Smart home heating
Discover the best tech for creating a comfortable, efficient home that’s easy and cost-effective to run
Controlling your central heating system via centralised smart tech is an efficient way to ensure you only use what you need, helping you to save energy and reduce bills
The more control you have over your heating and hot water setup, the greater the potential to tailor it to your needs and extract maximum efficiency. “Many homes in the UK don’t have even basic controls,” explains Nigel Griffiths, Build It’s sustainability expert. “By putting in a standard programmable timer, you can get about 75% of the way there in terms of the potential savings.”
Most of us are familiar with this simple bit of kit, which allows you to set a regular daily routine for when your heating turns on and off. Combined with room thermostats (ideally set to between 18°C and 21°C) and (in the case of radiator -based heating) thermostatic radiator valves, this setup can deliver a good level of control. If you’re updating an existing property, it should be affordable to install, too – providing a quick and reliable return on your investment.
But if you really want to maximise efficiency and savings, then it might be time to go to the next level. “The other 25% is about getting clever with zoning and temperature control,” says Nigel. That’s where the latest whizz-bang tech comes in.
What is smart heating?
You may live in a home fitted with a basic programmable timer and perhaps even a couple of heating zones already. But unless you’re constantly in the property and actively changing settings several times a day, you probably won’t have seen maximum value for money out of the system.
A heating loop that covers an entire ground floor could, for instance, be supplying a living room in the morning that doesn’t get used because the family prefers to take breakfast in the kitchen-diner. What’s more, if you’re unexpectedly out of the house, you’ll be warming rooms unnecessarily.
Tackling a self build or major renovation gives you the chance to address these issues. Correctly designed and installed, smart controls give you the power to break your home up into the ideal number of zones for your household and intelligently manage each room’s climate.
If you go for a fully-integrated smart home, the brains behind it will be the rack in your plant room – connected back via the core cabling. “Bus wiring can be daisy chained, but everything else comes off a central brain that quantifies and populates all the commands, such as the Niko system,” says Andy Moss from Moss Technical. “There may be some kind of sensor to detect your presence in the house, for instance, but it’s the Niko that realises you’re in and turns the lights on.”
Pairing up the right tech is important, so look for options that offer maximum compatibility both now and in the future. For instance, does the wall thermostat your heating engineer has specified enable you to use the smart scheduling and scene functions of your whole-house system?
Enhancing your lifestyle
Smart heating systems allow you to set detailed schedules for each circuit, every day of the week – and different products offer different levels of flexibility beyond this. Some literally enable you to control every minute of the day; others will give you a limited number of timeslots. You can use the default programmes and temperature settings or create your own, saving profiles under different names to easily switch between them. You’ll also get the usual ability to oversee everything at the touch of the button, via digital wall thermostats and apps that can be run from your smartphone.
“If you want the room at 15°C, you just tap that in and the sensor will stop calling for heat when that temperature is reached,” says David Hilton, an independent sustainability advisor and eco expert at the National Self Build & Renovation Centre. The ability to fine-tune each room’s heating means you can easily achieve exactly the right climate throughout your home, and potentially save money in doing so.
Central control for easy living
A setup that’s hooked into the property’s mainframe gives you maximum flexibility. “Smart controls can integrate with every part of your system, including underfloor heating, radiators, electric emitters such as Thermaskirt, heat recovery ventilation, hot water and more,” says Andy Moss from Moss Technical. “Our Niko controller can handle up to 20 zones, which is more than enough for most households. In a five-bed home with ensuites running off separate circuits, you’re probably looking at around 10 zones.” As a rule, open-plan areas are given a single zone.
One thing worth considering is that, if you’re building a well-insulated and airtight house with mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR), you might not need as many heating zones as you think. “In modern homes, the only real heat loss is between rooms, but MVHR will be transferring warmth from hotter zones to cooler ones. So you might find your heating engineer’s initial suggestion of 12 zones can be halved, which might free up some budget,” says Andy.
A centrally-controlled solution also offers you the chance to fully integrate the heating system alongside other home automation elements. So you might have low-level light and warmth come on in the early hours in a bathroom or ensuite; or a setback mode for underfloor heating (UFH) that can be triggered by time of day (and year), pressing the wholehouse off switch or simply leaving the property. “A 1°C drop when you’re out of the home would represent a considerable saving over the course of a year,” says Andy.
The most intelligent setups offer facilities such as learning functionality. So they monitor your usage, react to your whereabouts, and adjust themselves to reach the desired temperature in the most efficient way – bearing in mind your home’s heating characteristics, external weather etc.
Heating-only systems
You don’t have to go the whole hog, of course. A wide variety of dedicated smart heating options is available. The entry level is single-zone management, with the thermostat usually placed in a central location, such as a hallway. It will call for
the boiler to provide enough warmth to reach the desired temperature in their vicinity, and rely on thermostatic radiator valves (TRVS) to manage conditions in each room.
The next step up is a linked solution that uses digital TRVS to allow you to programme timings into individual emitters, thereby creating a zoned system that starts to open the door to greater energy savings and room-by-room oversight of comfort levels. For example, you can set the nursery at the recommended 18°C and create a cosy living room at 21°C.
The likes of Drayton’s Wiser and Worcester’s Bosch Easycontrol are strong contenders here. Both can be installed without disrupting pipework and are available with hot water control if desired, so they’re a good option for DIY retrofits. They’re pretty feature-rich, too; they can react to external temperature changes (weather compensation) and are able to offer geofencing for presence detection.
Worcester’s version has load compensation on compatible boilers, so it only fires up to the power level needed to reach the desired temperature for the room – saving even more energy. There are plans to make it possible to integrate Easycontrol into wider smart home installations, too.
Similar manufacturer-specific devices are available for single and multi zone underfloor heating (UFH) setups, with individual room thermostats controlling each circuit. In fact, this approach is pretty much standard now for underfloor heating systems, because a smart zoned setup is much better at intelligently maintaining the constant, low-level warmth that makes this type of emitter so popular for homes.
Be wary of getting too app-happy with your UFH controls, though. UFH is designed to make use of the floor structure to retain and dissipate warmth. Dropping the temperature a couple of degrees during the day may seem a good idea, but could actually reduce the setup’s efficiency.
How much will I save?
This is one of those how long is a piece of string questions, because there are so many variables at play. How leaky is your house in terms of draughts? If you’re renovating, are you upgrading your heat source and emitters at the same time? And what kind of control was there before?
“If you’re used to running around the house all day, every day adjusting the radiators to give you optimum performance, you won’t get big savings – but what you will find is that, now it’s all automated, your life is a lot easier,” says David Hilton. On the other hand, if you haven’t been engaging fully with your central heating, you can be confident running costs will drop significantly.
It’s important to be realistic with your expectations, though – and to be sure you’re comparing apples with apples when specifying. One manufacturer’s website claims its system can an offer efficiency uplift of 31%. Sounds great, but that would only be the case if you currently leave your heating on all day (including when you’re out of the house). In practice, most of us are likely to see an improvement of more like 5%-10%.
But it’s not all about savings: a well thought-out smart heating setup will noticeably improve comfort levels. And if this is done as part of a wider home automation project, with the right joined-up thinking you can future-proof your investment and massively enhance your lifestyle.