Smart Home Control for Heat Pumps UK: Apps, Automations and Savings

Heat pumps are already far more efficient than gas boilers, but pairing them with the right smart home technology can push efficiency even further — and make the system significantly easier to live with. Whether you’ve just had a heat pump installed or you’re looking to get more from an existing one, here’s what the smart home toolkit looks like in 2026.

Understanding Heat Pump Efficiency Before You Automate

Before diving into apps and automations, it’s worth understanding how heat pumps behave differently from gas boilers. Heat pumps work best when running at low, steady flow temperatures over long periods — not the short blasts of high heat a gas boiler uses. Overriding this with aggressive smart home schedules can actually reduce efficiency. To get a solid baseline understanding, it helps to look at heat pump running costs in the UK and what drives them up or down.

Smart Thermostats Compatible with Heat Pumps

Not all smart thermostats work well with heat pumps. The main options in the UK are:

• tado°: One of the best heat pump options. tado° supports OpenTherm and includes weather compensation, geofencing and integration with Octopus Agile tariffs via IFTTT or direct API.
• Nest Learning Thermostat: Works with most heat pumps via a relay connection, and learns your schedule automatically. Less granular than tado° for heat pump-specific settings but very polished to use.
• Hive Active Heating: Compatible with most UK heat pumps and integrates well with Hive’s wider ecosystem. The app is reliable, though it lacks some of the advanced tariff-aware features of competitors.

For a broader look at smart thermostats, including compatibility guides, our dedicated review covers the full range.

Weather-Compensated Heating Automations

Weather compensation adjusts your heat pump’s flow temperature based on the outdoor temperature — colder outside means slightly higher flow temperature to maintain comfort. Many modern heat pumps support this natively, but smart thermostats like tado° can apply it via their weather data even on systems that don’t have built-in weather compensation.

In Home Assistant, you can build this as a custom automation using the Met Office or OpenWeatherMap integration: when outdoor temp drops below 5°C, increase target flow temperature by 2°C. This keeps the system running efficiently without you touching anything.

Scheduling Around Electricity Tariffs

Since heat pumps run on electricity, the time of day you heat your home matters financially — especially on tariffs like Octopus Agile or Octopus Cosy, where prices vary by the half hour.

• Octopus Agile: Prices can drop to near zero (or go negative) during overnight wind surplus periods. Pre-heating your home to 21°C at 02:00–04:00 and letting it drift down through the morning can cut bills significantly.
• Octopus Cosy: Designed specifically for heat pump users, with cheap rates from 09:00–11:00 and 16:00–19:00. Set your heat pump to do its main heating work during these windows.

Home Assistant has a native Octopus Energy integration that exposes current and forecast tariff rates as sensors — these can directly trigger heating automations without any manual input.

Integrating Solar Generation

If you have solar panels alongside your heat pump, the combination is powerful. During high solar generation periods, you can instruct your heat pump to run slightly harder — warming the house and hot water cylinder while electricity is effectively free. GivEnergy and SolarEdge integrations in Home Assistant make it straightforward to build automations that trigger when solar export exceeds, say, 2 kW.

What to Avoid When Automating a Heat Pump

• Don’t set large temperature setbacks: Dropping from 21°C to 16°C overnight and then asking the heat pump to recover quickly is inefficient. A 1–2°C setback is fine; anything larger works against the heat pump’s strengths.
• Don’t use aggressive boost modes: If your thermostat offers a “boost” that raises flow temperature significantly, use it sparingly. It forces the heat pump into less efficient operation.
• Don’t automate hot water too aggressively: Many heat pumps run a daily pasteurisation cycle (Legionella protection) at a set time. Check this isn’t conflicting with your automations.

With the right thermostat and a few well-chosen automations, a smart-controlled heat pump can achieve a COP meaningfully higher than the same system running on a basic timer — and the bills will reflect it.