My latest new smart home device is this little 1800W ceramic heater from Olsen & Smith (sponsored link). It’s only around 20 centimetres tall, but is able to output a decent amount of heat quite quickly.
We bought it because our ten-year-old’s room is consistently colder than the rest of the house. I suspect it’s because the radiator in there is under-powered, and hidden away behind a cover, but it’s typically 2°C colder than our bedroom next door. So far, our mitigations against this have been extra blankets on the bed and a hot water bottle, but I decided that we needed to do more than just keep the bed warm.
Using the ceramic heater
This ceramic heater is designed to be placed on a desk, or similar – it’s not really suitable as a free-standing heater as it’s quite short. It comes with a 1.5 metre cord.
There are a series of touch buttons on the top to control the heater. It has a digital thermostat, so you can set a target temperature and have it heat up to that level. There are four heat modes: low, medium, high and eco, which determine the power output. Low drops it down to 900 watts, and high uses the full 1800 watts of power. Meanwhile, eco mode automatically adjusts the power output to maintain the target temperature. It also includes a built-in timer, allowing it to automatically switch off after up to 12 hours.
It’s very quiet – it’s stated to run at between 28 and 56 decibells. I’m partially deaf, so I’m not the best judge of how noisy something is, but I could barely hear it. It’s certainly much quieter than our air conditioning unit that we use in summer, and quieter than a typical desk fan turned up to full speed.
In terms of its effectiveness, the heater seemed to warm the room up pretty quickly, as measured by its own thermostat. I have a separate ThermoPro thermometer in the room which measured a smaller but meaningful increase in temperature, but the heater isn’t pointing towards it.
Smart features
The ceramic heater uses Tuya as its smart home platform. As regular readers will know, I’m not a fan of Tuya, but I accept that it’s simple to set up, especially if you don’t have lots of other smart devices. Indeed, on opening the Tuya app, Tuya auto-discovered my new heater and asked to configure it. The app controls are easy enough to use, and mirror the controls on the unit.
The key reason why I wanted to buy a smart ceramic heater was to be able to automate it in Home Assistant. Our ten-year-old tends to only use their bedroom for sleeping, so the heater doesn’t need to be on much. Thankfully, when I reloaded the Tuya integration in Home Assistant, it appeared as a climate device. Home Assistant’s controls are limited to setting the target temperature, and turning it on and off; the controls for setting timers and heating power aren’t exposed. But being able to turn it on and off with an automation is possible, and so I have it come on around an hour before bedtime to warm the room up, and then switch off.
A peculiarity with this ceramic heater is that you can link it with Alexa via the Tuya app, but not Google Home. Which is odd; every other Tuya device I have owned supported both. Thankfully, I could add it to Google Home via Home Assistant, so our ten-year-old can use voice control with it.
A bargain
Finally, I want to highlight that this little ceramic heater cost just £20 from Amazon. There are a few cheaper ceramic heaters, some of which simply plug straight into the wall. But they tend to have lower power output, and aren’t smart. As much as I’d rather have something with local control, a smart ceramic heater for £20 is excellent value for money.