Cool It

A networked home offers a wide range of options for saving energy and increasing the comfort of residents. And these factors are also typically interdependent. A bedroom that is not used throughout the day does not need to be heated continuously in winter. But if you know that you will be going to bed at 10pm, you can program your heating to reach a comfortable temperature at the desired time. The flexibility you need for this kind of solution can only be achieved with much discipline – or with smart thermostats that correlate the room temperature and the time and initiate the heating process at the right moment.

Heat pumps offer many options for optimizing energy usage – provided they are integrated into a smart home environment. If you use your heat pump wisely, you can save electricity and still keep your home comfortably warm or cool at all times.

To integrate a heat pump sensibly into an air conditioning solution, it needs to be accessible on your own home network. This is the only way to read a value such as the current temperature in a particular room and use it as the basis for configuring the pump. I faced this very challenge a few months ago. Our new home has a heat pump by Rotex and almost obligatory underfloor heating. When we moved in, however, the only control option consisted of the thermostats installed in the individual rooms, which controlled the valves of the underfloor heating control system and therefore indirectly controlled the heat pump. Metrics available in the system itself were inaccessible on the home network, as were the existing options for dynamic reconfiguration of the heat pump. It was simply impossible to combine smart room thermometers with dynamic heating profiles without further action.

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