Every manufacturer claims the answer is yes, quoting average savings in the 25%, or £180 a year range. But all of these promises are heavily caveated and, with energy costs changing regularly, it can be very difficult to tell what is having an impact. To find out if technology can really help, I spent the last two years comparing my miserly manual control and basic heating schedule to an AI-governed system.
The results surprised me. I used my 1930s solid-brick house with a recent, insulated loft conversion as the test bed. In the winter of 2024 my heating system consisted of a 10-year-old Worcester Bosch combination gas boiler set to a medium heat, a Hive thermostat in a central hallway with its smart features disabled and 13 radiators equipped with standard thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs).
To maximise energy savings, I set a basic schedule to turn the heating on for a couple of hours in the morning and evening, turned off the TRVs in rooms we did not use and manually adjusted those in other rooms when we did not need them to be heated. I also manually turned the heating off when leaving the house. It was laborious and not all that comfortable at times.
I frequently found myself being glared at by other members of the family who were shivering under blankets in the living room while watching The Traitors. Or being called a traitor after denying yet another request to turn up the heating. But it kept bills low throughout the winter and money in my pocket.
After controlling for hot water usage by using recordings from when the heating was not used during the summer months of 2025 to create a daily average, my manual control consumed 14,316.7 kilowatt hours of gas across 213 days from November to May. This was about 10 to 15% lower than in previous years when I had not been quite so controlling and miserly. In the summer of 2025 I replaced the Hive thermostat with a full Tado X system connected to the existing combi boiler.
This system consisted of 13 smart radiator thermostats to replace the standard TRVs, a wireless thermostat in each of the two largest rooms, and a programmer wired to the boiler. Instead of a central thermostat and a schedule with just one temperature for the whole house, heating is managed room by room. Each smart TRV can control the temperature of an individual room by commanding the boiler to turn on and then adjusting the hot water flow into the radiator.
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