Smart thermostats
We've seen some really great discussion on the community about smart thermostats, which has got us thinking. We're thinking about offering smart thermostats to members to help households reduce their carbon footprint and save on their bills. What does everyone think?
An exciting thinktank called the Behaviour Insights Team has done rigorous research into smart thermostats, and the results are striking. They found that smart thermostats save homes about 6-7% of annual heating-system gas use. For the average home, this means saving £26 a year. And they found that the comfort level was the same, or better, with smart thermostats.
This sounds great to us. We'd love to help our members save energy (and money too). A large proportion of households' energy is used on heating the home, and it makes sense to use a smart thermostat to control the temperature at a sensible level while conserving energy.
Looking at various smart thermostats on the market, we're especially excited about Nest and Tado. Do you agree, or are there other models people are excited about? Is there a clear favourite?
Most importantly, we'd love to hear what you think about the idea of Bulb offering a smart thermostat. Is this something you'd like Bulb to offer?
We can't promise anything yet, but we'd love to try and offer a smart thermostat to our members at a slight discount on their listed retail price. On this note - do you have a preference for buying the product outright, or would you prefer to pay off the thermostat over a period of time (say, 1-2 years)?
Thanks in advance for everyone's thoughts on these questions.
@Owen at Bulb , @Alistair at Bulb and @Andrew at Bulb
An exciting thinktank called the Behaviour Insights Team has done rigorous research into smart thermostats, and the results are striking. They found that smart thermostats save homes about 6-7% of annual heating-system gas use. For the average home, this means saving £26 a year. And they found that the comfort level was the same, or better, with smart thermostats.
This sounds great to us. We'd love to help our members save energy (and money too). A large proportion of households' energy is used on heating the home, and it makes sense to use a smart thermostat to control the temperature at a sensible level while conserving energy.
Looking at various smart thermostats on the market, we're especially excited about Nest and Tado. Do you agree, or are there other models people are excited about? Is there a clear favourite?
Most importantly, we'd love to hear what you think about the idea of Bulb offering a smart thermostat. Is this something you'd like Bulb to offer?
We can't promise anything yet, but we'd love to try and offer a smart thermostat to our members at a slight discount on their listed retail price. On this note - do you have a preference for buying the product outright, or would you prefer to pay off the thermostat over a period of time (say, 1-2 years)?
Thanks in advance for everyone's thoughts on these questions.
@Owen at Bulb , @Alistair at Bulb and @Andrew at Bulb
Comments
I think if you can offer them at the same price or slightly cheaper, as an add-on to your bill, they will likely be quite an attractive proposition.
Buying them straight off, unless you can do a really good deal on installation is probably no better than local purchase and installation though.
My preference would probably be for the Nest but that's mostly because the tado system is more expensive for the same functionality if you require hot water control or want it to be wireless (£199 plus £79 for the extension unit).
If the Tado system was a more competitive price, I'd be interested in trying one out.
However, at your suggested saving of £26/year, it's still going to take 10 or more years to recoup the cost (Nest plus installation being around £260). The device will also likely have died by then but the tado may fair slightly better in this regard due to its lower display complexity and lack of inbuilt Li-ion battery.
So I stick to my previous comments regarding them not actually saving households any money...
I still don't know how tado are still getting away with this statement:
I'd also worry that Bulb would get stuck with supporting these devices if they did offer them, and that might sound the death knoll for any such scheme as support's tricky and expensive.
On a related note, I wonder how much embedded energy there is in a smart thermostat and what the whole-lifecycle footprint of the product is.
A couple of old articles and a newer IEEE one:
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html
lowtechmagazine.com/2008/02/the-right-to-35.html
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/your-phone-costs-energyeven-before-you-turn-it-on
Add the datacenter power consumption, the embedded energy of all of the servers and devices required to make these smart thermostats actually operate (no, the data does not go from your thermostat to your phone, it goes across the world and back first), and they're not actually looking very green at all.
You raise some good points.
For the average UK household, smart thermostats have been shown to save around 4.7% of a yearly household gas bill, rising to 8% for Nest thermostats that utilise their ‘Seasonal Savings’ function. We were being fairly conservative when quoting potential savings in our original post; for the majority of Bulb members, the savings are likely to be higher and this would make smart thermostats a more attractive proposition.
The lifespan of each thermostat is definitely something we’re looking into. We wouldn’t want to recommend a product that wasn’t likely to recover the purchase value before breaking.
Your second point regarding the embedded energy cost of these thermostats is such a good point. It would be interesting to convert this value into the carbon intensity of manufacturing and running the back-end services of a smart thermostat and compare this to the potential carbon savings a thermostat offers when heating your home more efficiently.
Out of interest, what convinced you to go with a smart thermostat?
Any idea when this might happen? I take it there are no issues with smart meters and smart thermostats working together? Not really read about that so no idea personally.
As winter is quicky approaching, now might be the ideal time to get one installed though.
Smart meters are however independent of your power meter (smart or otherwise) so there should be no issue with having (or not having) both. The main thing to consider is just that most smart meters require a WiFi signal and a power socket near to the room thermostat part (although there are exceptions to both).
I got mine from using my Bulb referral credits to cover the cost - with the hope that the Nest would help lower my usage and make the rest of my credits stretch further.
It's certainly helped lower our useage. And freed me up from over-zealously making timer adjustments.
Going from having a thermostat to a smart thermostat will have much smaller cost saving.
The offering of the smart thermostat at a discounted prices from Retail is a very attractive idea, I would go a little further by offering it customers on a contractual payment plan. Offer the smart thermostat on contract, like a mobile phone contract, and charge an additional x amount on daily charges and unit price. I am sure many would b happy to pay for the device through an increase in their tariffs.
I do wonder how accurately they can guess the temperature of the room though with being so close to the radiator. In an ideal world I suppose the temperature sensor would be located elsewhere, but that's just another device that needs batteries then.
How long are the batteries in the TRVs supposed to last?
Let us know how you get on with the system over the winter!
I personally use the system in non-programmable mode and leave all rooms at a constant temperature of 22 degrees centigrade 24 hours a day. Contrary to popular advice, I find that this gives the best balance of comfort and economy with a heat pump and porcelain tiled floors as the heat source in a very well insulated home. The circulation temperature of the water is 27 to 32 deg C and varies with the weather compensation of the heat pump.
I saw the mention of Nest and have looked at that onliine. Am I right in thinking that if one of those was installed in the living room which is central in the cottage, that it would control temperature better than I am able to now? My broadband router is in the living room. Would I need an electrician or the people who service the boiler to intalll?
I hope you dont mind me asking you. I know you don't have a crystal ball but I need some understanding before I speak, for example, to the boiler people as they will want a larger sale out of it.
If not then installing any kind of programmable thermostat at all would be an improvement. It wouldn't necessarily have to be something fancy like a Nest.
I have an old (11 years) Worcester DT10RF programmable thermostat. I don't set times I want the system on or off, I set timed temperature targets. The heating is ostensibly "on" 24 hours a day all year round even in summer. The thermostat cycles through 4 different temperature phases each day: a warm phase for the morning, a low phase while we're out at work, then again warmer in the evening and low overnight. During the summer the house never falls below the temperature set-point and so although the heating is "on" the thermostat never calls for heat and the boiler never fires.
Something like this would solve your problem of the house overheating. But you still need a regular schedule in order for the timed temperature phases to match what you need. If you are home some days and not others, or get up earlier some days and not other, it would be more tricky to prevent unwanted cold times. A learning thermostat like Nest might help with the cold times, but even then it's not clairvoyant and wouldn't help on a truly random schedule.
To summarise: A thermostat of some sort is essential to an efficient heating system, but you don't necessarily need something expensive.
My old DT10RF has two timers - one on the thermostat for the heating, and another on the boiler unit itself for the hot water pre-heat. It's not clear to me what happens if I were to install a third-party thermostat such as Nest since presumably this wouldn't handle the pre-heat function. If you don't already have a timer for this it might not matter to you. The pre-heat is only useful in the summer in any case, where the boiler isn't already hot due to running the radiators. However it's something to bear in mind that you might need a specific Worcester thermostat if this function is important to you.
The boiler is a Worcester Greenstar CDi, no idea how old it is. The control at the side of it is Drayton Lifestyle LP111 which seems to control radiator times only. I believe tap water is heated as I need it and this works well. I do not think there is anything timed to do with hot water. I have Economy 7 so run dishwasher or washing machine at night to benefit from cheaper rates. So I think the answer to your question do I have a central thermostat is No.
What you describe in your paragraph "I have an old (11 years) Worcester DT10RF" is exactly what I was used to previously, and hoped this system would do. The reason I looked at Nest is that it works via WiFi and I thought that would be easier to 'install'. I am very restricted in what I can do here and cannot just bury wiring behind plasterboard. House dates from 1600 and there is not a smooth straight wall in the place, part of it's charm of course, and I am lucky to be it's custodian for now.
It all sounds as complicated as I feared.
https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/products/boiler-controls#digital
They also appear to have their own Hive-like smart thermostat:
https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/products/boiler-controls#smart
NOTE: I'm not endorsing any of these products, I've never used them. I was just having a quick look at what Worcester themselves offer today. It's been a long time since I bought my DT10RF!
Basically if your house only needs to go up a degree, it won't bother firing the boiler up to full power, instead just turning it on a little to match the small temperature rise required. The Nest supports OpenTherm which can do the same thing, but of course the WB boilers don't support that!
One thing I wanted to do was also take control of the burner output via the flow temperature control on the front panel. That way rather than getting up to temperature and sending the "off" command, the boiler could keep running and just turn the flow temperature down instead. With a bit of integral gain it would be possible to servo the burner output and keep the house at a nice constant level, and avoid the hot/cold periods as the boiler cycles. I never got around to doing that because life got in the way.
It looks like Wave has been replaced by "EasyControl". Do you happen to know if EasyControl does the same burner modulation?
I see they also have fancy digital TRVs. That's just more battery operated stuff though. Still, it's more flexible than zoned heating.
https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/downloads/bosch-easycontrol-brochure.pdf
Hmm. Now I'm considering an upgrade ...
I wonder if the app works P2P without internet when connected to the same network.
The installation instructions mention OpenTherm if that's any use @mowcius
https://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/downloads/bosch-easycontrol-installation-manual.pdf
The EMS bus on the boiler is reasonably understood, and OpenTherm is an open standard so making some hardware middleware shouldn't be impossible, but actual translation of data to make it work as one would expect may be rather difficult.
Timer set to 8:00 you have the mode above mentioned where it tries to get the temp to the set temp at that time, no more guessing how long before tonoutnit on.
It also has a mode where it'll try to keep comfort and thankfully ignores-ish the pointless thermostat temp (as you house is still controlled by one room then).
You can delve into temp ramp up deltas and wall thickness and stuff that sounds far to complicated ;-)
Good bit of kit.
It also has other names, mainly nefit easyit needs WiFi and external control, if like the chap above search on than for iffy and maker hacking.for internal control (otherwise, no internet, no app control but you still have the panel.
It needs to be wired to the boiler to for the ems control.
The new version looks to just add the 'hub' feature for other devices for trv etc.
If you are buying a new boiler, get a smart system.
If not, don't bother as your boiler probably isn't smart enough to modulate the boiler and water flow, then it's just a posh and easy to use timer.
I've not checked the research but I bet 'smart' saves energy as many still don't use a timer control properly as they are fidly to use or they just have an on off dial.
Most boilers are bringing out their own system.
I think bulb should leave it to the boiler manufacturers, the cost return is about the life of a boiler, so wouldn't save anyone any money as an 3rd party upgrade.
It is a life style upgrade.
None of them link to a Smart 'datalogger' Meter.
It would be better if smart energy monitoring plugs where used and a system to display this data and set timers and give warnings. It would probably save more in the long run (plugs are less than a tenner)
For instance, I can see leaving a computer on is going to cost me £25 a year for my son's Minecraft server, I can save money by having it should down over night.
I'll get the money back in one year on that alone.
Let alone an energy meter on the oven and leaving it warming up for hours ;-).
There are better savings
Anyway I've lost track probably missed bits out, but a phones not the easiest thing to type long replies with.
I hope you all have a warm and cosy Happy Christmas and a good New Year!
Talk to the people who service your boiler if you like but a lot of them will just try and sell you whatever they get good margins on from their local wholesaler.
It's a bit of a legal grey area as to whether you can get someone who's not a qualified electrician to fit the mains part of the thermostat, but it is still an easy task.
I wouldn't agree with @bsimmo saying not to bother though - it would be vast improvement from the time clock system that you have at the moment.
Water temperature modulation control via OpenTherm or EMS bus can increase efficiencies marginally but it's not exactly a game changer.
You're committing a criminal offence if you do not ensure that all electrical work carried out within your home is compliant with Part P.
The mains thermostat wiring to/from a boiler is no longer notifiable work (IIRC), but it should still be signed off/installed by an electrician.
Part P:
Non-notifiable electrical installation work, like notifiable work, should be designed and installed, and inspected, tested and certificated in accordance with BS 7671.
The word "should" is the grey area. "Should" doesn't mean it's required, but no tradesperson's insurance is going to hold up if they do work without being qualified and there's an issue that burns your/your neighbour's house down.
If not, it'll take so long to pay the potential savings back, don't bother. It's not a money saver.
Unless you are getting a new boiler system anyway, then get them in a deal.
You can get cheaper daily calendar timers that would do similar general job and do the smart savings, any are better than an on/off old wall thermostat.
They are at least smart, unlike smart meter.
Smart Thermostats can control things and act on inputs.
Smart Meters are just dataloggers and information providers.
If anyone wants to get into IoT and smart cities look for your local open smart city group (connectedhumber for the hull area)
Cardiff/Wales has one, Sheffield, Leeds too, Newcastle hopefully...