“Smart Tech” is becoming more of a household term across the world, and it’s quickly becoming an integral part of people’s lives. A lot of people use their phones for the majority of their daily lives, take for example the smart thermostat – we can now control the temperature of our homes from anywhere with an internet connection, with our phones. This includes using them to control other devices in conjunction with the thermostat.
Smart thermostats allow you to have a fine level of control over the heating in your home remotely from anywhere, they also allow you to have control over the hot water from your phone, both functions subsequently saving you money on your energy bills in the long run. These aren’t the only things that make smart thermostats “smart” though, they’re intuitive because they allow you to create schedules based on your personal preferences. If you don’t set one up, they ‘learn’ from how you use the thermostat and create a schedule automatically.
A lot of smart thermostats connect to weather stations over the internet and can automatically adjust your home's temperature based on the weather and humidity. They can also use motion sensors or geofencing to sense whether anyone is in the house, if not then they can set themselves to an “away mode” and save you energy by keeping energy use to a minimum while you’re out. A newer feature coming to many smart thermostats is the ability to adjust the temperature by room, this is called “zoned heating”, this could be useful if you need to keep a nursery warmer than the rest of the house for example but you would need the central heating system to be zoned to make this work.
Given that your thermostat will connect to your home’s wi-fi. it’d be silly if it didn’t offer some connectivity with other devices on the network. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, there is an app out there called IFTTT (which stands for If This Then That), the app is used to create simple statements which form connections between different products or apps. There are lots of devices which are compatible with certain thermostats, I’ll write another blog about those next time, but as an example; if you own Amazon Alexa, you can create a recipe which allows you to control the thermostat using your voice through Alexa.
The main upside of the smart thermostat is the fact that by combining all of these different features, a smart thermostat can help to save you money on your heating bills by automatically adjusting how much energy you’re using and when.