How to save money from Heating

A few years ago, I came across the concept of “home automation” from a technology magazine.  In it, it described the concept of having central control of many things around the home like all the lighting, heating and also having full control of the security system and your appliances, all while away from the home from either a smartphone, tablet or laptop.

At the time, this concept was still in it’s infancy and it was only available for custom builds and so out of budget for the average household.  Fast forward to today, and I’m excited to learn about Hive Active Heating.  They are an offspring of the British Gas team and have set up an exciting new product which lets you monitor, alter and control your heating and hot water all through the touch of a button on your smartphone or browser!  You can adjust your schedules and temperatures away from home with the option for alerts to be sent to your mobile if temperatures reach a certain level.

Smartphones are accessible to everyone nowadays and I love the idea of having this control.  Currently, our control panel for the hot water and central heating does not provide the flexibility that I would prefer, for example, we can only two ‘on’ periods during the day.  There are some days where we may need more than one depending on your movements during the day.  In a very recent example, we went to Scotland for five days so we turned our thermostat down but we didn’t want to turn it off completely as we didn’t want to come back home to a freezing house and no hot water.  Now if we’d have had Hive at the time, we could have saved so much energy and money by just turning it on as we were travelling back down.

I believe this is the way of the future and hope to sign on as soon as we’re out of our existing deal.  What do you think, is this great to have so much control or unnecessarily complicating our already complicated lives?

Disclosure: This is a collaboration.