Four heating system apps to save your pennies

 

With energy prices rising, consumers are starting to look at more ways of saving money to keep their heating costs down.

One option is to install an intelligent heating system to let you have a lot more control over your heating than you've ever had before. Here are four systems coming to the market.

British Gas Hive Active Heating
Hive Active Heating is available now, costs £199 including installation and will replace existing controllers with a new internet connected wireless system. Once you've had it installed by a British Gas installer, you will be able to control heating and hot water using the app or via the website.

The system lets you see the current temperature of your house, set alerts to let you know when your house has changed temperature, and let you turn the heating off or hot water on remotely.

The Hive system is not dependant on British Gas supplying your energy so you can still buy it even if you have another supplier.

Tado
Tado launches in the UK the first week of November, costs £249 and retrofits to your current heating set up. It uses a cloud-based heating app on your phone to let you control your heating. There is no separate central control panel.

There is a clever twist with Tado though, this system actually tracks your smartphone's location so it knows when you have left the house and when you will be returning and sets your heating accordingly.

The system uses what Tado calls "model predictive control" to pull in a number of data points to calculate when you are on your return home, what the weather is like outside and what temperature you have requested for when you return.

Tado will then get your house ready for you in time for when you step in the door by measuring the weather forecast, speed it will take you to get home and how fast your house heats up.

Honeywell Evohome
Honeywell's Evohome is wireless-connected heating system that will let you control individual radiators and therefore specific rooms.

You can create up to 12 zones, with multiple radiators per zone, and manually control each zone down to a set degree in temperature or set all the same. Ideal for turning up one radiator to dry some clothes without boiling the rest of the house.

There are also a handful of preset settings, which give you the option to reduce the entire house by a few degrees or override the system entirely - great for boosting energy savings.

Not out till January 2014 the system costs £249 for the Evohome Connected Pack. Radiator zone kits will be sold separately for £77 each so you can choose how many you want. That makes it the most expensive option, but it does give you the most individual control.

Nest
Nest isn’t available in the UK yet, although with a bit of hacking you can get the American system to work. You will need to know about DIY electrics and coding, so it's no simple task.

Created by Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, both previous Apple employees, it has been dubbed the learning thermostat for it's ability to learn how you use it and set up a heating schedule for you accordingly.

Over a couple of weeks, Nest learns when you like to have the heating on, how long for and at what temperature. Eventually it will pick up patterns such as the time period where people leave the house on a Tuesday, your lie-in on a Saturday and an empty house every other Friday.

Nest is connected to Wi-Fi enabling it to know online weather forecasts and it has a 150-degree sensor so it knows if anyone is home. It can all be controlled via your smartphone too.

The company says that it hopes to launch in the UK soon.