At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Easy to use
- Efficient
- Highly customisable
Cons
- Initially expensive
- UK only
Our Verdict
Genius is easy to use and efficient. Although it’s not cheap, it is good value – and Genius claims it saves consumers around 33 percent on their heating bills, making it easy to recommend.
Price When Reviewed
Not available in US
Around since 2012, Genius Hub offers smart heating control that learns when you use each room of your house.
Available only in the UK and Republic of Ireland, it allows you to automatically and remotely control each radiator, and build on this as part of a multifaceted home automation system, or a very high specification smart heating setting.
Then you can either set your desired temperature for each room according to the time of day, or let the system watch and learn from your room occupancy, and set temperatures and timings appropriately.
In effect Genius Hub makes any home a smart home, allowing you to remotely control the heating in every part of the house, as well as the hot water. It also offers other connected devices such as smart plugs and sensors, all controlled by a central hub and accessed via a mobile app or web page. And it lets you view historical usage.
You’ll have a warm and comfortable house, with hot water, without using any more power than you absolutely need. Thus, in principle, over time Genius Hub will save you money as well as making your home more comfortable.
Genius Hub says it has empirical evidence that its users can save back the cost of installation in four years, and that on average consumers save 33 percent on their heating bills.
What’s new in the Genius Hub?
Genius Hub’s big upgrade came in 2019 when the system became more stable and sophisticated, the platform evolved to allow for more creativity for technical types, and there were new, more high-end components. In 2021 we were able to welcome two new pieces of hardware: the Genius Room Thermostat, and the Powered Room Thermostat.
If you have a large property, with areas that are regularly unoccupied, Genius Hub is the ideal product for you
For the 2023 flavour of Genius Hub, the change is more profound. Genius Hub is future proofing its system and now supports Zigbee as well as Z-wave connectivity. For new customers Genius Hub says it expects the Zigbee protocol to unify in-home IOT technology. For the legacy consumer that means with a discreet small adaptor there is backwards and forwards compatibility, and in effect two networks – meaning that connectivity capacity increases.
The new – Zigbee – radiator valves now have a rotating top that means anyone in the room can adjust the temperature without access to the app – you can limit this via the app. Genius Hub says that the new valves know if they are installed horizontally or vertically and have three temperature sensors, which in turn makes them able to measure temperature more accurately. They are also very simple to install, in my testing.
Genius
Also new are the latest generation of smart plugs, which connect to both Zigbee and Z-wave, and are smaller than their admittedly bulky predecessors. They’re more in line with the form factor of limited simple smart plugs you might get from Tado and others. The new smart plugs can be linked with IFTTT, Alexa, Home Assistant and others. Beyond their direct utility they boost Zigbee and Z-Wave signals around the property.
Overall, Genius Hub continues to become ever more focused in its offering to customers. The company has a vibrant B2B business supplying smart heating to hotels, offices, hospitals, and landlords with multiple large properties, and corporate offices. This befits a company who makes a domestic product chiefly aimed at large multi occupant homes, with a major focus on reducing power consumption.
Genius Hub’s unique selling point is a bespoke zoned system, created for your home or other location, that will earn its keep by saving energy and therefore money. That’s the smartness. It offers plug and play, with sophistication and peace of mind, plus the opportunity for coders to build out smart home functionality on top of the initial platform.
This is reflected in some features such as compatibility with high-end home automation systems ELAN and Control4. You can include in your kit an electric switch that measures both your hot water temperature, and steps in to heat the water if the boiler fails. A motion sensor attaches discreetly to wall or ceiling, and simply recognises when a room is occupied. You then enable a setting for that room which combines occupancy and a schedule using one of the software features: Sense Mode.
Genius Hub is for large and complicated homes, and those customers who want a system that is very customisable. It’s business grade technology for your home.
You can also use multi-hub login, which allows a user to run two or more hubs and in effect operate them as one. This allows for a large building to be operated as one, and makes the system more scalable. Again, more likely a B2B thing than for home use, but if you have a large home of older construction, you may need two hubs to stretch to every room of the house.
Genius Hub has an API that allows those so inclined to add in their own devices and functionality. This all speaks to the same idea, which has been part of Genius Hub from the outset. It is not the cheap option, but it offers a level of bespoke comfort and style that – for large properties, at least – will be cost effective.
What it costs
Price is important, because as outlined Genius Hub isn’t the cheap option in this space.
The Genius Hub itself costs £159.99, and you will need an electric switch for your boiler (£64.99), so to control the temperature of radiators and water out of the gate you will need to spend £224.98. Then each radiator valve is £89.99, so you would be looking at around £900 to zone every room in a four-bed house. The plug-in adaptor to enable Z-Wave and Zigbee is another £34.99.
The system is modular and bespoke so beyond that initial setup you can really just spend what you need. A powered room thermostat is £124.99, a room sensor £54.99, and a temperature probe for your hot water (which is very useful if you have a small tank and a full household) just £12.99.
You can buy in two ways. Either specify your system on the Genius Hub website, or Genius Hub will consult with you to create a system for your home. You can fit it yourself, or Genius Hub can direct you to your local heating engineer who has experience fitting the system.
On pricing alone Genius Hub is not for every home, but if you have a large multi-occupancy property, particularly an old one in which not all areas are used all the time, Genius Hub may be a good investment.
Also: you don’t have to make the investment all at once. Our system first went in back in 2015, and we have added rooms and functions regularly over the intervening period. The price has become better value as the cost has risen, frankly, as at the lower price point in smaller homes the more basic Nest and Hive systems do a similar job for less.
How Genius Hub compares to the market
Genius Hub is not a Nest or a Hive – it is much more sophisticated, and somewhat more expensive than those products.
Hive or Nest is, in essence, a dumb on-off switch that allows you to remotely switch on and off your heating. It will allow you to set a temperature, but only from a single thermostat (or in the case of the latest Hive, several thermostats), unless you get smart TRVs to control radiators individually. For a smaller modern house, that is generally sufficient. And it is a lot more efficient than a timer-based heating system.
Genius Hub is better, though. For one thing the company tells us it has yet to find the house within which it won’t work, regardless of boiler type.
A true IoT system, it creates a network of connected devices around your home. That in turn allows you to zone off living areas. Then you can set desired temperatures for each based on your occupancy of those areas. What’s great is the modular nature of Genius Hub.
You can get the Hive or Nest experience by simply buying the Genius Kit base system and adding in valves and sensors as you desire to zone off additional areas of the house. So you’re paying only for the tech you use – not forgetting that you can move the zones as your needs change.
Basically, if you have a large property, with areas that are regularly unoccupied, Genius Hub is the ideal product for you. And you’re guaranteed peace of mind. Genius Hub will create a bespoke system for your home, fit it for you, and the support remains excellent and constant throughout the life of your system.
The Genius Hub kit
The components of a Genius Hub are universally stylish and discreet. The Hub itself is a small, simple device that will sit next to your router. The valves seamlessly replace your dumb radiator controls with no added bulk and the addition of a screen displaying the set temperature.
That powered thermostat is a small, portable white block with a screen that won’t look out of place in any home. And as trailed, the smart plugs are now discreet and stylish.
Installing and using all of this equipment is really straightforward, although only those with confidence and experience should attempt the initial install of the whole system.
The Genius Hub app
You can access the app on Android and iOS devices, and via the open web. It looks great, and is very easy and intuitive to use. Genius has managed to pull off the clever trick of putting installer-level settings into the app, but making them easier to use. This is principally because of the ‘Settings’ and ‘Doctor’ areas of the app, accessed from the main menu.
‘Settings’ gives you access to a list of all the devices on the system. It shows you when each device last communicated with the hub, and shows its battery life where appropriate. It also allows you to Ping the device, which will kick into gear a valve that isn’t playing for some reason, on the very rare occasions we have experienced that.
Other options include configuration, updates and removal of the device. You’re not going to need this page often, if at all, but knowing that this level of control is available and easy to understand is a good thing.
As is the ‘Doctor’. This is a series of in-app wizards that allow you to solve problems in natural language and with no technical knowledge.
Simply by answering questions about the issue you are looking to solve, the Doctor points you in the direction of a solution, taking you through the required remedial action step by step. And the app alerts you to issues that your system may have via a large red ‘Issues’ pane at the top of the app home screen.
We used the Doctor to fix a problem with a radiator valve that had been incorrectly set up in the factory. Simply by answering the questions asked it showed us how to reset the device and re-connect it to the network. A really smart result that will give end users a lot of confidence in the system (and keep them off tech support phone lines).
Genius Hub does offer paid tech support, too.
Genius Hub in use
We had Genius Hub in our two previous, three- and then four-bedroomed semi-detached homes, and now in a bigger (and wildly expensive to heat) four-bed money pit. We just love the level of control over heating and – via smart plugs – lights, electric blanket, and the kettle, to the extent that any money-saving aspect feels like a secondary issue. Being able to remotely control the heating is useful and cool. It works well, never fails.
It definitely reduces our power usage. Over time you heat only what you need to heat. And because you know that you can set a temperature in advance you don’t waste time and energy pre-heating spaces. I use a smart plug to control the electric radiator in my garden office (read: shed), and the zoned heating means the kids’ bedrooms can be warm at bedtime and first thing, but not during the day. The new valves mean that guests can control the heating in the guest room direct from the valves – but the app lets us choose a max temperature they are allowed to set on the valve itself if we ever wanted to restrict it.
Genius
Aside from the cost, the only negative associations my wife and I have ever had with Genius Hub were the relatively ugly, relatively big and relatively bulky early editions of the Hub. That ship has long sailed – if anyone…