An accusation made about the British is that they never shut up about the weather. And people from elsewhere find that odd, because British weather is mostly very dull – in every sense. Lots of grey skies. A general lack of terrifying tornadoes or the kind of heat that singes your eyebrows. All true. But we do have seasons that splutter into existence, with temperatures and conditions bouncing around before they settle. Which, I’ve discovered, is a problem for smart heating systems – or at least the one I have, which doesn’t offer quite enough control.
Most of the UK hasn’t discovered the joys of air conditioning, because we’d only need it here for a few weeks each year. Homes therefore tend to rely on central heating: a natural gas boiler, a bunch of radiators that take up too much wall space, and a thermostat. When I was growing up, thermostats were the polar opposite of smart. You’d set a temperature and hope for the best during a couple of heating windows each day. Any deviation from this strict routine meant trudging over to the thing and twiddling a dial, like you were living in the Dark Ages.
Heat of the moment
This is also the system we had in our home until a couple of years ago. Not ideal, because the thermostat lived in the warmest room. In winter, it would flick on for approximately three nanoseconds before declaring the house suitably toasty, entirely oblivious that rooms elsewhere were doing their best impressions of walk-in freezers. So we bought a smart-heating system – specifically a Tado v3+. A tame plumber/electrician (thanks, Neil!) connected the relevant bits to our boiler, and we then set about adding smart valves to our radiators.
The theory was that by controlling individual radiators, we’d waste less natural gas and spend less money. It took two winters before we fully got to grips with ensuring individual radiators wouldn’t fall off the network, causing the boiler to continue indefinitely. And we had to make do with (fortunately rare) occasions where Tado’s servers fell over. A couple of times, that rendered the smart heating system offline come morning, until I quizzically prodded the main control button precisely once, at which point everything fired back to life as though nothing was ever wrong. But now it’s spring things have got a bit weirder.
Good enough to heat
As noted, UK seasons judder into being. The past couple of months have lurched between unseasonably warm and unreasonably cold. The heating tries to keep up, but our carefully crafted schedules that work so well in winter aren’t so useful now. It’s not that the system itself is failing, just that 21°C (69.8°F, imperial units fans), say, feels wildly different inside, depending on context. In winter, I might need an extra layer. In spring, it’s “open a window before I melt”.
The thing is, our Tado leans hard on automation and AI. It’ll spot when a window’s open and ask if you want the nearby radiator temporarily turned off. Lovely. But there are no seasonal modes. There’s no “turn everything off until morning” button. There’s no way to create schedules for different contexts, which you can manually switch between. Just a brute-force off switch.
Smart heating promised a toasty utopia. But what I’ve ended up with is a system that’s admittedly pretty great in the winter yet sometimes too clever for its own good. And when fuel prices are sky-high, I need more than algorithms and automation – I need control without endless busywork. Because while I like being warm, I don’t have money to burn.
Read the full article here
