Heating the Internet of Things

Internet of Things seems to be trendy these days, people like the shiny apps for controlling things and typically there are claims that the devices will perform better than their predecessors by offloading things to the cloud – but this makes some people worry that there are potential security issues and it’s not always clear that internet usage is actually delivering benefits over something local. One of the more widely deployed applications is smart thermostats for central heating which is something I’ve been playing with. I’m using Tado, there’s also at least Nest and Hive who do similar things, all relying on being connected to the internet for operation.

The main thing I’ve noticed has been that the temperature regulation in my flat is better, my previous thermostat allowed the temperature to vary by a couple of degrees around the target temperature in winter which got noticeable, with this the temperature generally seems to vary by a fraction of a degree at most. That does use the internet connection to get the temperature outside, though I’m fairly sure that most of this is just a better algorithm (the thermostat monitors how quickly the flat heats up when heating and uses this when to turn off rather than waiting for the temperature to hit the target then seeing it rise further as the radiators cool down) and performance would still be substantially improved without it.

The other thing that these systems deliver which does benefit much more from the internet connection is that it’s easy to control them remotely. This in turn makes it a lot easier to do things like turn the heating off when it’s not needed – you can do it remotely, and you can turn the heating back on without being in the flat so that you don’t need to remember to turn it off before you leave or come home to a cold building. The smarter ones do this automatically based on location detection from smartphones so you don’t need to think about it.

For example, when I started this post this I was sitting in a coffee shop so the heating had been turned off based on me taking my phone with me and as a result the temperature gone had down a bit. By the time I got home the flat was back up to normal temperature all without any meaningful intervention or visible difference on my part. This is particularly attractive for me given that I work from home – I can’t easily set a schedule to turn the heating off during the day like someone who works in an office so the heating would be on a lot of the time. Tado and Nest will to varying extents try to do this automatically, I don’t know about Hive. The Tado one at least works very well, I can’t speak to the others.

I’ve not had a bill for a full winter yet but I’m fairly sure looking at the meter that between the two features I’m saving a substantial amount of energy (and hence money and/or the environment depending on what you care about) and I’m also seeing a more constant temperature within the flat, my guess would be that most of the saving is coming from the heating being turned off when I leave the flat. For me at least this means that having the thermostat internet connected is worthwhile.