Smart heating controls can warm the house before you get up, ease the heating back while you're out and let you adjust it from your phone. Whether a particular controller suits your home depends on the heating system you already have, so we check that before recommending anything.
What we check
- The type of boiler or heat source, and whether you have a hot water cylinder.
- The controls you have now: a wall thermostat, a programmer, a wireless receiver, or radiator valves.
- How the existing controls are wired, if a controller needs to connect at the boiler.
- How many zones the house has, and which rooms tend to run warm or cold.
Photos of the boiler, the wall controls and any wiring centre near the cylinder answer most of these on the video call.
Room by room, or the whole house
A smart thermostat controls the whole system. Smart radiator valves add control room by room. Not every home needs valves on every radiator, and heating engineers disagree about fitting them everywhere, so we suggest where they'll make a difference and start with the rooms that matter to you.
Which app does what
We usually fit tado X. It joins Apple Home and Alexa through Matter, which covers heating: temperatures, schedules you set there, and voice control. Hot water schedules and some of tado's own features stay in the tado app, and a few of those, such as automatic home and away, need tado's monthly subscription. We'll set it up so you know which app to open for what.
We don't quote savings figures. How much a smart controller saves depends on your home and how you use it, and the figures you'll see in adverts are the makers' own.
