Hacker News Reader

Comment by petepete | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, I had a new boiler installed last year with Vaillant's smart controls. There's a little puck shaped 'control unit' with WiFi/radio which allows the app to talk to it, and it to talk to the thermostat.

Like most people in the UK, the boiler's in the garage. A brick rectangle separate from the house. Did Vaillant include an ethernet port? You bet they didn't. The support team suggested I installed WiFi in my garage, which definitely wasn't going to happen.

I had to get the installer back and he ran the cable through the wall so it's now inside and working fine - but how did this ever make it to market? No wonder the reviews are all terrible.

View on HN

Most people in the UK don’t have a garage. Almost every home I’ve lived in has had a gas boiler somewhere inside.

Fair. But I strongly suspect nearly every house with a garage has the boiler in it.

Edit. So having done a little research this probably isn't the case. Maybe it's a regional thing, all the (mostly suburban) houses I've lived in and visited, in the north west of England, are set up that way.

In the midlands the boiler would preferably be in the utility room (laundry room). The slight waste heat is appreciated there.

In London it's wherever the landlord's plumber can fit it, as he illegally subdivides the house into several flats. At least going by my experience as a student. Kitchen, bathroom, garage, outside wall...

There's enough boilers in garages, lofts, the other side of the house, etc, once you overlap it with UK houses being brick, you get enough situations where getting WiFi from one place to another becomes a pain. A lot of the time, the WiFi AP is 30 cm from where the phone line came into the house when it was built (before the internet even existed), which is not optimally placed for coverage.

Not quite I’ve noticed in east of England the boiler is in the garage only when a conservatory or kitchen extension is made.

I’ve also tried to move mine from kitchen to garage and the builder I had at the time wasn’t aware of such things.

But agree with the point, I think if a wifi is added to an appliance an ethernet port should also be added.

I probably would have just installed an an extender plug that extends Wifi by signalling through the mains. Cheap and works quite well

I totally could have run a cable through the wall and installed an extra access point - I was planning on running the cable anyway to connect the control unit via ethernet, until I found that it didn't have one (yeah, I should have checked, I assumed it would).

I didn't really like the idea of having an access point in the garage just to service my boiler. Seems very wasteful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com