Gears and Gadgets

Making Home Heating Smarter

Making Home Heating Smarter

I’ve become a big fan of getting my home as tech-savvy as possible. It all came about from working at home this year. Someone got me a smart speaker last Christmas which I occasionally used as a timer when cooking, but after a few weeks of using the kitchen table as an office, I started to play more with the speaker.

That then led to me mastering everything from morning routines to setting up meetings to telling the speaker to play stuff on the TV. And then when I got a video doorbell installed, it is safe to say my home is now a tech lover’s dream. There has been one area though that I’ve come to realise needs brought into the 21st century: my home heating.

Working from home has made me realize that I have been taking heating in the office for granted. You’d typically come in from your morning commute and be met with a lovely warm office. The same can’t be said for working from home. When the weather took a turn in Autumn, I promised myself I wouldn’t become one of those people who work wrapped in a blanket with furry slippers on. I was going to proactively take charge of how I was heating different parts of the house,  just like I had with playing music and watching TV using these speakers.

I wanted to make my home heating smarter, and I think I’ve succeeded. Here’s how I did it.

I identified wasted spaces

Having my kitchen table as my office now sees me spend around half my day in one room. Factor in making dinner for the family too, and that’s over 12 hours spent in the one room. That meant every single time I was turning the heating on in the morning or evening, I was heating parts of the house I would never even be in.

If you’re keen to save as much on bills as me, that means you want solutions for figuring out how to deal with wasted space. In my case, that meant looking for different types of smart radiator valves. While I’ll explain about temperature control in a moment, I found that the likes of the bedrooms didn’t need the heating blasting all the time.

I could turn the valves all off, but with schools the way they are and the kids home more often too, I managed to get a “dumb” smart solution. I got some Radbot valves which will fluctuate an individual radiator’s heat output based on time of day and whether someone is in a room. They’re quite cheap right now at Trade Radiators, which offers a better deal if you’re only getting two or three, as the Radbot site only gives you a discount when you buy in bulk.

It’s a fair compromise between having the heating on all over the house, and certain rooms feeling like you’re walking into a freezer.

I wanted a Greater Degree of Control

Speaking of keeping things down low, a bad habit in this house was people walking by radiators and cranking the valves up to 5, leaving the living room and kitchen to feel like a sauna later in the evenings.

I’ve now avoided this by identifying my primary radiators and getting smart valves installed, which are linked to an app on my phone. I’ve turned it into something of a game lowering the temperature by a degree every few days to see if anyone notices the difference.  Again, I’ve opted for some cheaper valves I bought online, but you can get ones that link to a central hub that you can control even when you’re out and about.

I didn’t want to get a spark in

One of the biggest issues in trying to make things “smarter” is that you typically need a power supply. I always liken it to seeing photos of fancy new TVs; if you stop to scan the picture of a super HD TV turned on, you don’t see a plug wire in sight.

A good chunk of smart heating technology is like this. Many controls and smart thermostats will come with a plug to go into the wall. In cases where you’re thinking of getting an electrician in to wire a new socket in beside your radiator, you’re almost better off just getting a new electric radiator in and ripping everything out.

That’s going to incur a significant cost, and that’s something we want to avoid. That’s why I recommend looking for smart valves that are battery-powered. A decent valve that is using decent batteries should see you getting two years of power non-stop. That, I think, gives a good overview of how to make home heating smarter and work better for you. Hopefully, if you do it right, you should see usage go down over time with no panicking you’ll have to phone for oil anytime soon.

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