Best Smart TRVs UK 2026: Room-by-Room Heating Control

What Smart TRVs Actually Save

Without room-by-room control, the heating comes on and every radiator heats to the same temperature. The spare bedroom nobody's in. The dining room you use twice a week. All heated, all day.

Smart TRVs fix that by letting you set different temperatures for every room and schedule each one independently. Bedrooms warm up at 10pm and cool down when you leave in the morning. The home office heats only on weekdays. Spare rooms sit at 14C instead of 21C.

How much does that save? Here's the honest answer:

• The Energy Saving Trust puts a complete set of heating controls (a programmer, a room thermostat and TRVs on every radiator) at £100 a year in Great Britain and £110 in Northern Ireland. That's the whole lot, not the valves on their own.
• For heat pumps, Drayton cites independent BEAMA testing that found TRVs and smart TRVs work with air source heat pumps and save 6 to 8% without hurting the heat pump's performance.
• Drayton's own marketing says multi-room control saves "up to 19%" and the whole Wiser system "up to 30%", citing BEAMA and Salford University research from 2021. Read those as a manufacturer's best case.

So: if you already have working mechanical TRVs and a decent thermostat, smart valves are buying you scheduling, zoning and convenience, not a step change in efficiency. If your radiators have no TRVs at all, the gain is bigger. Either way, see the payback section before you get excited, because on the published numbers it isn't quick.

The Ecosystem Problem (Read This Before You Buy Anything)

Know this before you buy anything: smart TRVs are not standalone devices. They need a hub or thermostat from the same brand. You're buying into a system, not just a valve.

• tado valves: work within tado's own system, and tado says its X products don't work with V3+ and older
• Drayton Wiser valves: need a Wiser hub (it comes with the thermostat kit)
• Hive valves: need a Hive hub
• Honeywell Evohome valves: sold as part of an evohome system with its controller
• Aqara E1: needs an Aqara Zigbee hub
• Meross valves: need the Meross hub (in the starter kit)

If you already have a smart thermostat, buy valves from the same brand. If you're starting from scratch, read our thermostat guide first; the thermostat is the brain of the system and the valves are the muscle.

Don't buy tado valves hoping they'll work with your Hive thermostat. They won't. Don't buy Wiser valves expecting them to talk to your Nest. They can't.

Our Picks: 6 Smart TRVs Compared

The tado has the most polished app of the lot: clean, fast, genuinely pleasant to use. Per-room scheduling is intuitive, and you can set target temperatures room by room.

Installation is dead simple: unscrew the old TRV head by hand and screw the tado on in its place. The box includes adapters for the common valve bodies, and you're not touching any water or pipes.

The catch? The automatic features sit behind a subscription: tado's AI Assist costs £3.99 a month, or about £30 a year on the annual plan. Geofencing, pre-heating before you get home, open window detection and holiday mode are all in that tier; remote control and the smart schedule are in the free app. Paying monthly for features that ought to be included is a legitimate gripe, and it's the single strongest argument for Wiser instead.

If you're happy to live with the subscription (or ignore the automatic features), the tado is the most refined of these valves.

The Wiser is the valve I'd recommend to most people, and the reason is mostly the subscription: there are no subscription fees. Compare the live prices on both cards: tado's AI Assist adds £30 a year on the annual plan, every year you use it.

Per-room scheduling works exactly as you'd expect. Boost mode bumps a room up for an hour, and away mode drops everything to a setback temperature when the house is empty. The app isn't as polished as tado's (functional rather than beautiful), but it does everything you need.

Drayton is a long-standing UK heating brand, now part of Schneider Electric, and the Wiser hub controls the boiler as well as the valves. With a heat pump, Drayton says Wiser works through on/off control, so the heat pump's own weather compensation should stay in charge of the flow temperature.

The Meross starter kit puts the Meross hub and one valve in a box, so you can try smart heating in one room without buying a thermostat kit first, and add valves after that. Check the card for the live price and stock, because this one comes and goes.

What makes Meross stand out is that it works with several smart home platforms (the listing names Apple HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant and SmartThings) rather than locking you into one app. The main complaints are about the app being less polished than tado or Wiser. Star ratings move week to week, so we don't print them; the card shows them live.

For a whole-house system with the slickest app, tado or Wiser are still the picks. For the cheapest way in, Meross is hard to beat.

If you've already got Hive heating, adding Hive valves is a no-brainer. They slot straight into the app you already use, with per-room scheduling and boost.

Hive's big advantage is simplicity and support. The app is designed for people who aren't tech enthusiasts, and Hive will book a British Gas engineer to fit it if you'd rather not do it yourself. It works without a subscription; Hive+ is an optional extra.

The reason it doesn't top the list: it's a solid product rather than a standout one. If you're already in the Hive world, that's fine.

Evohome is the one built from the start as a zoning system for a large house with a lot of separately controlled rooms. Resideo, which sells Honeywell Home in the UK, says it handles up to 12 heating zones, with hot water control, and works with underfloor heating as well as radiators.

It's also the one aimed squarely at heating engineers: Resideo runs installer training for it, and it's sold in packs with the evohome controller and its radiator controllers.

The downsides are real, though. You need that controller before any valve does anything. The app feels dated next to tado and Wiser, and setup is aimed at professional installers. For a two-bed flat, Evohome is overkill. For a five-bed detached with ten or more radiators to control, it's the right tool.

Many smart valves look like chunky plastic lumps stuck to the side of a radiator. The Aqara E1 is the exception: compact, minimal and genuinely good-looking. If looks matter in a visible room, it wins.

It runs on Zigbee 3.0, so you need an Aqara hub, and Aqara says Matter support comes through an update to its hubs. It does window opening detection (and can use an Aqara door and window sensor for better accuracy), which an earlier version of this guide said it didn't.

The limitation: it's at its best inside an Apple or Aqara setup, and it's a smaller brand in the UK than tado or Wiser, so support and troubleshooting resources are thinner.

Smart TRV Comparison Table

Prices aren't in this table because they move constantly: the cards and comparison above show today's. We've dropped the zones, battery-life and per-valve price columns that used to sit here, because most of the makers don't publish those on their current UK pages and we weren't going to fill a column half with numbers we can't stand behind.

The Payback, With the Working Shown

Start from the published numbers: the Energy Saving Trust's £100 a year in Great Britain (£110 in Northern Ireland) for a complete set of heating controls, and BEAMA's 6 to 8% for valves on a heat pump. The first is the ceiling for the controls side of your system, assuming you start from nothing.

Now the cost. On our rough estimate a three-bed home wants four or five valves, plus the hub or thermostat if you don't already have one. There's no plumber: the heads screw onto the valve bodies you already have. Put today's prices into the calculator below and it does the sum.

For someone who already has a smart thermostat and is adding valves, it comes to a payback measured in years, not months. On tado, paying about £30 a year for AI Assist, it's longer again.

Where the sum improves sharply: if your radiators have no thermostatic valves at all, or you genuinely keep half the house at 21C for no reason. That's the starting point manufacturers' best-case figures assume. If you already turn the spare room down by hand, be honest with yourself: you're buying convenience.

If your loft is bare, insulating it first is the job we'd do before smart valves. See our loft insulation guide.

Build Your System: What Will It Actually Cost?

Use the calculator to see the total cost, the saving and the payback for a complete system: hub or thermostat plus valves.

What You Don't Need

Smart valve makers would love you to put one on every radiator. You don't need to. Here's what to skip:

• Don't put a smart valve on the radiator in the room with your main thermostat, unless your system is designed for it. If the thermostat controls the heating from that room and a valve there also closes, the two can fight each other.
• Don't buy valves from a different brand to your thermostat hoping they'll work together. They won't. It's an expensive mistake to fix.
• You don't need valves in rooms you always heat. They save the most in rooms you don't always use: spare bedrooms, dining rooms, home offices.
• Skip the starter kits if you already have the hub. Buy the valves on their own.

Installation: Genuinely Easy DIY

This is one of the few smart home products that's genuinely DIY-friendly: no plumbing, no wiring, and usually no tools.

Unscrew the existing TRV head (it's hand-tight), screw on the smart valve, put the batteries in, pair it in the app. You're not touching water, pipes or electrics, so nothing drains and nothing leaks.

The one exception: some older valve bodies need an adapter. Many smart valves include adapters for the common UK fittings in the box. Check your valve type before ordering, and use the maker's compatibility checker if in doubt.

If a radiator has no TRV at all (just a manual on/off valve), you'll need a plumber to fit a TRV valve body first, which means draining down the system.

Do Smart TRVs Work with Heat Pumps?

Yes. BEAMA's testing, cited by Drayton, found TRVs and smart TRVs compatible with air source heat pumps and saving 6 to 8% without hurting the heat pump's performance.

They also matter more with a heat pump than with a gas boiler, in one sense: at the current cap electricity is 26.32p a kWh against 7.97p for gas, about 3.3 times the price per unit. A heat pump claws most of that back through its efficiency, but every unnecessary degree still costs you electricity.

If your installer says the heat pump handles weather compensation and you don't need TRVs, that's half right. Weather compensation sets the overall flow temperature from the weather outside. Valves set individual rooms by occupancy and schedule. They do different jobs and work best together.

One note: some heat pump controllers (like Homely) run the heat pump directly and take a different approach from room valves. Check what yours does before buying.

For most heat pump installations with standard radiators, though, smart valves are one of the best additions you can make.