervals that the thermostat uses. You can use the ‘Follow Schedule’ option to either change back to the scheduled temperature at the next set point, or turn this off to make the setting permanent.

The most recent app update lets you see every room in one place, although you can still select each room individually. Overall, the new app makes the system far more polished and easy to use.

I like the simple app, which provides an at-a-glance view of every room in your home. The temperature readings from the thermostat and radiator valves were accurate, but be prepared to spend a bit of time getting the schedules and temperature set points to your liking. Each room has its own thermal properties, so getting the exact temperature right room-by-room requires a bit of tweaking.

At launch, Wiser didn’t support IFTTT, but that has now been rectified with a new channel. The IFTTT channel has no Triggers and just one Action: toggle the Away mode on or off. That’s not that flexible, but being able to toggle Away mode at least means that you can create your own geolocation service, turning your heating off when you go out and back on when you return. For households with multiple people, you’re best off using the Life360 service to track locations, so that you don’t turn your heating off when there are still people at home.

Amazon Alexa support is available through the Wiser skill. As Alexa recognises each room, you can control your heating on a room-by-room basis. I found that the skill worked perfectly and is on a par with the voice control that other room-by-room heating systems offer.

Google Assistant support has been added now, too. As with the Alexa skill, you can control each heating room. It works just as well as the Alexa skill.

Should I buy the Drayton Wiser?

The main competition for Wiser is the Honeywell Evohome. Although more expensive, Evohome has a dedicated touchscreen controller and more powerful zone controls. As such, it’s the best multi-room heating system currently available. That said, Wiser’s simple controls and low price makes it a well-priced alternative. If you want multi-room heating on a reasonable budget, there’s nothing that comes close.