As you probably know, I’m always looking for gadgets and devices to play with and having a smarter home is one thing that’s high up my list. I’ve been looking at Nest recently, but while I think it’s a really cool device, it doesn’t really allow you to easily split your house into zones that have different requirements. You know how it is, it’s nice to warm up bedrooms in the evening and early morning, but those areas don’t need to be heated during the day.
Well, recently Honeywell announced that they’re launching their evohome offering in the UK and this might just fit the bill. Besides controlling your boiler like Nest does, it also lets you split up your home into up to 12 zones that can be managing centrally; really allowing you to optimise your energy usage:
There are a number of cool features to evohome, the zoning ability is just one of them. Communication across all devices is wireless (868 MHz), which means you don’t need to run cables or mess around with wires to get your installation set up. All you need to do is install a central control unit and change the control on each radiator to Honeywell’s motorised radiator controls. Each radiator can be assigned to a particular zone, and then controlled centrally, either manually or automatically.
Evohome does promise ultimate control. Not only does it come with a colour touchscreen (shown alongside), but there’s also a mobile app which allows you to control your heating from anywhere you may be. So, if you’ve taken the family out for the day, you can override the heating controls to leave the heating turned off while you’re out, saving a substantial amount of energy. In fact, Honeywell claim that upgrading basic timer and a thermostat controls to evohome smart zoning could deliver as much as 40% savings on heating your home. If you think about the rising cost of energy, a saving like that could be massive and can offset the price of an intelligent system like this.
So, what do the costs look like? The evohome Connected Pack includes the new colour touchscreen plus the boiler controller and the network gateway and has an RRP of £249. The radiator zone kits have an RRP of £77 and both items will be available for purchase in the UK from January 2014. The cost is not insubstantial, but it does allow full control of your heating in the same way you can control the electricity you use to light your house. If you had to compare current heating technology to lighting, at the moment you would be turning on all the house lights when it gets dark and turning them all off when you go to bed. Evohome lets you control room by room heating in the same way we control our lighting, turning it on when we need it and off when we don’t. Pretty exciting stuff!