Understanding heating control
Heating is responsible for the lion’s share of a home’s energy costs, but you can cut down these costs with the right heating control unit. You will then enjoy efficient, simple and convenient control of the heating, ventilation or even the full range of building services in your smart home.
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What types of heating control units are there?
Heating control options range from digital operating elements on the equipment itself to smart modules situated in the individual rooms or even intelligent control of the heating in a smart home. It is even possible to combine various models together.
Convenient operation with WOLF Smartset App
Thanks to the Smartset app, you can connect your WOLF heating system to the Link home or Link pro interface modules. This makes it easy to control the heating with the Smarthome from anywhere via smartphone. Would you prefer to control your home technology centrally from your laptop at home? No problem, the Smartset portal offers you the same options as the app.
This way, you not only increase comfort and safety, you also save a lot of energy - for example, by conveniently reducing the temperature in the water tank with your smartphone.
With a smart home, you can benefit from a wide range of centrally controlled functions:
Day and week programmes
Thanks to the day programme you save, the kitchen will automatically be warm in the morning. During the day, while you are at work and no one is home, it will remain cooler. In the afternoon, the heating control unit in the smart phone will ensure that the indoor atmosphere is comfortable by the time you get home. You choose the desired temperature – with individual settings for every room, of course.
In the week programme, you can decide when the smart home heating system will lower the temperature, such as every Thursday evening while you are at the gym. On the weekend, the smart home can ensure comfortable heat all day long – however you prefer.
Controlling the water temperature
You can also save a lot of energy by lowering the water temperature in your hot water cylinder using the smart home app while you are away. After all, you don’t need to have large amounts of hot water standing ready for a bath when you aren’t even home.
Smart ventilation control
With the smart home app, it is also perfectly simple to increase the ventilation on summer nights. Controlling the ventilation system this way ensures that your home will cool down overnight and the intense summer heat will never even find its way indoors. During a party, it also makes sense to supply more fresh air to keep the air from growing stifling.
Another use: if you hang up your laundry in the basement, this will increase the humidity. The smart home can then take action and lower the humidity. You won’t even need to open the windows, which would let out valuable heat in the winter or allow it to enter in the summer. Smart ventilation control
Optional geofencing
Some smart home providers integrate geofencing into their system. With this function, your smart home heating system knows via GPS how far you are from your home.
It can then predict your return and ramp up the room thermostats in the rooms. The same applies to your ventilation system. Then you can enjoy comfortable temperatures and an ideal indoor atmosphere when you get home. If your smart home system has a geofencing function, you can use it with appliances from WOLF.By the way: Today’s smart home thermostats can detect whether or not someone is in the room. Then the system only heats when you are actually using the rooms.
Other functions
Anyone looking to improve the comfort of their home will be pleased by other functions offered by a smart home, such as automatic brewing of coffee in the morning or starting of the robot vacuum later in the day. The control unit also detects power-hungry devices, automatically switching off lights and devices with high standby consumption.
You can integrate security components such as motion sensors, surveillance cameras or sirens into the building control to alert you of suspicious movements. The best part: all devices can be controlled from anywhere at any time.
The potential of intelligent building control and the network of diverse devices is far from exhausted. For example, researchers are working on intelligent rescue systems that inform first responders in event of emergency.
The prerequisites for a smart home and a smart heating control unit are relatively modest:
Internet access: To control appliances such as your heating with a smart home, you naturally need an internet connection.
Control units and base station: For networking the various devices in your home, you need a base station, which functions as a central control unit. Communication between devices is generally wireless. This way, all objects are networked together over the internet.
Programming unit: To use the heating control in a smart home, you will need a programming unit such as the BM-2. This is the key to smart heating.
Interface modules: You can integrate your heating system into your smart home with suitable interface modules such as the Link home and Link pro from WOLF. These can bring your smart heating online.
Frequently asked questions "Smarthome"
A heating system with weather-compensated control adapts its flow temperature to the outside temperature.
- The lower the outside temperature, the warmer the heating water. This compensates for heating losses through the building envelope.
- The warmer it is outside, the less heat the appliance produces, so as to save energy.
The efficiency of this form of heating control makes it very popular.
With the Link pro interface module, you can control even older heating appliances and ventilation systems from WOLF as well as combined heat and power modules with a modern heating control unit. However, it often makes more sense to replace old heating appliances, since they are not as efficient as new ones.
Programmable thermostats allow you to control the room temperature. They are easy to add to an existing installation. In some cases, they can even be controlled with an app. The solution is mainly suited to existing buildings.
A complete smart home system gives you much more extensive and simpler control options on the heat generator itself. The energy savings are also significantly higher as a result, since this control directly influences the amount of heat produced by your heating system. In contrast, programmable thermostats only control how much heat flows through the respective radiator.
In other words, if your goal is to save energy, there are more effective methods than intelligent heating thermostats. Either a installing a system that directly controls your central heat generation or – in the case of outdated, inefficient heating systems – replacing the appliance itself.
If the digital heating control in your smart home fails, you can also generally set the thermostat to the desired room temperature manually.
Our recommendation - BM-2 Programming unit
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