Overall, I’m happy with the product but I found it a little tricky to set up. The instructions don’t go into a huge amount of detail, a problem which is compounded by the fact that the Heatmiser support site was devoid of any information on this particular model at the time of writing, so I have discussed my difficulties below and explained how I resolved them.

Installation

I won’t go into too much detail on the physical installation, but suffice to say, most people should get the unit fitted by a qualified electrician. There’s only a page and a half of the small (A7 size) manual devoted to it, plus three wiring diagrams, and any mistakes could damage the thermostat and/or the boiler. The thermostat is designed to be flush mounted into a standard 35mm deep single back box. It can be surface mounted but it won’t look as good, particular as the thermostat is a few centimetres larger than the back box at each edge. I chose the latter option to save money, but will have it flush mounted at a later date. I will be interested to see what effect flush-mounting has on the Wi-Fi signal strength, if any.

Appearance & usability

The thermostat is essentially a PRT-TS with an added Wi-Fi card, and it looks exactly the same from the outside. It’s reasonably modern-looking (as far as thermostats go!) with a touchscreen illuminated by a blue backlight. It displays the room temperature in the middle of the screen, which can be adjusting using the up/down icons below it. A slight niggle is that it can be difficult to see what you are doing – the backlight doesn’t come on until you touch an icon, by which time it is too late. I would personally prefer the backlight to come on when touching any part of the screen (not just an icon) and the unit to only respond to icon presses when the backlight is on.

A nice feature is the “Screen” icon which locks the screen for 15 seconds, allowing time to clean it without accidentally activating any functions.

You can also view and set heating programmes, set the clock, enable temperature hold and holiday modes from the touch screen. I found setting the time slightly strange, as the down button changes the hour down and the up button changes the minute up – changing the date works in a similar way with the month and day – but this is something that is rarely necessary to change and can be done from the Web interface or iPhone app anyway.

Wi-Fi setup

Setting up the Wi-Fi connectivity nominally requires a Windows PC and the configuration utility supplied on CD. However, when plugged in via USB, the device presents itself as a USB mass storage device (albeit a very small one: 6.5KB) containing a single file – CONFIG.TXT – which contains the network configuration information in plain text, which could easily be edited by hand by users of other platforms such as Mac or Linux. The file is fairly self-explanatory – the only thing worth pointing out is that the KEYMODE parameter (wireless encryption type) must be either WPA, WEP or OPEN.  There’s a slight security issue in that if someone were to steal your thermostat, they’d have access to your wireless key, thermostat password and PIN, but this is a fairly unlikely scenario!

I had trouble getting the unit to connect to my Wi-Fi network until I switched my router (Linksys WRT54GS with Tomato firmware) from WPA only to WPA+WPA2 encryption. I’m not sure whether this means that the PRT-TS needs WPA2 encryption to operate (despite the configuration utility only showing WPA), or whether there is an issue with my particular router, but if you’re having trouble, it’s worth enabling WPA2 on your router. Before I managed to get WPA+WPA2 working, I tried using WEP encryption as a test but the configuration utility wouldn’t let me save the changes. I didn’t play with the OPEN option, so I’m not sure whether this refers to unencrypted Wi-Fi (and therefore will ignore any username/password) or WEP Open System encryption.

The device requires a static IP address, and port 8068 must be forwarded via the router if remote connection via the iPhone app is required.

It’s worth noting that the front part of the thermostat detaches from the rear, so it can easily be removed once installed, and the front part will power up when attached via USB which means you can set up and test the Wi-Fi connectivity before installing the unit on the wall. This isn’t mentioned in the manual, and neither is the fact that a Wi-Fi icon (similar to the one used on the iPhone) appears on the display when connected successfully.

Browser interface

The browser interface is full-featured if a little basic-looking – it’s reminiscent of a router interface from ten years ago. The so-called “Live View”  panel on the right shows the actual temperature (to one decimal place), set temperature and heat status, and a refresh button as it doesn’t seem to auto-refresh. The main interface allows you to view and adjust heating programmes, temporarily override the temperature, lock the keypad remotely, set the clock and change network settings. There doesn’t seem to be a way to change the port on which the Web interface is accessible, which would be a nice feature to have.

It doesn’t contain any form of logging functionality, so it’s not possible to view temperature changes over time. This would be nice to see in a future firmware update, but I’n not holding my breath.

iPhone app

The iPhone app, a free download from the App Store, is similarly utilitarian. It allows you to see the current temperature (rounded to the nearest degree, unlike the browser interface), set temperature (which can be adjusted) and heat status. You can also view and adjust heating programmes via the app.

One quirk of the app is that you have to select whether you want to connect locally (i.e. when you are on your home Wi-Fi network)  or remotely (via the Internet). It would be nice if the app could determine whether you are home or away and select the corresponding connection method dynamically.

The interface is fairly bland but it does the job. It’s a shame that the graphics aren’t retina ready, so they look jaggy on the iPhone 4 (which has been out for more than a year, so you would have expected Heatmiser to have updated their app!). It would also be nice if a future version of the app came with iPad support – the current version works fine on the iPad but doesn’t take advantage of the bigger screen.

I was left scratching my head for a while, as I was originally able to connect via my Web browser but not via the iPhone app. This resolved itself once I moved my router closer to the thermostat, so it seems that the protocol used by the iPhone app is less forgiving of low signal strength (and potential packet loss) than standard HTTP over TCP/IP. Again this is something that should perhaps be mentioned in the manual.

Conclusion

It’s a version 1 product, so is sometimes a little rough around the edges, but the hardware is solid and the product could easily be improved with updates to the Web interface and iPhone app. The manual is fairly basic, which I can understand is necessary to minimise the size and weight of the box, but why not include a more detailed version on the included CD and/or on the Web?

One final point is that I was slightly perturbed to find that the thermostat, which I paid £150 plus delivery for via Heatmiser’s own shop, is available for as little as £126 delivered from some resellers, so it pays to shop around!

Update

Heatmiser tweeted me and pointed me towards their document download area which contains some useful information. They also say they’re working on a new version of the iPhone app, iPad and Android support, multi-zone and logging functionality, and suggest that users email support@heatmiser.co.uk with any further suggestions.

Also, the £126.20 price I found is actually ex-VAT (thanks Luke!) so it is actually best to buy from Heatmiser directly.

Clearly the best solution is to educate users to use the Title field properly for newly-created documents (see Title vs Name), and also to update all existing documents, but it’s a big task and for now we have opted for the”quick fix” of showing the document filename in search results. Here’s how you do it:

• Ensure that the IsDocument managed property is set for use within scopes:
  • Browse to Central Administration
  • Click on your Shared Service Provider
  • Click Search settings
  • Click Metadata property mappings
  • Find the IsDocument property and set Use in scope to True
  • Click OK
• Edit the page and modify the Search Core web part
• Under Results Query Options, edit the Selected Columns property to include Filename:
  <Column Name=”Filename”/>
  (it doesn’t matter where as long as it is between <Columns> and </Columns>, and obviously not halfway through another <Column> tag)

• Find the following line (it should be in the Result template):
  <xsl:variable name=”id” select=”id”/>
• Underneath it, add the following two lines:
  <xsl:variable name=”filename” select=”filename”/>
  <xsl:variable name=”isdocument” select=”isdocument”/>
• A few lines down, replace the code starting with <span class=”srch-Title”> and ending in</span> with the following:
  <span class=”srch-Title”>
  <a href=”{$url}” id=”{concat(‘CSR_’,$id)}” title=”{$url}”>
  <xsl:if test=”$isdocument &#61; 1″>
  <xsl:value-of select=”filename”/>
  </xsl:if>
  <xsl:if test=”$isdocument &#61; 0″>
  <xsl:choose>
  <xsl:when test=”hithighlightedproperties/HHTitle[. != '']“>
  <xsl:call-template name=”HitHighlighting”>
  <xsl:with-param name=”hh” select=”hithighlightedproperties/HHTitle” />
  </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:when>
  <xsl:otherwise><xsl:value-of select=”title”/></xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:if>
  </a>
  <br/>
  </span>
  

I found this tip on the TechNet forums, although it didn’t work as-is because the author had forgotten to declare the isdocument variable. It has been tested in MOSS 2007 but will possibly also work in SharePoint 2010. If desired, you could easily tweak the XSL above to show the document title as well as the filename.

There’s no easy way of changing the OSSSearchResults.aspx page that appears when you do a “This Site” search, and even if you do, it’s unsupported and any changes will most likely be lost next time you install a MOSS service pack. If you have ISAPI_Rewrite installed, as we do, you can easily redirect site searches to the Search Center using this line:

RewriteRule ^(.*)OSSSearchResults.aspx(.*)$ /SearchCenter/Pages/results.aspx$2 [I,L,RP]

I thought I’d be OK to wait, but having played with one in the Birmingham Bullring Apple Store last week (who didn’t have any stock available to take away on the day), I started getting twitchy fingers – as well as considering going for a 32GB model instead of the 16GB I’d ordered through Apple – so started watching the very useful iPad-Stock.co.uk website.

After a couple of false alarms – Tesco Direct occasionally showed stock but every time I got to the checkout, I was told it was out of stock, and a friend managed to order one from HMV only for his order status to change to “pre-order” within hours – I eventually managed to find some stock, this time at Best Buy, the US electronics giant who have recently opened up shop (physically and online) in the UK. All went well, until I put my credit card details in… declined!

I tried a couple of different cards – one credit, one debit – and strangely both of those failed as well. My phone then rang – it was Tesco Bank, the issuer of my main credit card, who wanted to go through a few transactions with me to make sure they weren’t fraudulent. Having verified that the declined Best Buy transaction (along with a few previous purchases elsewhere) were legit, the operator unblocked my card and said that I should be able to put the order through again.

Great, I thought, so I input my card details again – still no joy! So I phoned Best Buy, who helpfully told me that my account had been blocked for 24 hours due to the original declined transaction and I was welcome to try again tomorrow. When I asked if there was any way around this, I was told not – I couldn’t even order over the phone. A friend of mine had a similar experience, so I wonder how many potential orders Best Buy have lost out on due to this dubious “security” measure – I can imagine a lot of banks and card issuers have declined cards as people suddenly dropping some £500 on an electronics website could well appear fraudulent without speaking to the customer first.

Knowing that the Best Buy stock was likely to have run out by the following day, I decided to go elsewhere. At the time, Insight were showing stock of the black 32GB Wi-Fi model that I wanted, so I decided to place an order with them. The deal wasn’t as good as the Best Buy one, as I had to pay £12 delivery, but if it meant I could have the iPad in my hand sooner, I was happy to fork out.

I was pleased to see that the website accepted my credit card details… then dismayed when I got an email later saying that it had been declined. By the time I read the email on that same evening, Insight’s phone lines had closed, and as it was a Friday I wouldn’t be able to give them a different card to try until the following Monday. Another retail fail – why doesn’t the site have an option to update the payment method via the website when the phone lines are closed?

So, having exhausted my options, I gave up for the day. At around 10.30 this morning, I had a quick look at iPad-Stock, not expecting to see anything, but to my surprise there was stock showing at Comet. They were offering free delivery for Tuesday, or £6 for a Monday (7am-6pm) delivery. It’s not like me to pay extra to receive something a day early, but this is the iPad 2 we’re talking about… My order went through successfully and I got an email confirmation, so all good so far.

I haven’t cancelled my Apple order yet – I thought I’d wait until my Comet order is fulfilled, so I have something to fall back on in case of problems. However, a friend of mine also put an order through with Comet and tried to cancel his Apple order immediately, and was told that the order was already being shipped and couldn’t be cancelled – so he ended up cancelling his Comet order. I’ll wait and see what happens on Monday – worst case is I can’t cancel it and have to return it to Apple when it arrives, or sell it on to a friend or colleague (at cost price, naturally – I can’t be bothered eBaying it).

Towards the end of March – coincidentally, a week before my first annual inspection and service was due – the boiler failed and I called npower out. They offered me an appointment for two days later, so I agreed with my employer to work from home on that day.

The engineer arrived and set to work looking at the boiler. He thought that either the gas valve or PCB needed replacing, although he didn’t seem to perform any extensive diagnosis in order to reach this conclusion. He then started the annual service inspection, and at this point noticed that there was a small gap between the boiler and the flue because the original installer hadn’t properly attached the bottom of the flue pipe to the fan assembly. Unfortunately the flue pipe was cemented in place through the wall of the garage in which the boiler is installed. He said that npower could fix this, but as a pre-existing fault it would be chargeable at £200 and they wouldn’t necessarily do a great job as they are not installation specialists, so I would be better off getting a local gas fitter to rectify the problem, which would probably take around an hour and cost in the region of £80. The npower engineer said that once the flue had been fitted correctly, I should contact the call centre and book an appointment so he could come back and fit a new gas valve. In the meantime, he said he had no choice but to declare the boiler as “Immediately Dangerous” and disconnect it from the gas supply.

The engineer left, and I immediately contacted Custom Heat, a local (Rugby-based) gas installation company, about whom I had previously heard good things. They were able to come out the following day after 1pm, which I was pleased with as I was eager to get the issue resolved.

When the Custom Heat engineer arrived, he took a look at the boiler and told me categorically that there was no problem with the flue installation, and that the npower engineer was wrong to condemn the boiler. He reconnected the boiler to the gas supply, charged me a £72 callout fee and left.

I got straight on the phone to the npower call centre to explain this. The operator was very apologetic and promised that she would call me back by the end of the day. This didn’t happen, and when I called the following day to chase this, I was told they had no record of the conversation. So I explained everything in detail again, requesting that the information be added onto my account notes, and was given an appointment for the npower engineer to return five days later.

The engineer arrived and, to my surprise, he had no knowledge of what had happened with Custom Heat. He was still adamant that the flue was incorrectly fitted and therefore the boiler was unsafe. He demonstrated this by dismantling the boiler and shining a torch up from the combustion chamber into the flue, and we could both see that there was an escape of light. He said that unfortunately he’d have to condemn the boiler once again and wouldn’t be able to replace any parts until the boiler had been made safe.

So I phoned Custom Heat to explain the situation. The operator said she would get the engineer to call me back as soon as possible. Around ten minutes later, he called me so I briefly explained the situation again and put him on the npower engineer who was still on the premises. The Custom Heat engineer told him that he they would come out and fix the flue with no charge, and that I should call the office to arrange this, which I did. The operator initially tried to backtrack on the “free fix” promise, saying that there would be no additional callout fee, but parts and labour would be chargeable. I didn’t accept this and they did back down and send an installer out within 15 minutes. As luck would have it, the npower engineer was fortunately still here and he was able to explain his findings.

The installer was very good and completed the work within an hour and a half, albeit with some difficulty as the boiler was installed approximately seven years ago and the fittings had started to corrode in place. Unfortunately, by the time he’d finished, the npower engineer had left, so I had to book a third appointment with them, for three days’ time.

The npower engineer arrived, was happy with the flue, and started carrying out a proper diagnosis of the original fault. He decided that the gas valve wasn’t the problem after all, and it was actually the PCB. He didn’t have one with him, but was able to pick one up from a local supplier and fit it the same day, which did indeed get the boiler working.

So, after twelve days without heating or hot water (even the shower runs from the mains water), I was finally up and running again.

Clearly the original installer was at fault for not connecting the flue correctly, but I have no recourse as the central heating system was already fitted when we move in, and we were left no paperwork showing who installed it. Also Custom Heat were in the wrong for refusing to accept that there was a flue problem, and reconnecting the boiler without remedial work when the npower engineer had declared it unsafe. I can’t fault the npower engineer for erring on the side of caution and refusing the work on the boiler until it had been made safe, but things could have progressed much more quickly if the call centre staff had logged my issue correctly, and there wasn’t such a long lead time for appointments, which would have made the situation all the more unpleasant had it happened in the middle of winter.

Custom Heat deserve some credit for eventually fixing the problem for free, saving me approximately £60 in labour, although I’d have preferred to have paid and had it fixed first time around. They were also quick to come out on both occasions, unlike npower. I would hesitate to recommend Custom Heat based on my experience though, as they were happy to leave me with a visibly unsafe boiler.

I’m glad I had the npower cover, as it saved me paying £200-odd for a new PCB (although reconditioned boards are available on eBay for around £65) plus labour to diagnose the problem and fit the part. Fortunately my employer is flexible enough to allow me to work from home when necessary, so despite the inconvenience, I wasn’t out of pocket for four separate days I had to spend out of the office.

I haven’t decided whether I’ll renew my npower hometeam contract when it runs out. Most likely, I’ll switch to the British Gas equivalent which costs an extra £2/month for similar cover (albeit without the 50% cashback option), which could be worth it if they’re able to get out to me more quickly in the event of a boiler breakdown.

Once you’ve built up enough credit, you can browse the Internet as with any other 3G dongle. According to the paperwork that was supplied with the welcome pack, the dongle and SIM are provided by Nutshell Mobile, which in turn is an MVNO running on the Three network. The supplied ZTE MF112 dongle is the standard Three device (with a paper Samba logo sticker covering the Three logo!), complete with the same standard 3Connect software that Three supply. It all worked flawlessly on my main Windows machine (although I wasn’t able to send/receive texts or view my account details as presumably these features aren’t available on the Nutshell/Samba SIM) and I was even able to get online using my spare Linux machine thanks to the Sakis3G script.

It’s worth pointing out that there are no ads forced upon you as you use the service, so it doesn’t get in the way of your normal browsing. You just need to remember to keep topping up your credit by viewing ads, which is pretty painless and something you can easily do with the sound turned down while you’re doing something else. I would expect the service to stop working when I run out of credit, but I wonder if it would continue to allow me access to the Samba site to build up some more credit on the go.

The Samba website is fairly basic (complete with the misspelt “live alot” tagline) and sparse in information – I have no idea, for example, what the monthly data transfer limit is – but it’s early days and I’d expect that the site would be fleshed out prior to a public launch. Samba might also want to consider switching to a courier service more reliable than CityLink as it took me well over a month to receive my welcome pack!

Ideally, I’d like to see Samba develop their own multi-platform client software that provides a way to view ads and remaining credit without forcing users to use Firefox (not that I have anything against Firefox, but it’s not my primary browser), and maybe provide other ways of getting online such as MiFi hotspots to support a wider range of devices (think iPod and non-3G iPad users), but these things could come later.

I think the Samba Mobile service has the potential to be really popular with consumers, because it offers a useful service for free that would be fairly costly if  bought directly from an operator such as Three. I only hope that their is enough advertising revenue to keep the service afloat, as it would be a great shame if the service wasn’t able to get off the ground.

Cannot save the property settings for this Web Part. Exception occurred. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80020009 (DISP_E_EXCEPTION))

I managed to resolve this, thanks to an MSDN forum post, by changing one of my lines of code:

using (SPSite oSiteCollection = SPContext.Current.Site)

to the slightly more long-winded:

using (SPSite oSiteCollection = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Site.ID))

I’m not sure why using SPContext.Current.Site directly (versus creating a new SPSite object) causes this behaviour, but at least it’s a simple fix.

Under Options ? Preferences ? Directories, tick the bottom two boxes (Automatically load .torrents from and Delete loaded .torrents), then type or browse to the path where Chrome downloads your files. For me, it’s D:\Downloads.

You can keep Delete loaded .torrents unticked if you like, but for me this option is a godsend as it saves me having to manually clear old .torrent files from my download directory.

To make the process as seamless as possible, make sure that Chrome’s Ask where to save each file before downloading option is unticked:

The process for disabling this feature (on an image-by-image basis) requires editing the VMC file and is detailed at Ben Armstrong’s blog.

The way around this is to instruct your network to increase the delay before a caller is sent to voicemail:

1. Via the Phone app, enter *#61# and press Call.
2. Write down the message that appears after “Forwards to”. This is your voicemail access number.
3. Now dial **61*xxx*11*y# (where xxx is your voicemail access number and y is the number of seconds before the call should be sent to voicemail – this must be a multiple of 5 seconds) and press Call.

I have tested this tip on an iPhone 3GS on Orange and an iPhone 4 on O2, but it should work on all phones and networks as it’s a standard GSM feature.

The product page is showing as out of stock  and unavailable to add to the shopping basket, so it seems unlikely that my order would be fulfilled so I’m surprised that it hadn’t been cancelled automatically.

I expected to be able to cancel the order myself via the order management page, but unfortunately this wasn’t an option due to the order’s inexplicable “Part-complete” status. So, intending to ask Customer Services for a refund instead, I headed off to the Contact Us page, clicked on the top option (Contact WHSmith) and was greeted with…. an error message! To their credit, the error message quotes a telephone number for contacting the Customer Services team, but this is only open from 9am to 5.25pm Monday to Saturday. Not much use at 8 o’clock in the evening, then.

So I clicked around a bit more and found the Cancel Order page, which suggests emailing customer.services@whsmith.co.uk. I did this, and very promptly received a response. Unfortunately, it was an Invalid Recipient error from the mail server!

I searched my mailbox and found an old password reset email from support@whsmith.co.uk, so tried this address and I received an autoresponse indicating that my email had been received by the customer services team.

Hopefully I’ll get my refund soon, but needless to say I won’t be shopping at WHSmith.co.uk again.

Update (11 Oct 2010): Looks like my email has been ignored as I haven’t heard anything since I got that autoresponse two weeks ago, and my unfulfilled order is still showing as part-complete. However, the Contact Us page seems to be working now, so I’ll give that a shot!

Update (28 Oct 2010): I have finally received a response from WHSmith: “I can confirm your card was refunded on 29 September 2010, and that the order has been cancelled but, due a system error the status has not changed.”