Author: William Pluse

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Future of heating with Genius Hub

Jigsaw 4

The future of heating with Genius Hub

We’re reflecting on how you will be heating your homes in the future.

Many of you will have noticed the Genius Hub push in the summer of 2020 to release more components that control electric heating. This is because we see a big shift in building control and the government legislation to promote the installation of electric heating over gas central heating.

Preempting this shift into more electric heating in properties, we have recently been developing and releasing more products in the Genius Hub family that control electric heating. These include our all new Powered Room Thermostat and our all new Electric Relays.

The Powered Room Thermostat will give control of anything from electric underfloor heating, to electric space heating, to electric Infrared panels.

This new Powered Room Thermostat can control up to (3.6 kW, about 20 square meters) of electric underfloor heating, and can protect the floor from overheating with its integrated floor probe connection. The Powered Room Thermostat can also be used to control wet underfloor heating for sensitive floor coverings such as engineered wood, vinyl or a laminate floor.

This is a versatile device as it can also be used to control electric space heaters as well as infrared panels. With its built in PID control it is an easy to use device that you can either walk up to on the wall to adjust the temperature in the room (if you don’t want to use the app), or you can pull out the app and give the heating a boost from anywhere.

Not stopping there we also released our new Electric Relay. This is something that can be used to control an electrical load (2.4 kW), and has been designed for controlling electric heaters, so it’s ideal for things like Infrared heating panels or Infrared heated mirrors to take the chill out of your bathrooms. It doesn’t stop there though; you can also use them for heated towel rails, small electric space heaters, kick space heaters, or even outside lights. This is the perfect solution where you want something that you can tuck out of the way as they come with a single surface mount pattress (similar to a single light switch) and blank faceplate.

For the heating of your homes we have teamed up with the UK manufacturer Jigsaw Infrared. They have a new range of beautiful custom infrared heaters which work very well with Genius Hub controls as well as providing an attractive heating solution for any room. 

We are proud to be working with Jigsaw as their panels are manufactured in Britain (Yorkshire to be more precise) and they conform to the highest manufacturing and safety standards. This range of very high quality, high efficiency heaters is an excellent choice when it comes to heating either a whole house or perhaps just an extra room in a new extension. Working from home in the shed at the bottom of the garden… this could be just the ticket to stop those frozen hands tapping on that keyboard.

Being made in the UK means you can also get custom panels faster, be that an infrared mirror to exactly match the wall in your bathroom, or an image printed onto an infrared panel with no reduction in heat output, which can be a problem for companies applying images after the manufacturing process.

 

Get in touch with Jigsaw directly for any of your Infrared heating needs, and they will be happy to ensure you choose the right heater for your home which will also work with your Genius Hub.

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Stocking fillers from Genius Hub

Stocking fillers from Genius Hub

The most wonderful time of the year is upon us and its the perfect time to exchange gifts with family and friends. We at Genius Hub have some excellent products which are perfect for a stocking filler this Christmas.  

The first Genius Hub product perfect for this Christmas is the Genius Room Sensor. This device is an excellent addition to a Genius Hub system as it allows the user to access the Sense and Footprint modes within the app, which are based upon Occupancy Detection. The Genius Room Sensor accurately measures the temperature in a room, plus it can sense when you use a room, to pre-heat that room to your preferred temperature when you are there and automatically save energy when you are not. You could even use the Genius Room Sensor to turn on your Christmas Tree lights. This product is the perfect size for a stocking filler and can easily be installed without any tools, so there’s no need to purchase a tool kit this Christmas.

Top view of Genius Motion Sensor

The next Genius Hub product which is perfect for a stocking filler this Christmas is the Genius Motion Sensor. Similar to the Genius Room Sensor this product will detect occupancy within the zone you place it into, however the Genius Motion Sensor is more discreet as it has the capability to be placed in the top corner of a room,  this provides excellent occupancy detection capabilities due to the Wide Angle of coverage. This Christmas there will be no need to schedule your radiators from your smartphone, allowing you to join in the festivities as much as possible. This is possible due to our Footprint mode or Sense mode. Adding a Genius Motion Sensor (or Genius Room Sensor) to a room where you’ve installed a Genius Radiator Valve or using Genius Hub to control your electric or underfloor heating, enables the system to learn when you normally use the room and automatically heat it ready for your arrival while also turning down your heating when you leave.

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Winter Tips from Genius Hub

Winter tips for your Genius Hub

As Winter is upon us we understand that it is the most important time of the year not only for festivities and cheer but also for the quality of your heating system. We at Genius Hub are passionate about providing the best smart heating system on the market. Here are some tips for how you can use your Genius Hub system to its maximum potential this winter.

1. Update your heating schedules – Over this festive period you are more than likely to be in the house more than ever, ‘unless you have been working from home’. So ensure that your heating periods are updated so you and your family are kept warm this winter. To do this just head to our app and select ‘Timer Mode’ then update your schedule to match your festive calendar. Using our ‘Copy’ schedule facility it will mean within a few clicks you can ensure your family are comfortable this Winter.

Top view of Genius Motion Sensor

2. Use Occupancy Detection – During the winter it is popular to use a range of festive lights, whether these are wrapped round  a Christmas Tree, over a fireplace or your standard room lights. Why not control these via occupancy detection? As a bit of fun the lights could only turn on when you are in the room, or you can set them to turn off when you’re watching the blockbuster movies over Christmas. Our Genius Room Sensor or Genius Motion Sensor can perfectly detect when you or your family members enter your lounge or dining room giving you the opportunity to show off your wonderfully decorated Christmas tree! We recommend creating a zone such as ‘Christmas Tree’, assigning either your Genius Room or Motion Sensor to this zone and setting overrides to 2 hours. In 3 easy steps you can transform your Festive Lights and Decorations to be smart.

3. Connect Alexa – If you have Alexa at home or you are lucky enough to be gifted an Amazon Alexa this Christmas we highly recommend you connect your Alexa to your Genius Hub system. This will let you control your heating with your voice. For those moments when your hands are full of Christmas Presents or too many shopping bags from the Boxing Day sales you can simply ask ‘Alexa, set the Lounge to 22 degrees’ or ‘Alexa turn the Hallway lights on’. It is really that easy to control your Genius Hub this Winter!

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Green Homes Grant

Green Homes Grant (£5,000)

£2 billion has been made available by the government to fund the new green homes grant. The scheme will commence at the end of September and you can benefit from it too if you have a project in the pipeline and you use eligible contractors. You need to consider that there are primary measures and secondary measures. The driver behind this from the top i.e. the government is; “Heating buildings accounts for almost a fifth of UK greenhouse gas emissions and reducing carbon dioxide from homes will be essential to reaching net zero by 2050.” Gov.uk.

Primary measures

  • Insulation, including solid wall, cavity wall, under-floor, loft, or roof insulation.
  • Low carbon heating, such as air source or ground source heat pumps, or solar thermal systems.

Secondary measures

  • Draught proofing.
  • Double or triple glazing, or secondary glazing, but only if you currently have single glazing, it won’t cover replacement double glazing.
  • Energy efficient doors, where you’re replacing doors installed before 2002.
  • Heating controls and insulation, including appliance thermostats, hot water tank thermostats, hot water tank insulation, smart heating controls, zone controls, delayed start thermostat and thermostatic radiator valves.

The current understanding is that you must install or improve a primary measure. You may then get a grant for up to the same amount for a secondary measure. That will include Genius Hub controls for your project too. The vouchers are worth up to 66% of the cost of the measures, up to £5,000, and for Low-Income homes vouchers cover 100% of the costs up to £10,000. If you are a landlord you can benefit from the grants too for your properties.

You need to use Tradespeople who are registered for TrustMark to be able to access the funds. You can use this link https://www.trustmark.org.uk/ to search for a registered company in your area. On the TrustMark website, choose your area, and then under select a trade choose ‘central heating engineers’ or ‘underfloor heating’.

To take advantage of this, first come to us and we can help you get the best design for our eligible ‘smart heating controls’, then discuss your ideas with a local tradesmen/women and they will be able to advice you on how to get the grant.

For more reading on the subject see:

Money Saving Expert

Government Memorandum Of Understanding

Press release- Quality assurance at heart of new £2 billion green homes grants

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Preparing for Winter 2020

Preparing for Winter - Discount Extended

Winter2

September marks the start of autumn so now is the time to contact us about the heating improvements you were discussing back in spring but put off until next winter. Genius Hub have been busy during the lockdown integrating not one but three new components into the system. One product in particular is for our new and growing number of underfloor heating customers. This new thermostat controls both electric underfloor heating and also wet underfloor heating, with built in temperature overheat protection for the floor.

As smart homes become more common, Genius Hub understand that though we want homes to be smart we’re also happy with our traditional looking light switches, thermostats, and plug sockets and for this part we help homes become smart ‘behind the scenes’ by releasing devices that can be tucked out of the way out of sight, creating a smart home that is energy efficient and can be controlled by your phone but can maintain a traditional, uncomplicated and simple look.

Genius Hub offer this new Powered Room Thermostat which can control up to (3.6 kW, about 20 square meters) of electric underfloor heating, and can protect the floor from overheating with its integrated floor probe connection. The Powered Room Thermostat can also be used to control wet underfloor heating for sensitive floor coverings such as engineered wood, vinyl or a laminate floor. The Powered Room Thermostat is on sale and we’ve extend the discount for another two weeks.

If you are thinking about underfloor heating but have been put off by the cost and disruption of digging up the floor, get in touch with JK floorheating. Because of how JK lay the pipes into the existing floor, the final floor covering can sit just above the pipes with little to no increase in floor height and this makes for a very responsive system, especially when it is controlled by the Genius Hub. This works really well with the occupancy detection – automatically bringing the heating up to a comfort temperature when you enter the room. We are happy to promote how well JK works with Genius Hub because we have tuned our smart algorithms to work perfectly with the JK underfloor response times, and no other underfloor system is as easy to retrofit into an existing home and will respond as quickly as the JK floorheating.

Our new Genius Motion Sensor allows for use of  occupancy detection for controlling the likes of outside lights as the nights draw in or to give you better control of the heating of your rooms. This little device can be added into a room with radiators, lights, underfloor heating or electric heating, so you can use our sense mode  or in between Sense and footprint mode there is a carriage return allowing the system to cleverly only heat rooms when they are used, or learn when rooms are used and create a heating schedule for you. These discrete little devices are easy to add to your Genius Hub and can be located in a room up high, or even in a porch to pick up someone walking up to a property to trigger internal or external lights to come on.

Finally there is our new Electric Relay. This is something that can be used to control an electrical load (2.4 kW), and has been designed for controlling lights or electric heaters, so it’s ideal for things like LED outside lights, heated towel rails or kickspace heaters. This is the perfect solution where you want something that you can tuck out of the way as they come with a single surface mount pattress (similar to a single light switch) and blank faceplate.

If you missed our latest webinar you can learn all about and see the new components with our director Alasdair telling you in detail about how each component works. He also discusses the details of pre-heat for those who wanted to know just how that part of the system works with a more technical explanation.

0:01:16 Wireless Motion Sensor 

0:12:05 Electric Relay

0:23:00 Powered Room Thermostat

0:47:12 Deep Dive into Preheat 

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Is your HUB up to date? – September

Is your HUB up to date?

The latest app and hub software is 5.4.0 and this is going into testing this week with our ‘beta’ testers. This will be available to all customers in mid October. This is the result of 12 months of work and testing for our hub team with a lot of the work going into the reliability of the main system processes running on your hubs. This hasn’t stopped us packing in some new features though, and we’ve listened to the feedback from our user forum and added in the features people have been asking for, so they can tweak the heating to get the most from the efficiency of control Genius Hub gives them.

You will see the update (blue i icon) appear within your app if you don’t have the latest firmware on your Genius Hub, make sure you upgrade to the new improved hub software before winter starts.

 

 

The new features include being able to change the frost protect temperature – useful for those who want to be able to shut the system off from the home page ‘power’ icon when they leave the property for extended periods of time, but also want to be able to customise the temperature that each room shuts down to. 

The main back end improvement is the second part of the re-write to the communication driver, which will improve the battery life of the devices as well as improve the reliability of the wireless communication. This will prevent or at least significantly reduce the chances of spurious overrides reported by some customers, as the new hub software will process the messages back from the devices faster as well as improved filtering out any rogue messages.

 

Other improvements include; bug fixes to the displaying of zone status when in sense mode, correcting the chart axis for on/off zones, improving the Android accessibility font sizes, correcting some of the theme display bugs and fixing some of the links in the app user manual on iOS. We’ve been sure to go through the app trouble shooting wizard too and added in any missing solutions as well as adding in all of the required support for the new devices we’ve released this winter.

 

Don’t forget that in this app we’ve built help videos into the app doctor too. When you’re in the app doctor you will see videos stepping you through the process, from helping you to add new devices to your Genius Hub to helping you remove a stubborn Genius Radiator Valve from a radiator.

 

You have to upgrade your HUB to benefit from these improvements.

 

As always we’re not stopping there and for a full list of what we’re working on short and long term please see our R&D Roadmap and our Change Log.

 

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What’s new with Alexa?

What's new with Alexa?

As you may already know the Genius Hub works with Amazon’s Alexa and we’ve run some demo’s online for how to set up Alexa on your Genius Hub.

If you prefer using a more customisable tool to link your Genius Hub to other smart things on your home, then we also have a webinar piece on IFTTT which you can use to connect  Google Assistant to your Genius Hub.

Sticking with the Alexa theme here, we have been doing some digging and looking at the other helpful and amusing things that Alexa can do around the home.

We thought that we’d include some of our favourites into this blog so you can see our thoughts on the top 5 things that you can do with your Alexa – as well as using it with Genius Hub to turn on the lamp on your landing of course.

1 – When you’re away this summer use the “Alexa, open Burglar Deterrent” to help ward off any people possibly snooping on your property.

2 – With the lockdown easing it’s now much easier to exercise outside, but Alexa still has some ideas of things you can do indoors with “Alexa, how do I keep fit at home?”

3 – If you have young children and worry about a sudden noise in the house disturbing them when they are just nodding off to sleep, you can try “Alexa, open White Noise” to create some background noise to calm them.

4 – As the summer holidays role on anyone with young children will be looking for anything to keep the children amused for another 30minutes. Try “Alexa, what can I do with the kids at home?” to help come up with entertaining things to do with the children in between trips to the park.

5 – Finally, to help with those tricky Trivial Pursuit or pub quiz questions try “Alexa, give me the fact of the day” to give you the edge at the next picnic in the park or meeting up with friends or family.

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Keeping your home warm, efficient and safe

Keeping your home warm, efficient and safe

So you already know that the Genius Hub is the most sophisticated of the smart heating controls – learning when each individual room of your house is used and continuously updating your heating schedule to match, but did you know what the best smart cameras and security systems are?

Read what Forbes Advisor Rachel Wait has to say on the subject of Energy saving and security for your home. 

The clever thing here is to connect the smart camera or security system to IFTTT and then use that to trigger lights in your home to come on when someone is detected.

See our director Alasdair discussing IFTTT and how to set this up here.

Imagine how if you simply add a camera to your home you can now use your existing Genius Hub to turn on a smart plug upstairs with a lamp plugged into it, so it appears that someone is just getting up to see who is at the door when the camera spots someone outside.

Alternatively, people are also purchasing our little Genius Motion Sensors to be installed in porches to look out on a driveway and then using the Electric Relays to turn on outside lights automatically when movement is sensed, as well as also being able to control the outside lights from the Genius Hub app using IFTTT at sunset and sunrise.

Don’t forget the other reviews from Matt Egan from Tech advisor – full review of the system here.  He has it installed into his own home and he’s lived with it along with his family for many years. Or David Ludlow’s appraisal of the system from Trusted Reviews here.

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Genius Hub Webinar – 01/08/20​

Genius Hub Webinar - 21/08/20 @ 1pm

Tune in at 1pm on 21/08/20 and use this link to set a reminder on YouTube.

If you tuned into our webinars during the lockdown or you have watched them since, you’ll have seen we have embraced this ‘new normal’ of getting our help online and discussing things through a virtual meeting.

We’ve run the webinars on a variety of topics including:

Now we’re looking to find out more about what you’d like us to cover. Here is a link to a new post on the forum where you can add your thoughts on what you’d like us to discuss and help with on the next webinar.

In this next webinar we’ll also be showing you exactly what our new components released this summer and autumn look like. The all new Motion Sensor, new Powered Room Thermostat and the new Electric Relay. These can be used in many new applications and we’ll be discussing them in the next webinar as well as the questions you have.

Don’t forget that we’ve also added some new videos to the website about the individual components to help you understand more about what you may have installed in your property and possibly unlock some features that you may not have already realised that it had.

Tune in at 1pm on 21/08/20 and use this link to set a reminder on YouTube.

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Is your HUB up to date?

Is your HUB up to date?

The latest app and hub software is 5.3.8, and you need this to get the most from your heating this winter. We’ve made a lot of improvements to the firmware which controls the heating and switches, and improvements to the doctor solutions in the app too. These only work if you upgrade both the app on your phone as well as the Genius Hub itself. It takes seconds to upgrade your HUB. 

You will see the update (blue icon) appear within your app if you don’t have the latest firmware on your Genius Hub.

In this app & hub update we’ve created new help videos for all of the most frequently asked questions, and we’ve built these into the app doctor. When you’re in the app doctor you will see videos stepping you through the process, from helping you to add new devices to your Genius Hub to helping you remove a stubborn Genius Radiator Valve from a radiator.

As you know we listen keenly to the feedback we get on the Genius Hub forum (you can access the forum here with your HUB username and password)  and we also run analytics on the support requests that we get through the winter. This all goes to help improve the systems you already have installed into your homes, let properties, offices, schools, hotels to name just a few. 

You have to upgrade your HUB to benefit from these improvements.

We also have full support for some new devices too. The first is our new  Genius Motion Sensor  for more discrete occupancy detection in rooms where you don’t want to add a Genius Room Sensor, second is our new Genius Electric Relay which can be hidden behind a switch or spur to interrupt the electricity supply to something like a light or small heater. All are now fully compatible with the Genius Hub.

Don’t forget your Genius Hub works with Amazon Alexa now and you need the hub firmware 5.3.8 to be able to connect Alexa to your hub.

As always we’re not stopping there and for a full list of what we’re working on short and long term please see our R&D Roadmap and our change log.