How best to set up my Hot Water Schedules

Your hot water setup should suit your household’s needs and strike a balance between comfort and efficiency. This guide explains how to configure your schedule, optimise Homely to meet your needs, and understand the costs and efficiencies of different settings.

Target Temperature

The target temperature setting controls how hot your water will be. However, the higher the temperature you set, the less efficient the heat pump becomes.

Key Points:

• More hot water: Higher temperatures mean more hot water is available at once.

• Efficiency trade-off: Higher temperatures make the heat pump work harder, lowering efficiency.

• Reheating time: It can take between 30 minutes and 2 hours to reheat a full tank

Hot Water Scheduling

Hot water tanks are well insulated, but they still lose a small amount of heat over time, maintaining high temperatures unnecessarily can waste energy. To avoid wasting energy, schedule your hot water to heat only when you need it.

Key Points:

• Energy loss: Keeping water at a high temperature for long periods increases heat loss and energy usage.

• Improved Efficiency: Your heat pump performs better when reheating cooler water only when needed, rather than keeping the water at a high temperature all day.

Guiding Principles

Smart and Standard mode customers  

For customers on a fixed tariff, the key settings to focus on in the app are the target temperature of the hot water tank and the schedule for when hot water is needed. You should set your schedule for the time you are looking to use your hot water and then use the toggles as specified below to preheat the water ahead of these times. Optimising these settings will ensure both comfort and efficiency.

Balance between availability and cost: Maintaining a higher water temperature throughout the day provides greater convenience, ensuring hot water is always available when needed. However, this comes with a slight increase in energy consumption and a reduction in overall efficiency.

Smart+ mode customers

As a Smart+ customer on a time-of-use tariff, Homely can help you maximise savings by scheduling your hot water heating during the cheapest electricity periods. Ideally, we recommend setting your hot water schedule to start after the cheap tariff period ends, rather than during it. This approach helps your system run more efficiently and reduces energy costs. However, we understand that these cheaper periods may not overlap with the times you need hot water. In such cases, it’s important to prioritise having hot water when you need it. To ensure hot water is ready when required, set your schedule for your desired usage time and use the toggles as outlined below to preheat the water in advance.

To upgrade to Smart+ go to the Change your Homely Mode page in Account Management.

Using Recommended Hot Water Schedules

You can now choose from four new recommended schedules in the Homely app:

1. Maximum savings – Designed to keep costs as low as possible without sacrificing essential hot water needs.

2. Ultimate comfort – Prioritises hot water availability throughout the day for maximum convenience.

3. Balanced and budget friendly – A middle ground between savings and comfort, ideal for most households.

4. Let Smart+ do the hard work (Smart+ only) – Uses smart optimisation to give you comfort while still reducing bills over time.

Where to find them

To access these schedules:

• Go to the Hot Water screen in the Homely app.

• Tap Add or Edit a schedule.

  

• Tap Show me to see the list of recommended schedules

Applying and customising a schedule

Each recommended schedule has:

• A detailed description explaining the cost vs comfort benefits.

• An Apply settings button so you can activate it instantly.

Once you’ve applied a recommended schedule, you can still tweak the times and settings to suit your household. However, keep the original guidance in mind—this helps ensure you maintain the intended balance between savings and comfort.

Below is a guide on how to set your schedules and toggles in the Homely system to optimise your hot water production with an indication of their associated savings and comfort levels.