One of our favourite smart thermostats is on sale for less than £65

Here's the cheapest way to get smart heating

We’ve spotted a great deal on the Hive Thermostat Mini – one of our top-rated smart thermostats.

The Thermostat Mini has all the features you need to run your home heating conveniently and stop you wasting heat. And, as the initial outlay is so much lower than rivals, you can start making potential savings sooner. Hive’s Thermostat Mini is usually available for an already budget-friendly £79, but the current 20% discount means you can buy it now for just £63.20.

Get the deal from Hive

This offer is available until 9 January. Bear in mind that if you don’t have any existing Hive products, you’ll also need to buy the Hive Hub, which brings the price up to £111.20 – which is still a great price for a smart heating system. Professional installation, from a certified British Gas engineer, will cost an additional £79.20. You can choose the best option for you when you order from Hive.

If you’re not sure if this is the right smart heating system for you, read our full review to find out more. To summarise, we’d recommend it for a flat or smaller home. But we have options for larger homes in our round-up of the best smart thermostats we’ve tested.

Here are some of the Thermostat Mini’s best features:

• Geolocation: get an alert to remind you to turn off the heat when you leave the house
• Open window detection: heat your house, not your garden
• Boost mode: need a quick heat boost? This function switches on the heat – but only for an hour
• See your daily heat use (monthly and yearly data, and cost in £, are only available with a Hive Heating Plus subscription, which is £19.95 per year)
• Schedule heating for each day of the week
• Schedule hot water
• Frost protection and holiday mode
• Compatible with Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, Siri Shortcuts and IFTTT

There are a couple of things to bear in mind. A big change from the earlier Hive Active Heating thermostat is that much of the thermostat’s functionality has been shifted into the app. You can switch your heating on and off using the touchscreen on the thermostat itself, and change the target temperature, but scheduling and most of the other settings are only available in the app.

You should also note that a single Hive thermostat will only let you choose one temperature for the whole house. It’s not a multi-zone system. But there is a workaround. If you buy Hive’s smart radiator valves – which you can easily fit on your radiators yourself, in place of the existing valves – you can control the temperature to that radiator itself and set a specific heating schedule. This makes them handy to have in less-used rooms, which you might want to heat less often than the rest of the house.

Smart radiator valves have another great feature: instead of the vague 1-5 numbering system, they’ll display the temperature to which the radiator is set.

Hive’s smart valves are also on sale at the moment – for £47.20, instead of their regular price of £59. You can buy them from Hive.