The range of Homey’s zwave is very poor indeed. I purchased a few smart plugs (tussenstekkers in Dutch) to act as zwave repeaters. Funny thing is that the Homey sphere is in the middle of my appartment. The plug in one corner of the appartment and the radiator head in the far corner of the smart plug and that worked great, but anyway 
Since I live in an apartment I have collective heating (blokverwarming in Dutch), so that heating unit is warm 24/7 in the seasons, so throttling the heating unit isn’t an issue for me. The unit apparently does have a smart system that when little heat is requested (resistance on the water pump or something, that’s way I understood of it anyway) that it slows down heating and with a properly insulated boiler in it, only little heat is lost (only the heat in the pipes of course)
I use a Homey app to work as a thermostat in my house. I programmed it in accordance to my household’s daily routines, so no hassle with 40 flows, just one app in a nice interface. The Homey app also allows quick settings for ‘Home today’ or ‘Not in the house today’ for quick exceptions. I never used geofencing, but that was something I could also have done of course, either via Homey’s function (not sure how well that works), or via IFTTT if I wanted to.
This all functions very well and very comfortable without any need for extra cloud-services. Just local homey.
Quick remark:
It would be more like letting your car run stationary since you’re already at your destination, and with newer central heating units only very little heat is lost as they are very well insulated. But you are right of course that, they shouldn’t need to heat up if it isn’t necessary.
