Hi,
0) This is a project aimed at reducing the UK's carbon emissions from domestic heating, and for the householder, energy costs. This is improving energy energy efficient, dear to FL users' hearts.
1) The aim is to regulate each room's temperature separately (possibly with a schedule built in), using heat from a central boiler, without any plumbing changes. It's an easy retrofit to an existing radiator system.
2) Some of this tech does exist on the market, indeed I can point you to some long lists of alternatives to what we're doing, but not necessarily with the right combination of features, and all closed products with non-interchangeable parts (ie you can't mix and match manufacturers easily), thus driving up costs and risks for the end user. We're attempting to provide a common reference base that multiple manufacturers/implementations can share to get round this. (Our implementation may also be good for research work as its should be easily upgradeable for monitoring and recording too.)
3) Thermal insulation is notoriously poor in UK houses, and needs improving. In parallel, only heating the parts that you're actually using has the potential for up to a 50% energy saving or maybe several hundred GBP/USD for a typical household. I have observed some of this improvement even with my prototype.
4) One aim of this is to make the savings easy to achieve without fiddling around with complicated schedules and so on: the system that doesn't need programming and continual manual adjustment is the one most likely to be used, IMHO. And actually it's already been nice to be able to just flip on the heat briefly in my room for a few minutes without going to the other end of the house and messing with the house stat.
Does that help?
Rgds
Damon