She Whose Views Must Be Taken Into Consideration has her whole house wired up with Alexa - I find it a touch creepy to be honest, but she likes being able to say “Alexa, bedtime” and have lights and all sorts of other things switch off automagically.
But she is an IT bod so it’s to be expected. 
Personally i have it all turned off including Siri on my phone. Each to their own…
Unless you’re in a built up area I would seriously question this and not take the artisan advice at face value. If I recall your house is old not a new build.
You are quite right but this garçonnière of my partner’s is right in the middle of a very historic area and the houses are cheek-to-jowl. However, you will be pleased to note that we never take a single artisan’s word for anything and he has 3 experts in to assess it. It’s his bolt hole that he uses to escape from me about one day a week 
In that case, I’d defo go for a pellet burner wifi connectable, turn on an hour before to heat the room, no wood storage, minimum cleaning etc
As any fule kno there’s a discreet little button inside a fridge which when pressed, puts the light off. The door presses it when you close it.
I think pellet stoves (and pompes de chaleurs) heat a room up faster than a wood burner because their fans start instantly.
Not really as the flow temperature of air to water system is quite low usually 35+40c so they run low and slow. Some of the bad press on these comes from folk switching them on and off like boilers.
We have four pompes de chaleurs, a pellet stove and a woodburner, so I’m not making up these posts. The wood burner’s fan doesn’t start immediately. the heat pumps’ fans start much faster, and the pellet stove’s fan starts straight away.
I never suggested you were, only yesterday I went to see someone very upset by their heat pump setup that they were turning on and off , just like their old boiler and no wonder as the installer set it to 60c! It was costing them an arm and a leg. I did some rudimentary re setting up and will monitor how it’s running for them. It’s now running low and slow and will take 2-3 days to warm the place up.
Due to higher temperatures and fan instantly starting, that would beat most others
Well, there goes all the mystery
Our heat pumps are probably more than fifteen years old, but we found in the years before we emigrated, that a couple of hours after our arrival in winter, the whole house was warm again. And at that time these were our only heat source.
I wonder if there’s any significant difference between today’s heat pumps and older ones?
Schroeder gone to Vero…
Obv you may all have a captive fridge dwelling gnome to sort the light problem, but my fridge is boringly conventional.
You’d tend to assume that modern ones are better (for some measure of “better”).
From a completely cold start my fifteen year old heat pump takes about 12 hours to get the house up to temp. Though it does seem to produce a tankfull of hot water fairly quickly - the sequence being: hot water, then when it is happy with that it will start on the “heat store”, then when it’s happy with that it will start circulating water round the radiators - so it takes ~3 hours before anything even vague warm hits the rads.
Ours just heat rooms and do that very effectively, unless it gets really cold.
Yes improvements have been made in both variable speed compressors and fans. Refrigerants have changed and so heat exchangers have altered to improve thermal transfer. Control circuits with weather compensation sensors so the system understands how hard it needs to work for a given outdoor temperature.
Reads like you have conventional split air to air units
To be fair mine has that and it was installed in 2007 by the previous owner.
In fact when we moved in it only had that and behaved very erratically until I managed to get hold of the remote unit that sent room temperature data. It worked much better after that.
That’s a very rare thing, I have walked around my area looking for condensing gas boilers with weather compensation and not seen a single outdoor sensor.
They are far more common on modern heat pump setups as they modulate much better than older ones. As you found without the indoor unit it’s pretty much hopeless.
I am very impressed that you are a Molesworth fan @vero!