Smart climate controls
A cooler, warmer, healthier home — it’s easily controllable
You never need to struggle to be comfortable in your home thanks to a growing range of climate–focused devices – all easily controllable!
There’s a big, obvious clue in the name: creating a smart home is all about making your home smarter. And that doesn’t just mean scattering chatty speakers or app–controlled routers around. Sometimes, it’s important to emphasize the ‘home’ portion of the equation — a true smart home is one that keeps close tabs on itself, feeds that information back to you, and adjusts your environment either automatically or on demand.
This isn’t about being lazy, although that’s a fun side effect of most smart kits. You’ll still need to be involved, in some small way, since the majority of climate–focused devices don’t yet know how to open or close a window by themselves. But going smart can help you to spot things you otherwise might not have known about, and fix them before they turn into an issue.
Let’s look, as an example, at the Awair air quality monitor ($199). Just upgraded to its second edition as we went to press, it’s a combination of snazzy LED display and sophisticated sensor that looks at your home environment to ensure you’re getting
the best quality air possible. If it detects toxic chemicals, excess carbon dioxide, humidity imbalances, or even fine dust particles, it’ll let you know to get ventilating or to switch on your humidifier for a while. Like many other devices, including those we’ve reviewed this issue, it also allows you to track those metrics over time in order to discover patterns and potentially find the source, resolving environmental issues before they worsen.
Sensors don’t have to go to quite that extreme to be effective — something as simple as a smart thermometer (another skill of the Awair) or a contact sensor for your windows or doors is all you need to introduce a climate control ecosystem.
Thermodynamics
Of course, if you’re looking at temperature, the real headline–grabbers of the past few years have been smart thermostats like the Nest Learning Thermostat (from $249) and its many competitors. There’s a good reason for this. Smart thermostats aren’t unfathomable upgrades; in many ways they act exactly as a normal thermostat would, triggering your heating system when the temperature in your home dips to a certain level, and switching it off again afterwards.
So far, so straightforward. If you’d like to just set your temperature and be done with it, you’re welcome to; modern smart thermostats are highly
attractive, accurate, and simple to interact with directly. But the benefits of going smart extend beyond placing a sleek device on your wall. Internet connectivity, and the apps that generally go along with smart thermostats, mean you can manually warm your home wherever you might be — if you’re heading home you can trigger your heating, or if you’re out for the day you can switch it off.
Some thermostats go even further, intelligently sensing a human presence in your home to ensure you’re not wasting energy by heating an empty house (with the option of detecting or ignoring pets, depending on your preference for keeping them cosy) or linking to cameras or motion sensors to keep tabs on individual rooms.
You don’t have to go down the often complex and expensive route of getting an engineer in to replace your existing thermostat, by the way. Localizing your controls using the new breed of individual smart radiator thermostats is a really easy way to install the same — or perhaps better — effect yourself, and introduce room–by–room temperature controls while you’re in the process.
Most thermostats, particularly if they offer HomeKit support, will give you further options — triggering other smart devices when your home reaches a certain temperature, for example. Think of the possibilities; you could do things like switching on a fan or air conditioner via a smart plug if they hit a top–limit temperature, or tying space heaters to your general heating system if your radiators aren’t doing the job.
Trigger points
This automation can work the other way around. Placing contact sensors on windows or doors means you can avoid letting any heat escape by automatically shutting off your radiators, or you could rig up just about any link to your heating, however esoteric — how about turning it on briefly using one of last issue’s smart buttons?
Employing sensors as triggers can make a huge difference to your home. Using a humidity sensor in conjunction with a smart plug and a humidifier has clear benefits, and setting up a link like this is easy, letting you pause or manually override at will.
The fact that you can essentially brew up your own climate ecosystem with the help of Apple’s HomeKit platform, or web-connected services like IFTTT, definitely makes up for the lack of smart functionality and network connectivity in many everyday appliances.