Mill WiFi Portable 1200W
Price: €179
Website: https://www.harveynorman.ieOpens in new window
Where To Buy: Harvey Norman
Spring may be here (or on the way, depending on your interpretation of the calendar) but the weather is still firmly stuck on winter settings. That can call for extra measures in the home heating department; with the increase in the cost of almost everything, that may hit your entire home budget.
Reworking your heating system so it only heats the areas you need can be expensive and time consuming. So it is not entirely unreasonable to look for a smarter way to heat small spaces in your home.
Enter the Mill WiFi Portable 1200W heater, a wifi-connected smart heater that promises to use less energy and keeps an eye on consumption so you can keep close track of your energy bills.
It is powerful enough to heat a single room, so you don’t have to kick in the heating while you are working from home, and it has smart features to help prevent you using energy needlessly. It can also be easily transported around your home if needs be.
At first glance it looks like a regular heater, small and unobtrusive, with a few buttons and dials and a display that shows the current temperature target. And you can use it like that if you want, but add in the Mill app and you have more control over the device, regardless of where you are in the world. All it needs is to be plugged in.
Using the Mill app and your wifi connection, you can turn it on and off remotely, keep an eye on power consumption and set schedules and temperatures for day and night use.
The heater can even detect when a window is open, noting a drop in temperature, and adjusting the settings accordingly so, to quote an oft-used Irish parent phrase, you aren’t heating the whole housing estate.
[ How smart technology can help cut your energy billsOpens in new window ]
Its smart features include predictive heating, which uses an algorithm that will look at the current temperature of the room, the temperature you want to achieve, and decide when it needs to turn on to achieve your desired temperature at the schedule you set. That means rather than switching on at the same time every day, the heater becomes more dynamic, sort of like a mini Nest thermostat that gets smarter the more it learns about your room.
If you have a few of the devices, you can set one up for individual control, which means that it will follow the target temperature you set for it rather than the entire room or home control.
It does, however, mean another app, which is going to add to the clutter on your phone. It is Matter compatible, which adds in support for Google Home and other voice assistants, and also removes the element of uncertainty around whether it will retain its smart control features in the long term.
However, Matter is not a complete solution. Annoyingly, hooking it into a Matter enabled system means you lose access to certain features offered by the Mill app. That includes the open window detection, weekly schedules, and statistics for power consumption.
That is where Matter fails a little; while I want everything to work happily together, I don’t want to lose extra features to get that. So the trade-off is voice control or extra features – in which case I can live without the voice control.
Good
Easy to set up and powerful enough to heat the average-sized room, the Mill Wifi Portable heater is a cost effective way to heat a room without pushing up the heating bill for the entire house.
The smart features mean there is little danger of forgetting about the heater and leaving it turned on; it will automatically cut out when it reaches a set temperature, and you can always log in to the app and double check that you have turned it off if you are unsure.
The heater is Matter enabled, so you can add voice integration with your chosen home assistant.
Bad
Using the Matter integration means you will lose access to the Mill app, and with it some of the smart features of the heater, including open window detection. There are ways around some of these limitations, but unless you are reasonably sure that you can replicate the features after enabling Matter, you might not want to take the risk.
Everything else
There is a child lock, which disables all the physical buttons apart from the main power switch, and the device’s surface doesn’t heat up to uncomfortable levels.
The verdict
A smart, simple heater that comes in handy until the weather turns for the better.