A Guardian writer spent two years testing a smart heating system with AI features against careful manual control. The setup costs about £930, so the savings matter.
Smart heating makers say their products cut bills by about 25%, or £180 a year. Guardian writer Samuel Gibbs tested that over two years in his own home and said the results surprised him. The excerpt available here stops before the results, so the savings figure is not known.
The house is a 1930s solid-brick home with an insulated loft conversion. In the first winter, Gibbs ran a strict manual routine. He used a short heating schedule, shut off radiators in unused rooms and switched heating off when leaving. That used 14,316.7 kilowatt hours of gas over 213 days, about 10 to 15% less than in earlier years. It was also, by his account, not always comfortable.
He then installed Tado X, which heats room by room. It uses 13 smart radiator valves, two wireless room thermostats and a programmer wired to the boiler. The AI learns how fast each room warms and cools, turns radiators off when a window is open, and preheats the house before people return.
The material does not say how much gas the AI system used or whether it beat manual control. His boiler also lacks OpenTherm, a feature that lets the system lower the boiler's water temperature, so some savings were not available to him. Alternatives include Hive, Drayton and Honeywell.
Before paying about £930 plus a subscription, remember the advertised savings are averages, and a careful manual routine may already save a lot.
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