Home Features Smart thermostat buyer’s guide

Smart thermostat buyer’s guide

There are lots of options on the market for smart thermostats, but which should you buy?

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Most homes in the UK rely on boilers and radiators to keep their homes nice and warm during the winter. They are also increasingly using air conditioners to keep cool in the summer.

The thermostat is the focus of controlling the temperature within the home, but nowadays, people are looking to smart thermostats to monitor temperatures from anywhere.

This buyer’s guide will look at what smart thermostats are on the market and which you should consider putting in your home.

Nest Learning Thermostat

Website: https://nest.com/uk/
Price: £179 (Amazon)

What is the Nest Thermostat?

The Nest Thermostat is a connected thermostat that comes with an app that allows you to control the temperature. The device claims to learn your habits and will program itself after about a week of usage. It remembers the settings you make and will eventually start making changes on your behalf.

The app also controls the thermostat and shows how you are using the heating and cooling systems. The Home/Away Assist uses your phone’s location to boost home/away detection and make your energy usage as efficient as possible

The third generation of the Nest Thermostat uses OpenTherm Technology to modulate your compatible, high-efficiency condensing boiler. This advanced tech can drive down your energy bill even more. With this model, you can now choose between four colours. In addition to the stainless-steel model, there’s copper, white and black.

The device works with Nest Protect to monitor carbon monoxide. There are also Nest security cameras that the system works with.

Tado

Website: https://www.tado.com/gb/
Price: £129.99 (Amazon)

What is a Tado Smart Thermostat?

The tado° Smart Thermostat uses your phone’s location to control your heating, ensuring no energy is wasted. The smartphone app gives you full control over your heating wherever you are. The manufacturer claims that the system saves up to 31% of your heating costs.  In five years a 150m2 house with four residents saves almost £5,000.

The Smart Thermostat can be automatically controlled via the location of your smartphone as well as manually, by schedule or on the device itself.

The new product suite offers several integration possibilities, such as IFTTT, Amazon Echo and soon Apple HomeKit. It also works with 95 per cent of heating systems.

You can easily install the Smart Thermostat yourself. Simply replace your existing wired room thermostat.

Hive

Website: www.hivehome.com
Price: £199 (Amazon)

What is Hive Active Heating?

The Hive Active Heating thermostat is the smart device where you can program up to six time independent schedules for both heating and hot water. The added advantage for the heating schedule is that temperature can be varied for each scheduled time slot.

The Hive system simply replaces the programmer, with the receiver unit and the room thermostat. It also is a connected system that lets you control your home from your phone.

Each time you buy something new you just pair it with your Hub and your user account is automatically updated. You can then start controlling your new product with the Hive app from your smartphone, tablet or laptop.

The system also works with the Amazon Echo. You can ask Alexa to turn the heating on when you’re feeling a bit chilly. She’ll switch the lights on when it gets dark. She’ll even turn the kettle on if you fancy a cup of tea.

Honeywell Lyric T6R Smart Thermostat

Website: https://getconnected.honeywell.com/en/lyric-t6
Price:  £187.38 (Amazon)

What is the Honeywell Lyric T6R Smart Thermostat?

The Lyric T6 series is the next generation of programmable thermostats. Not only it is simple to set up straight out-of-the-box, it’s been designed with the best features of today’s connected devices. Create a schedule to suit your needs, adjust your heating remotely via smart phone or simply leave the automated location-based feature to turn on your heating before you get home.

The Lyric T6R touch-screen makes scheduling, changing and overriding temperatures easy with a large, clear display and intuitive on-screen text guidance.

The Lyric app gives you complete control over your home heating wherever you are, including schedules and automated synchronisation with the thermostat.

Using the location features on your smartphone, the Lyric T6R communicates with the app to determine when your home is vacant or when you are on your way home adjusting the temperature automatically.

The Lyric T6R features a choice of schedule settings to fit your lifestyle, including 7 days, 5/2 day and single day scheduling with up to 6 different time settings per day.

The Lyric T6R is Homekit enabled meaning it can be controlled using an Apple device (requires iOS 8.1 or later), as part of a suite of home kit compatible products