Five ways to save money with a smart home thermostat
According to The Energy Saving Trust, in an average home more than half the money spent on fuel bills goes towards heating and hot water. The good news is a smart home thermostat, like a Hive Thermostat or Thermostat Mini, could help you save by never heating an empty home. The even better news is there are lots of simple ways to achieve this. Here are the big five:
1. Use the Hive app
The Energy Savings Trust also agrees that one of the most important steps you can take to reducing your fuel bills and lowering your carbon emissions is to have an efficient heating system that you can control easily.
So once your smart thermostat is installed, the next thing to do is to make sure you’ve downloaded the app that goes with it (in our case the award-winning Hive app).
You’ll then be able to control your smart home thermostat on any smartphone, tablet or with Amazon Alexa or Google Home. You’ll have instant access to your heating wherever you are. So you’ll never have to heat an empty house again – forgotten to turn off the heating when you ran out for the weekend? Just turn it off wherever you are. Then turn it on again 30 minutes before your home.
2. Set schedules
Like most thermostats, smart thermostats allow you to set schedules for your heating, based on who’s at home when. One of the big advantages of a smart thermostat is they also allow you to adjust those schedules on the go through the app. So whatever you’re doing on whatever day, you can adjust your heating to come on just the right amount of time before you get home.
3. Link your heating to other smart devices in your home
Another simple way to save, is by linking your smart home thermostat to other devices in your home. For example, if you link your thermostat to a motion sensor, it can turn the heating up as you open the front door or off when you leave. This is really easy to do by heading to Hive Actions in your Hive app.
4. Set up zoned heating
It’s really easy to rack up bills by heating areas of your home that you’re not using, but if you zone your heating by room or area you could save money. You can have room by room control of your heating if you replace your standard radiator valves with smart radiator valves. You can select the temperature, set heating schedules, or turn radiators off all together, even when you’re not in the house.
Because you only need to heat rooms you’re actually using, over time you’ll see a difference in your energy bill as you won’t be wasting money heating empty rooms. For example, if you’re working from home, you could set a schedule that turns the heating on from 9am – 5pm in the room you work in, turning it off everywhere else.
And if you have zoned heating in your home, a smart thermostat can help keep costs down there too. You can create up to three different temperature zones in your house; all synced with one central smart thermostat. So, at night you can keep it warm upstairs and cool downstairs, and vice versa during the day.
5. Ready by and Geolocation
Most smart thermostats come with some handy additional functions that can really help save you money. They don’t come as standard so if you’re looking to buy one, it’s worth checking to make sure it includes the following two in particular:
Ready By
It’s tricky to know how long a house takes to warm up. As a result, lots of people waste money by setting their heating to come on earlier than needed. Smart thermostats like a Hive Thermostat have a ‘ready by’ option so it will pre-heat your home to exactly the right temperature at exactly the right time. This also means you can probably set the thermostat a bit lower, which is another simple way to save. In fact, according to The GreenAge, turning your thermostat down by just one degree can help you put away up to £100 a year.
Geo-location
The geo-location function is a really easy way to stay warm and keep your heating bills down. It works by tracking your location using your phone so it can alert you if you’ve left the house and your heating is still on.
From smart thermostats with remote sensors to functions like holiday mode, there are many more ways a smart home thermostat can keep you toasty without wasting money. Why not take a look and learn more?
