How to Control Heating Consumption — Without Giving Up Comfort

In the previous article, we looked at why heating costs are determined by more than just the price of a tonne of wood pellets, a MWh of gas or a kWh of electricity.

There are also the initial investment, installation, maintenance, repairs, the system’s service life and the building’s heat loss.

But there is another part of the cost that we can influence ourselves:

• when, where and how much heat we use.

We cannot control energy market prices. Nor can we control the weather.

But we can control our own heating consumption.

Does the Entire House Really Need to Be Heated 24 Hours a Day?

We use different rooms in a house or apartment at different times.

The bedroom is mainly used in the evening and at night. The living room is used more often in the evening. A home office may only be needed on working days, while a guest room may sometimes remain unused for weeks.

Yet in many heating systems, all these rooms are kept at almost the same temperature for long periods.

This means that some energy is consumed simply because the heating system continues to heat a room even when full comfort is not needed there.

Not Every Room Needs the Same Temperature

Comfort does not mean that the entire building has to be kept at +22 °C around the clock.

Different rooms can have different temperature settings.

For example:

🟧 ✓ living room — a comfortable temperature when the family is at home

🟧 ✓ bedroom — a lower temperature during the day

🟧 ✓ home office — heating during working hours

🟧 ✓ guest room — a lower temperature while the room is not in use

🟧 ✓ bathroom — a higher temperature exactly when it is needed

Seemingly small adjustments become significant when they are repeated every day throughout the entire heating season.

A Heating Schedule Works Even When We Are Not Thinking About It

Manually adjusting the temperature in several rooms every morning and evening is not particularly practical.

That is why automation becomes important.

A properly configured heating schedule can automatically:

🟧 ✓ lower the temperature at night

🟧 ✓ reduce it when nobody is at home

🟧 ✓ raise the temperature before a room is used

🟧 ✓ maintain different settings in different rooms

🟧 ✓ adapt heating to weekdays and weekends

The user does not have to think about heating every day. The system automatically follows the preset schedule.

A Separate Heating Schedule for Every Room

Zone control is one of the most important ways to reduce unnecessary energy consumption.

If each room can be controlled individually, the entire building no longer has to operate as one large heating zone.

Instead, each room becomes its own zone, where the temperature can be adjusted according to actual needs.

And this changes the question itself.

Instead of:

• “How cheaply can I produce heat?”

the question becomes:

• “How much heat do I actually need to produce?”

Where Does Infrared Heating Fit Into This?

This is where one of the advantages of infrared heating becomes particularly practical.

Infrared heating can be divided into separate zones, allowing the temperature in each room to be adjusted according to how that room is actually used.

Sundirect Plus series panels are designed to work with Smart 2.0 or Smart 2.0 Pro controls, allowing multiple panels in the same room to be controlled together.

Smart 2.0 — Heating That Follows Your Daily Routine

Sundirect Smart 2.0 is more than just a thermostat for switching the heating on and off.

It allows you to plan how the heating operates in advance:

🟧 ✓ 7-day heating programme — up to four temperature periods per day

🟧 ✓ Adaptive Start — the system starts heating in advance so that the room reaches the set temperature at the specified time

🟧 ✓ Open Window Detection — when a rapid drop in temperature is detected, the system helps prevent unnecessary energy consumption

🟧 ✓ Holiday Mode — reduced heating during longer periods away from home

🟧 ✓ ±0.1 °C temperature control accuracy

🟧 ✓ Group Control — control multiple panels together in one room

Smart 2.0 Pro — Control from Your Smartphone

Smart 2.0 Pro adds Wi-Fi connectivity and the Sundirect Smart app.

This allows you to:

🟧 ✓ control your heating remotely from your smartphone

🟧 ✓ monitor energy consumption in the app

🟧 ✓ control multiple panels as a single group

🟧 ✓ use Alexa and Google Home voice control

🟧 ✓ create a 7-day schedule with four temperature periods per day

Energy consumption monitoring is particularly useful in this context.

Instead of simply estimating how much energy your heating uses, you can see the actual consumption and adjust your heating settings accordingly.

The goal is not to heat the entire building in the same way, but to heat the right room, at the right time, to the right temperature.

This is where smart control becomes part of reducing heating costs — not by sacrificing comfort, but by reducing unnecessary energy consumption.

But Smart Control Cannot Solve Everything

No control system can eliminate significant heat loss from a building.

If heat escapes quickly through a poorly insulated roof, external walls, old windows or uncontrolled ventilation, the heating system will have to compensate for those losses.

That is why efficient heating is always a combination of:

• the building + correctly calculated heating capacity + control + user habits.

Changing only one of these elements may produce limited results.

What Matters Is Not Only the Price of Energy, but How Much We Use

We often try to predict how much electricity, gas or wood pellets will cost next winter.

But heating costs depend not only on the price of energy, but also on how much energy we actually consume.

By heating each room according to how it is used and using individual temperature settings and automatic heating schedules, we can reduce unnecessary energy consumption without sacrificing comfort.

Consumption is the part of our heating costs that we can influence ourselves.

Next Article

How to Prepare Your Home for the Heating Season — Before Considering a New Heating System

Where does heat escape? What can you check yourself? And when can relatively simple improvements deliver better results than buying new heating equipment?

That is what we will look at in the next article.