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Living with Remote Heating Control: Month 2

FrequencyCast is taking part in a British Gas trial of their Remote Heating Control system. Here's a quick overview of Pete's findings of the system so far, as featured in show 79.

Listen to FrequencyCast Show 79 - Remote Heating Control Month 2 Update

Remote Heating Control Month 2:

Pete has been living with the British Gas Remote Heating Control system for two months. Here's a transcript of his findings, two months into the trial

Transcript continues from: Local Digital Radio

Kelly:

So Pete, how are you getting on with British Gas?

Pete:

I thought you were going to ask me that, because it says so there on the bit of paper, doesn't it?

Kelly:

It does.

Pete:

So as you know, I'm taking part in the British Gas "Don't Take Our Word For It" campaign, where I'm given some lovely tech to play with by British Gas. Now, you've actually not seen this yet, have you?

Kelly:

I've not seen anything.

Pete:

So what's happened is, British Gas has installed a remote heating control at home. Now, because we've actually had some relatively warm weather through the last couple of months, I haven't actually had to really use this in anger yet, but this is quite cool. Now, the house at the moment is guarded by my cat, so it's just my cat at home, and I can muck around with the temperature and frighten the life out of the cat - how cool's that?

Kelly:

I think that's quite mean!

Taking control of Pete's home with British Gas Remote Heating Control

Pete:

So I'm looking at my smartphone here. Now, at the moment it's saying I'm in away auto mode, and I can see here that my target is set to - ?

Kelly:

18 degrees.

Pete:

But the actual house temperature at the moment is - ?

Kelly:

23 degrees.

Pete:

So what I can do is slide this little slider up here, and when I slide it over 23 degrees, the system at home realises that it's not quite warm enough, and will actually remotely fire up the boiler, and you'll see a little green light there?

Kelly:

Yes.

Pete:

And what that's doing is telling my heating in the house to turn on now, and what is particularly clever is, you can set up these really complicated little schedules, so that you only have it coming on on a certain day at a certain time. Most thermostats that I've played with before, you just have one setting, so it comes on at seven o'clock every day and goes off at whatever, but here you can say, on a Monday, I go to work earlier, so I'll ramp it on half-an-hour earlier; Saturday and Sunday, people behave differently to weekdays, so you can actually really target this very precisely, and if it is a particularly cold day, you can just override it from your phone, and automatically adjust your heating.

I did get a strange message from British Gas saying, the system needs to be unplugged - it says, system is offline. I had to unplug it, and plug it back in again, and I'm still waiting for my smart meter. I'm hoping it'll be installed (hint, hint, British Gas) in the next couple of weeks, so in the next show, we can look at how these new smart meters are going to be changing our lives.

Kelly:

Can I have one?

Listen to FrequencyCast Show 79 - Remote Heating Control Month 2 Update

The UK Digital TV and Technology Podcast

Living with Remote Heating Control: Month 2

FrequencyCast is taking part in a British Gas trial of their Remote Heating Control system. Here's a quick overview of Pete's findings of the system so far, as featured in show 79.

Remote Heating Control Month 2:

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