Two Hull businesses are collaborating to develop the home heating system of the future.
Tech specialist Sauce has furthered its work with city manufacturing giant Ideal Heating to create intelligent, responsive controls driven by real-time data, making systems more efficient and reliable than ever before.
The tie-up has resulted in Ideal launching its most advanced control to date, Halo Combi Wi-Fi, giving households greater flexibility with their heating.
It allows customers to be in charge of their heating remotely via an intuitive app, while in home integration with smart products such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home brings voice command to the fore.
Data harvesting will assist ongoing product development, maintenance and support, while geolocation operation also provides the possibility of automatic shut down when the home is empty, switching back on when a resident’s return begins.
Lizzie Wilkinson, head of domestic product management for Ideal Heating, said: “Sauce has helped us take the home heating experience to another level. It gives households more control and flexibility, providing improved comfort and energy efficiency.
“The industry is changing and it’s important we adapt. We see this as a major opportunity, as we can now use all this valuable data to inform and influence the development of future smart home heating systems.”
She flagged the strong relationship across the city at launch, explaining how Halo includes a programmable room thermostat linked to a mobile app.The data is accessed through a portal created by Sauce and, as well as helping with ongoing customer support, the wealth of information will be used by the Groupe Atlantic business to develop even more advanced systems.
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Jim Wardlaw, chief of product and design at Sauce, said: “The world of heating systems has changed dramatically and continues to do so. Customer demand and expectation is higher than it has ever been, with people wanting greater control of their systems in order to suit their lifestyle.
“Working in our agile way with Ideal, we are producing data-led, smart and highly-efficient home heating systems that can be perfectly tailored to customers’ requirements.”
The Halo kit includes the smart interface, which controls the boiler, as a plug-on requiring no wiring. The thermostat then links to the smart interface through a wireless network.
Users can programme up to six heating periods each day and the schedule can be varied. Additional elements include a child lock, holiday mode and frost protection.
Sauce created a prototype at the beginning of the product development process to test the transfer of data over a server-less infrastructure.
Its C4DI-based team also helped create simulations of the thermostat screens to enable extensive user testing.
Following the launch of Halo, Sauce is continuing to work alongside National Avenue-based Ideal to develop future systems, using the vast amounts of data now available to them.