Ceilingo connected thermostat: setting up your own heating schedules

Connected thermostats: what actually changed

Heating controls moved on quietly, and a great many houses are still running the previous generation.

The clearest way to see what changed is to look at what happened to the telephone.

What the old models could not do

There was a time when reaching someone at a company meant going through a switchboard that put your call through to their office.

Once they had left the building, they were unreachable.

Old thermostats, wired to a programmer through a pilot wire, worked in exactly that way.

It worked, but it left you very little room. The heating did what the programmer said, and changing that meant standing in front of it.

What a connected thermostat does differently

Telephones changed. Instead of a fixed handset, we carry a phone that reaches us and lets us reach anyone, wherever we happen to be.

Connected thermostats brought the same freedom to heating.

You control the whole system remotely, set it to match how you actually live, and see what it is costing you.

What you get from one

• Remote control: as a phone lets you speak from anywhere, a connected thermostat lets you set the heating in your house from anywhere, on a phone or a tablet.

• Settings that fit you: temperatures set to your preferences and to the shape of your week, much as you set up a phone to suit yourself.

• Lower running costs: it adjusts itself and reports in detail on what you use, which is what makes the saving something you can see rather than something you are promised.

• Working with the rest of the house: it fits into a home automation system and works alongside whatever else in the house is connected.

In short

The move from a wired thermostat to a connected one follows the same path the telephone took.

Choosing one is not about keeping up. It is about a house that is easier to live in and cheaper to run.

The old models have had their day.