Pihole works well but blocks British Gas Hive heating controller

[clexp]

I installed pihole to good effect for my mum (71 year old, living alone 2 hours away from me). She uses her laptop several hours a day for things like committee meeting minutes and web browsing. Needless to say her ISP has profiled her and sold the profile, I used her laptop one visit and was appalled at the experience quality, a good broad band speed and a good laptop, all slowed with much loss of screen space. I knew the fix here. Pihole.

I was travelling home on the day installed it and she was clearly impressed at the improvement on both phone and laptop. She went to switch her heating on through an app on her iPhone. It is the British Gas Hive home remote control heating automation. That stopped working, something could not find something else any more - the phone app indicated. I did not have enough time to trouble shoot before I left. Facing a choice of crap internet and heating, versus good internet and a cold house she wisely choose heating. We disconnected the rpi and I promised to return to fix.

I have googled but I cannot find anything. On the forum I cannot find anything either. This must be pretty straight forward, just need to allow something on a whitelist? The original thermostat on the wall does not work, it was disconnected with the installation of the hive. There is a white hive box attached to the router, switched on and not attached to anything else. I doubt the phone talks directly to the white little hive box, the white hive box must radio ( wifi?) to the boiler. I guess the phone app talks to the Hive servers, (customer profiling) and then the servers talk to the Hive unit in the house, which then tells the gas boiler to switch on. That's a lot of remote traffic for what could just stay in the building.

I absolutely cannot believe I am the first to find this, or even that it is not a resolved issue already. Hive and British Gas are huge, Pihole is huge, and both been around for a long time, there must be crossover. But I could not find anything on a forum search and my google searches are fruitless.

Anyone seen this before?
Thanks.

[yubiuser]

Use the query log to see which domain is blocked when the app is active.

[clexp]

Ok so far so good.

It seems on privacy level 0 (logging everything) I can find nothing to British Gas or potential related 3rd party. I can see nothing related to 'Hive'. The heating system seems to receive instructions to start and to stop. I think the white hive box does just take to the phone app.

What did I get wrong before? The BT router does not have a DNS setting. I think it must field these out to BTs own in-the-field DNS servers. I think last time I did not swap the dhcp server to the pi, and then the phone could not talk to the white hive box.

So far web browsing, email and face book and other messaging systems seem to work. I am here for a few more days. Lets see what crops up. Thanks everyone.