Basic heating controls which allow home owners to manually switch the heating on and off have been available for a long time now. But as the cost of heating our homes increases every day the need to have better control of the heating is vital. For example, by controlling exactly when the heating comes on, at what temperature in which zone of the house and during which period of the day allows us to deliver significant savings to customers while ensuring their comfort.

The graph opposite clearly shows the difference between leaving the heating on all night KW(2) and turning it down to a low temperature KW(1) until 5am when it reheats the house. This operation alone has demonstrated savings of around 20.2% in gas usage. The same process has been shown to offer the same saving while the home owners are out at work.

The principle of managing the home heating as and when it’s needed can be fully extended to cover cast iron flued range cookers such as AGAs and Rayburns. In the same way as the house’s heating is not required during the night and while the occupants are out at work, so range cookers are not needed at these times. Macoun has developed electronic controls to manage the range cookers at these times making significant savings in the amount of gas used in the home. The slow warm up and cool down periods associated with cast iron cookers are built into the control software so that the cookers are optimised to be always ready to cook but saving energy when not needed.

Once again, if required, remote control can be installed to manage the cooker if the customer decides, for instance, to have dinner with a work colleague and not cook at home that night.

The same principle can be applied for holiday or long weekends, this all adds to the savings.