When I originally refurbished my flat one of the things that I installed was an internet enabled thermostat, meaning that among other things I could turn my heating on and off remotely. By 2023, the Heatmiser unit that I had was showing its age though, so I upgraded to a Google Nest.
I did very little research before getting one; they all seemed much of a muchness as far as I could tell, and in practice I found it wasn’t something I used very often anyway. The thermostat itself is a stand alone unit that needs mains power, and connects to a separate control unit (called Heat Link) that switches your heating. This is where it gets interesting. Its expected that you fit it with a flex and plug, affixing it to the wall using rawl plugs or similar. You could do this with a UK plug, but that would be a bulky and untidy solution. I was going to have to add a socket for it in this case, and if I’m doing that, a neater solution would be to use a fused switch, routing power to a standard backbox on which the control unit sat. Unfortunately there was no provision for mounting it on a UK backbox, presumably because it was designed for the North American market.
3D printing’s propensity for being a solution looking for problems came to the fore and I designed a pattress that adapts the Google Heat Link to a standard UK backbox.
This resulted in a much neater installation that I would have otherwise achieved.
