The Challenge
Energenie is an innovative smart home brand with a range of products designed to help reduce your carbon footprint and save you money. Its products include smart lights, smart sockets and controllable valves which enable you to separately control heating radiators in different rooms around the house.
Its existing product involved manual programming of the time and temperature at each radiator, but Energenie saw an opportunity to centralise automation using its MiHome gateway which would allow you to set the time and temperature of any radiator in the house from the central app.
The company asked Plextek to redesign the interface of its infrared controllers to enable the upgraded product functionality but using a radio link, rather than infrared. A particular challenge – the new solution needed to be designed to operate on very low power so the batteries would run for several seasons.
The Approach
We designed a new circuit board inside the valve with a radio link and microcontroller which connects each of the valves via the MiHome gateway and to an app on a smart phone or computer. To minimise battery use our design communicated voltage and temperature only every five minutes with the default setting (i.e. heating level) being maintained in the absence of an update.
The Approach
We designed a new circuit board inside the valve with a radio link and microcontroller which connects each of the valves via the MiHome gateway and to an app on a smart phone or computer. To minimise battery use our design communicated voltage and temperature only every five minutes with the default setting (i.e. heating level) being maintained in the absence of an update.
The Outcome
The upgraded device was launched nationwide in 2016 and continues to be sold as a part of Energenie’s MiHome system. As well as reducing carbon footprint and saving consumers money, an added benefit of the regular and centralised control of radiators has been minimising the risks of radiator valves seizing, further lowering the cost of home maintenance. We have subsequently supported Energenie with other smart home developments including smart light switches.
