Ideal Boilers and Danfoss have both announced that Amazon Echo integration has arrived for some of their smart thermostats, giving customers the ability to control the central heating with their voice.
Ideal customers with a Touch Connect thermostat can now ask Alexa to turn the heating up and down, find out what the temperature is set to and get a temperature reading. Many phrases have been pre-programmed to make getting started with voice controlled central that bit easier.
Meanwhile, Danfoss have also launched voice control for their Danfoss Link Central Controller and Danfoss TPOne-S thermostats.
Head of Marketing at Ideal Boilers, Luke Pykett, said: “As part of our mission to deliver incredible customer service we are continuing to innovate and enhance usability through introducing voice activated command services, making it even easier for customers to control their heating when, where and how they wish to.”
Danfoss Marketing and Technical Support Manager, Gareth Ash said: “Being able to use simple voice commands to control the temperature of your home takes Danfoss Smart Home Heating Solutions to new levels of ease and convenience – and will also help consumers keep their homes comfortably and affordably warm.”
How Does the Alexa Integration Work?
With the Ideal Touch Connect, simply ask your Amazon device one of the set phrases and Alexa will take care of the rest. Some of the set phrases include:
- “Alexa, make it warmer in here.”
- “Alexa, what’s the temperature in here?”
- “Alexa, turn the heating down.”
The default name of the Touch Connect is ‘heating’ but this can be changed to anything you like. So, for example, we could change name our Touch Connect the ‘Home Heating Guide Thermostat’, then ask “Alexa, what temperature is Home Heating Guide Thermostat set to?” and get a verbal response almost instantly.
The Danfoss thermostats need to be paired up with your Amazon Echo using the Danfoss app, once that’s done you can use Alexa to find out the temperature in certain rooms or to make changes:
- “Alexa, what is the temperature in the kitchen?”
- “Alexa, turn up/down the heat in the bedroom.”
Other Thermostats with Alexa Integration
With 6.6 million people across the UK (that’s 1 in 10 of us) owning a smart speaker, 75% of which are Amazon devices, there’s definite potential for smart thermostats to adopt voice control*.
Unsurprisingly, there are many smart thermostats that can be voice controlled thanks to Alexa:
- Nest Learning Thermostat
- Sensi Smart Thermostat
- Ecobee3
- Honeywell Lyric T5
With so many smart thermostats to choose from, use our comparison article to find the best smart thermostat for your home.
*Source: YouGov – https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2018/04/19/smart-speaker-ownership-doubles-six-months
