Tado is a thermostat with a difference, it’s smart and saves you money by only heating the house when you are at home.

We have had it installed now for almost 2 years, and more importantly for a winter. Coming into the winter I thought it would be worth looking at how we have got on with it. Well it shows me how much the heating is on (which is quite a lot), it shows how quickly the temperature in the house drops overnight (which is too quickly for my liking) and it turns the heating off as soon as we leave the house and back on again when we are on the way home (which I really like).

They have updated their app this year which has introduced scheduling, allowing you to set different temperatures for when you are at home at different times of the day and for different days, the same as you would with a dumb timer thermostat. But why would you want to if it turns off when you are at home? Well for us, with Zoe at home during the day the heating would be on all the time in cold weather and that could get expensive. Instead she is quite happy to put a thicker jumper on if needed, so we lower the temperature during the week day. At the weekend with the kids around we find it hard enough to get them to put a jumper on when we go out let alone in the house so we want it a bit warmer, plus the temperature often plummets in the evening.

Tado have also brought out a new model with the temperature shown on the wall unit and you can change the temperature on it as well as from the app or website. It looks good but I still have the original

I am looking forward to them adding a few other features which I think will really make this product fantastic, a heating boost feature and an advance to next temperature feature, they have talked about some new features before the next heating season but I won’t hold my breath.

Would I recommend Tado, certainly, its one of those gadget’s that just work, you don’t need to do anything but get on with your life and it saves energy when you are not at home.

If you are thinking about getting a smart thermostat do it, if you’re not, why not? Buy it here.

This was a guest post from Mr ETL.

We have solar panels and like many people want to make the most of the electricity they produce. There are products that can redirect any excess electricity generated to your hot water tank but they are of no use to us as we have a combi boiler and don’t have a tank. We use as much electricity as we can when the sun is shining – we put the washing and dishwasher on during the day, but still on sunny days we export most of it back to the grid.

 

Immersun is a diverter product and when they got in touch to ask if we wanted to trial their product my initial thoughts were it was of no use to us, but a couple of people on the Microgen forum where I share my solar usage data were using the diverter products for heating via another means, so I thought it was worth investigating.

 

So how does it work, well the Immersun measures the amount of electricity we are importing or exporting from the grid and if we are exporting diverts the same amount of electricity to a heating element. It checks this every few seconds so if we turn the kettle on or the sun goes behind a cloud it recognises it very quickly. Now the clever bit is that if you are directing the electricity to a heater it takes whatever electricity is available and gives it back as heat. 

 

We had the Immersun installed by a very nice electrician. He turned up and asked where our hot water tank was, I explained that I wanted it to be used for plugging in a heater and that I wanted to be able to take it into different rooms as needed. After the initial surprise he said he could mount it onto a piece of wood with a couple of standard plugs on it and we can plug any resistive load onto them, eg. heaters or lights.

 

We got the wireless adapter for the Immersun which meant that the main unit could be wired to a plug and therefore could be plugged in anywhere in the house and provide 2 (or even 3) plugs for use.

 

We bought a 2kw convection heater and its now sitting in our hallway heating the core of the house. To be honest at the minute it’s over heating the house a bit as the outside temperature hasn’t been low enough and the sun has been shining quite a lot. I’ve even plugged my kettle into the plug and had a cup of solar powered tea from it. It took a few minutes to boil but hey.

 

This system will not be of any use in the middle of summer and may not have a huge amount of use in the middle of winter. In Autumn and Spring though this has the potential to save us money on our gas bill and keep Mrs EcoThrifty warm on a cold day, as she spends most of her time in the house.

 

If you are buying this setup it will cost you £400 – £500 (see here) plus installation depending on if you get the remote monitoring which isn’t essential but nice to have. The heater cost us £20 so it would take a while to pay for itself. The Immersun allows you to put in your electricity costs and it will tell you how much in Kwh and £/$ have been saved but the real saving for me will be how much less gas we use and how warm the house feels on a cold spring or autumn day.  So watch this space for the next blog post to see how we get on with it as the trial progresses. For more information about the Immersun, take a look at their website here.

 

This was a guest post from Mr ETL.

 

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Disclaimer – there are affilate links in this blog post.

When we purchased the solar panels we also bought an SMA Sunny Beam Monitor (cost us around £150), which enabled us to see how much solar electricity we were generating each day. You can download the information from the monitor and track it to ensure that your solar panels are operating effectively in the long run.  To start with we had lots of fun checking it to see how much money we were making each day.

As well as the Sunny Beam, we have a British Gas Energy Monitor (cost us *free*) which if I’m brutally honest, I have never looked at, but my husband tells me it is meant to instantaneously tell us what energy we are using in kilowatt hours. It doesn’t store any information and you can’t download anything, you can only see what is happening right now.

These monitors were good in theory, but couldn’t individually answer a few questions such as:

My husband did some research and found out about the Eco Eye SMART PV Energy Monitor
(retails at around £83), which he felt could address these issues and they very kindly sent us one to review. 

The Eco Eye Smart PV Monitor tracks both generation and usage and compares the two every 4 seconds and stores the information so that you can download it and look at trends over longer periods of time.    

We have positioned the monitor in our kitchen, where the majority of our appliances are.  It operates a traffic light system, so if it is flashing green, you are making electricity, amber – breaking even and red – you are paying to use electricity.  You can also see it in kilowatt hours.  If I see it flashing green and that there is a decent amount of spare generated electricity I put the washing on!  

This has really helped us to get clever about the way we use appliances and gives us a much clearer idea of when to turn things on or off and how many things we can have running at the same time. Our other monitors are now redundant and we could have saved ourselves money by buying the Eco Eye in the first place.

Disclaimer – I received an Eco-Eye monitor to review prior to writing this post and I have included affiliate links in the article. If you purchase an item through the affiliate link it won’t cost you any extra and it will help to support the blog – thanks!