Heating Your House – room by room.
We were really lucky when we bought our house 20 years ago – the previous owner had been a Gas engineer, and we had a seriously good heating system already installed. We actually have thermostat controls for both upstairs and downstairs, which we’ve always loved, allowing us to just heat the parts of the house we’re using.
Once the children are all tucked up in bed at night, there is absolutely no need for upstairs to be anything higher than 16 or 17 degrees, – but we can make downstairs a nice cosy 21 if we want to.
So I totally ‘got’ the idea instantly when I read about Evohome’s new system, which controls your heating room by room.
How brilliant is that?
So if we’re spending a family evening watching a movie together, we can adjust the rest of the house to cool down, and only heat the room we’re all in – not the whole of the downstairs, mind, like we can now – just the one room. Brilliant.
Similarly, the husband and I work from home, using just the one office for most of the day. In the winter it gets SO cold (WHY do your fingers get so chilly when you’re typing?), but it always feels so extravagant to heat the house (or in our case just the upstairs) for one solitary room. We did have an electric fan heater for a while, until we worked out it was actually more expensive to run that than it was to heat the whole of the upstairs with all its empty rooms!
We do have quite a large house y’see – we extended our modest 3 bed semi to a 5-bed with office. Which means it’s not a very deep house, but it is wide. So all that heating going on when we’re in one spot in the middle seems such a waste. To be able to just heat the office, using our economical gas central heating system, strikes me as a genius idea.
You can create up to 12 zones in your home that can be controlled individually – for me that’d be living room, kitchen, bathroom (oh, imagine setting a toasty bathroom just before you head off for an hour’s isolation floating in the bubbles…), dining room, kids bedrooms, our bedroom… and I’m out of ideas. 12 is WAY more than we’d need, even if we set the children’s bedrooms individually (which’d be a good idea, actually, as Bear’s room is right over the hot water pipes, thickly carpeted and never chilly, while two of the boys have two external walls plus laminate flooring – and are ALWAYS chilly!).
Honeywell suggest that upgrading a basic timer and a thermostat controls to Evohome smart zoning can deliver up to 40% savings on heating your home. Which is not only genius, but plain ole smart too.
On top of all THAT (as if that wasn’t enough) there’s a mobile app too.
Which means that when you ‘pop out’ for an hour and find yourself coming home hours later, in the dark, to a freezing cold house – you don’t need to now. You can set your heating while you’re out, so when you get back it’s warm and toasty and welcoming for you. And if you go away for a winter break and a cold snap occurs – no need to worry about the house and all the heating being turned off because you can turn it back on again from wherever you are.
I also happen to know someone (you know who you are) who uses her phone to turn the heating up when she’s at her computer; because the control panel is upstairs and that’s just WAY too far to go.
Shocking, I know, but it’s true.
If, like me, you think 12 zones are probably WAY to much for you, then just take a look at the Evohome System Planning Tool – you can quickly figure out just how many of which bits of the system you’ll need for your own home.
