Your Old Schedule Was Built for an Empty House

Most heating schedules are designed around a simple assumption: nobody is in during the day. The thermostat drops to a low setback temperature after the morning rush, stays there until late afternoon, then fires everything up again for the evening. It is a sensible pattern — for a household where everyone leaves at eight and returns at six.

Working from home breaks that assumption completely. If your schedule has not changed since you started spending weekdays at the kitchen table, you are running a heating system that fights your routine all day. The good news is that a smart thermostat is genuinely good at this job, once you tell it what your week actually looks like.

Map Your Real Week Before You Touch the Settings

Before opening the app, spend a few minutes thinking honestly about your week. Most people's schedules are less uniform than they imagine, and a single rigid weekday programme rarely fits.

• Office days. If you go in two or three days a week, those days suit a traditional away-day schedule.
• Home days. These need a comfortable daytime temperature, but only in the rooms you use.
• Meetings and calls. Long stretches sitting still feel colder than moving about, so a call-heavy afternoon often needs a degree more than a busy one.
• Household patterns. School runs, a partner finishing early, a regular exercise class — all worth noting.

Write it down in half-hour blocks. It sounds fussy, but it takes five minutes and it is the difference between a schedule that works and one you override every day.

Choose Sensible Temperatures

Comfort is personal, but the practical range for a heated living or working room is around 18°C to 21°C. Sitting still at a desk, most people find 20°C about right; 21°C if the room is draughty or you feel the cold.

For periods when a room is genuinely empty, a setback of 15°C to 16°C is the sweet spot. It protects against damp and frozen pipes without burning much gas. As a rough rule of thumb, every degree you turn the thermostat down can trim around a tenth off your heating bill, so the gap between your comfort temperature and your setback temperature is where the savings live.

Resist the temptation to set 23°C to "warm the house up faster". It does not work. The boiler heats at the same rate regardless, and you simply overshoot and waste money.

Build the Working-Day Schedule

A typical home-working weekday might look like this:

• 06:30–08:00 — warm-up. Bring the house to comfort temperature before you start. Most smart thermostats learn how long your system takes and start early to hit the target on time; expect anything from 30 to 90 minutes depending on your radiators and insulation.
• 08:00–12:30 — comfort. Hold your chosen temperature in the rooms you occupy. If you have smart radiator valves, this is where they earn their keep.
• 12:30–13:30 — a short dip. If you go out for a walk or eat in the kitchen, a one-degree drop is fine. Avoid deep setbacks of less than two or three hours, though — reheating a cooled house often costs more than maintaining it.
• 13:30–17:30 — comfort again. The afternoon stretch is when a slightly higher setting pays off if you are stationary.
• 17:30–22:30 — evening comfort. Shift the focus to the living room and kitchen.
• 22:30 onwards — setback. Drop to 15–16°C overnight, and let the schedule take over.

If you have a heat pump, flip the logic. Heat pumps prefer long, low, steady runs over short bursts, so keep setbacks shallow — two degrees rather than five — and give them a longer lead time in the morning.

Heat the Rooms You Are In, Not the Whole House

One of the biggest inefficiencies in a home-working setup is heating bedrooms, spare rooms and hallways that nobody uses between nine and five. Smart radiator valves let you close those rooms down individually, while the thermostat keeps the main living space steady.

Do keep one radiator open in any room with a thermostat or a pipe run that could freeze, and never block a radiator with a desk, sofa or drying rack. Heavy curtains drawn across a radiator push heat straight out of the window.

Review, Adjust and Let It Learn

Give any new schedule a fortnight before judging it. Your thermostat needs time to learn how your home heats and cools, and you need time to notice which hours feel wrong.

Then make small corrections. If the office feels cold at nine, move the morning warm-up half an hour earlier rather than raising the target temperature. If the house is still warm at bedtime, bring the setback forward. Check the energy report in your app monthly and look for the days that spike — they usually reveal a schedule that no longer matches your life.

Finally, revisit the whole thing when the seasons turn. A schedule that works in a mild October will be wrong in a frosty January, and a sunny spring afternoon may need no heating at all. Twenty minutes of tweaking twice a year is usually enough to keep a home-working household comfortable without paying to heat empty rooms.