How to Improve Your Heating Habits in Spring

After a cold, dark winter, the beginning of spring promises more sunshine and warmer homes. With less reliance on full home heating, “improving” our heating habits may seem redundant when we can just turn off our heating all together. But if the British weather has taught us anything, the changing of seasons does not a cosy home make! You’ll find behaviours practised during winter have unwittingly followed you into the year’s second quarter, keeping those energy bills alarmingly high. Switching to electric allows for greater control over your heating – with an emphasis on convenience and energy-saving features that allow you to break those bad habits and practise an eco-friendlier approach. Here’s how:

Electric heating: Transforming bad habits into sustainable solutions

Bad habit: Setting the thermostat too high

As we lose an hour to daylight savings, we tend to wake up during the coldest, darkest time of day. Naturally, you might turn the thermostat right up for that instant gratification – doing so, however, will cause uncomfortably stuffy rooms, lots of energy waste and an increase to your bills, so cranking up the thermostat ends up doing the exact opposite of its intended purpose.

Solution: Precision thermostats and adaptive start

Electric radiators fitted with their own precision thermostats accurately calculate the required heat output in each room. Maintaining a set temperature without fluctuating, the digital thermostat adjusts itself instantly whenever it detects heat levels have gone above or below your specification. Consistent programming does wonders for your energy bill and does away with the need for extreme boosts in heat.

The adaptive start setting measures the time it takes the radiator to reach a certain temperature. When activated, it enables your radiator to pre-heat ahead of schedule, so your room is always perfectly heated at the exact moment you need it. So, if you find you keep cranking up the heat to stay warm on a morning, precision digital thermostats and adaptive start make sure you can wake up to a comfortable temperature without any fuss or unnecessary energy waste.

Bad habit: Heating every room in the house

A central heating system has pipework and radiators which are connected to a boiler; the annoying thing about that is the whole system must work together to exert its functioning – if you plan on hanging out in the living room for the afternoon, your radiators are going to have to run throughout the rest of the house. So, heating every room at the same time may not even be a bad habit of yours – instead an unavoidable consequence of central heating that keeps bills and energy waste high.

Solution: Schedules and zoned heating

With no moving parts, electric radiators don’t rely on pipework or a boiler to run, with each acting as their own individual unit. Therefore, you’ll find an immediate workaround to this issue by creating unique schedules and heating zones on a room-by-room basis throughout your property. This can be done on either the in-built thermostat or an app on your smart device if your radiator has Bluetooth or WiFi compatibility. The radiators in your living room, bedroom and bathroom can all run on different schedules and temperatures, avoiding having to heat any rooms unnecessarily.

Bad habit: Avoiding annual servicing

Annual maintenance is legally required on all gas boilers and carbon monoxide detectors, not only to ensure they’re working efficiently but as a way to catch any developing faults that could result in a safety breach. As prices average between £70-£120 per visit, the costs attributed to maintaining central heating end up racking up, especially if you have multiple properties. Sometimes it can be as simple as forgetting, but it can also become a logistical issue if you’re out of the house a lot. It may only be once a year, but let’s face it: booking in your annual servicing is a pain.

Solution: Do away with mandatory maintenance all together

That’s right – a heating system that doesn’t involve carbon monoxide or burn combustible fuel makes electric one of the safest alternatives out there. Convenient, too, as the maintenance surrounding electric radiators is almost non-existent. A light dusting once a month is all the maintenance needed to keep an electric radiator in top condition – so forget having to cash out or moving your schedule around for the engineer.

Bad habit: Forgetting to turn off the heating

We’ve all done it; left the house in a rush and only realised later the heating’s still running. A once-in-a-blue-moon mistake doesn’t matter so much, but if this happens often or you’re guilty of leaving the heating on longer than necessary, it really starts to become a problem for your wallet and is unnecessarily wasteful.

Solution: WiFi-app control and geolocation

Smart electric radiators with app compatibility give you unlimited control over the way you heat your home. Pair your radiators to your smartphone and manage your heating from anywhere in the world. Left for work and realised you’ve forgotten to turn the heating off? No problem: log in to the app and either turn off your radiators or set them to one of their many eco modes.

Radiators like the Technotherm KS DSM also come with geolocation control, a setting that measures your proximity and turns itself on and off accordingly: if you go beyond a certain radius, your radiator will switch to a lower power setting until your return. This autonomous feature saves you money and energy, requiring no input on your behalf – great for people who forget what they’ve forgotten in the first place!

Bad habit: Losing track of energy waste

We can all relate to doing a double take at our heating bill – it’s so easy to leave radiators running for hours at a time and even easier to lose track of just how much energy is being wasted. It may feel a bit hopeless trying to keep an eye on it all; energy bills tend to be littered with jargon and meaningless abbreviations that don’t help at all with forward planning.

Solution: Energy usage statistics

The Ecostrad Ecosystem app has a fantastic feature that allows you to check your radiators’ energy usage in real time. Connect all of your electric radiators and access individual statistics to help identify over-consumption. Viewing data like this from the convenience of your phone is a great way to retain the information, and the Ecosystem app’s interface does so simply so you can make proactive change towards your home’s energy usage (and get those bills down too).

A fresh start with electric

Upgrade to electric today and unlearn all your bad heating habits. Our selection of smart radiators and heaters contain everything you could want to make home heating more manageable and keep costs down. So don’t delay; browse our full collection or get in touch with our friendly support team for even more expert advice on making the switch.

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