The boiler does have an outdoor probe, but it's not installed. It also has a blanking plate for the electronic control system, which is not installed. The reason for this is because of cost and 'proprietary lock in'. If I was to request this when it was installed I would have received 2 Worcester Bosch Wifi thermostats. Expanding the system would be quite expensive as EMS/Wifi thermostats and radiator valves are very over priced. You also get forced to accept how Worcester decide to control the heating with little to no flexibility if you disagree with this.
I am also somewhat at odds with modern "smart" heating controls, they are typically steered towards convenience and aesthetics, as well as over priced with non-standard interfaces, meaning once you choose your brand you are stuck with it and they can charge you whatever they like for adaptions. Then there is the privacy, data-mining, "cloud" reliance and all that nonsense to consider.
A primary example of this is digital set-point radiator valves. I don't care how many times someone tries to explain these or sell these to me, they are not worth it. Well, they are not worth it if you are prepared to go the extra mile and install actual temperature probes in rooms away from the radiator. Putting the temperature senor beside a radiator, actually attached to it, is just ... em... dumb. The only good reason to do this is to save on having to install a proper temperature probe elsewhere. In order to modulate the room temperature they need to use complex machine learning style routines switching the radiator on and off and watching the temperature gradients to try and "deduce" the room temperature while the temperature probe itself is completely blinded by the hot radiator beside it.
These types of system, including TRVs are notorious for being bad at heating up a room/house and tend to modulate a lot before eventually stabilising. So they are better suited for having the heating running 24/7. If you switch the heating off during the day while you are out and the house gets cold, when you come home and the boiler comes on the radiators get hot, the TRV shuts off, long before the room gets warm, they osculate on and off for hours before the room temp stabilises. It's extremely annoying when you feel the room is still cold but the radiator valve has shut off as "it" got warm.
As such I intend to replace the TRVs with electro-thermal radiator valves in each room I want to control, with a temperature probe in a suitable location in that room. Each of these forms a demand zone. Obviously if the target temp is not reached the radiator will be on. Then taking the largest differential between actual and target for any zone (and the outdoor temp) I can choose the heating loop flow temp. So when I come home in the evening the heating will have gone on, high temp, radiators on and as the target temp gets approached various radiators will start to shut off and the boiler will be backed down to a lower temp.
It's been a project I have been working on for a long time, been designing it for years, but can only now start to put it into action as I now own the house, previously renting so couldn't do much.
Two of the hardest parts of the requirements I have set myself are 1) Fault tolerance / Fail safe and 2) trying to maintain transparency for manual control. Both leading to ease of use and allowing the system to still be operational if my hardware or software has a failure, such as the Wifi going off. In such a case the automated heating will default to off, but still allow me to control it manually.
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