THE BEST SMART COLD-PROOFERS
You’ve got a range of heating hardware to choose from – and here are our picks
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for smart coldproofing: everyone’s home and heating needs are different, but there’s always a heating solution to match. You might already have bits of smart home gear in place, or you might be starting from scratch; you might have two rooms to heat or six rooms to heat; but whatever the configuration, you’ll be able to find something to suit.
Here we’ve chosen a selection of gadgets to pick from – each one a best-in-class option for the particular job you need in keeping the cold at bay. From detecting leaking pipes to heating rooms in your house separately, keep these gadgets near the top of your shortlist.
These systems work out when you’re at home and when you’re not
everything should be very straightforward: one of the key selling points of these systems is that they’re able to adapt to your family’s own particular schedule and habits. Once you’ve got the hardware set up, and your app connected, you should find you start saving money – and staying warm – almost on auto-pilot.
These systems are clever enough to be able to assess the temperature outside – via an online weather report rather than actually looking out of the window – and then make changes to your heating accordingly. There’s not much point in having your heating operating at full blast if it’s a rare mild day in December.
When the weather goes the other way, into freezing cold temperatures, you can be confident that your smart coldproofing devices are going to be able to keep up. You won’t need to tell your smart thermostat that a cold snap is on the way, because it’ll already know about it (double-check the specs if you want this feature, because not all smart thermostats offer it – though the two we’ve included in this article do).
Another neat feature that many smart thermostats offer, including the picks we’ve highlighted here, is geofencing. By monitoring your phone’s location, these systems are able to work out when you’re at home and when you’re not – another useful bit of information that can be used for intelligent and cost-effective heating.
It gives you an idea of how these smart heating and coldproofing devices can work without much input from you at all: by learning how your home heats up, and splitting it into zones if necessary, and knowing where you are, a smart thermostat can make a lot of decisions on its own, with manual app control also available whenever you need it.
Add in extras – like open-window sensors, and heating fans and radiators in individual rooms, and the system can get even more sophisticated. These sorts of devices are typically very straightforward to set up and configure, and may not even come with detailed setup instructions (again, you’ll need to rely on guidance through the relevant phone app).
Ideally, you want these extras working on the same platform (Samsung SmartThings,
Apple HomeKit or Amazon Alexa, for instance) as your main smart thermostat, to minimise the number of apps and settings you’re going to be jumping between.
You’ve therefore got some planning and preparation to do, but you don’t have to go all in on everything right away – your smart coldproofing system can start off small and then grow bigger over time. No matter how low the temperature drops outside, no matter how frozen those puddles in the street are, you don’t need to worry about catching a cold indoors with the right smart coldproofing tech in place.