Mr C and I always love to watch Grand Designs presented by Kevin McCloud on Channel 4. We like to dream about how we are going to transform and equip our house with lots of gadgets!
Grand Designs has been exhibiting for years now and we never had a chance to go. We were so pleased that British Gas kindly gave us and one of my blog readers tickets to go to see the exhibition. As we had never been before, we didn’t quite know what to expect for the exhibition.
We arrived there quite late and it was really busy with massive amounts of people inside the exhibition halls. There were split into different categories like garden, innovation, kitchen, building etc. The first thing that caught my eyes were kitchen! We had a look at all the different brands of kitchen appliances and worktops. I always dream of having a well equipped kitchen with the latest gadgets. Well, for now, I can only dream as it is outside our budget to redo a kitchen!
Then Mr C had a chat with the British Gas rep about their Hive system. Hive essentially allows you to control your heating and hot water from your laptop, mobile or smartphone. It requires a one-off installation fee of £199 (or currently £149 for British Gas customers) but I was pleasantly surprised to find out you don’t have to be a British Gas customer to use the Hive system. They are currently developing a zonal system so that you can control upstairs and downstairs separately, which is expected to launch in 2015.
British Gas are always keen to help their customer to improve their home’s energy efficiency and save money. They are rolling out smart meters to all their customers by 2020, so everyone will get them over the next few years. The smart meters are to replace your current gas and electricity meters, and with the addition of a smart energy monitor you will be able to see how much energy you’re using. We are getting our smart meter installed next month. So hopefully we will be able to understand and control how much energy we are using and money we are spending.
Later we walked around and saw George Clarke display his culinary skills at the Live Kitchen experience.
Near closing time, there were quite a few bargains to be had especially in the food section and we had bought fudge, Wing Yip sauces, Yakult drinks and delicious ice cream! It was a great eye opening event for us especially as this was our first time. It gave us plenty of ideas for what we would like to do around the house. So hopefully, it won’t be too long!
Disclosure: We received complimentary tickets for this experience, however, all thoughts and opinions remain our own.