When summer is over and you find yourself feeling cold, having a heater is a great appliance to warm up your home. But heaters use lots of electricity, which means a high electricity bill and more damage to the environment. AENO have sent over their Premium Eco Smart Heater, which offers energy saving and is environmentally friendly thanks to its infrared heating capabilities. Should this be added to your next purchase? Let’s take a closer look at what you need to know!
Design:
The AENO Premium Eco Smart Heater features an aesthetic and minimalistic design, to blend into any environment. Gone are the days when your heater was ugly and chunky and stood out. The heater is made of a 11mm Ultra clear enamelled tempered glass panel with a gloss finish. The glass panel is available in either black or white. This panel is either mounted to the legs and placed on the floor or mounted on the wall/ceiling. The panel measures 1000 x 365 x 11mm, so while it is very narrow, it is pretty long. Sitting on the floor it will need some space as it sits horizontally whereas if you mount it on the wall, it can be positioned vertically. It is even possible to mount the heater onto your ceiling, which is something I have never seen before but this would be a great way to mount the heater should your wall space be limited. It is no wonder it was a reddot winner in 2023!
When it comes to physical buttons, all you get is a power button located on the side of the unit. The rest of the controls are all on your smartphone via the AENO app, but more on this later.
Setting the heater up:
The heater comes in an Eco-craft recycled packaging box with biodegradable plastic. There are two ways to place the heater in your home. You can either use the anodized sandblasted aluminium legs with rubber feet to stand the heater on the floor, allowing you to move it around as needed. Or you can attach the wall bracket to secure the heater onto a wall/ceiling. To set the heater up, you simply need to remove the glass panel from the cardboard box, choose which leg option you will be going with, and grab the embossed bolts. Whichever option you choose, no tools are needed when it comes to attaching the glass panel to the legs or wall bracket. This is thanks to the embossed bolts which are easy to tighten by hand. There is also a template provided for drilling the brackets to a wall, should you opt to do so.
How it works:
The AENO Premium Eco Smart Heater makes use of infrared heating technology to heat objects in its path and air, without drying out the air or blowing air around. Think of infrared like the sun. The sun heats people and objects around them. This method of heating is actually far more efficient as it is able to quickly reach the surfaces of furniture and walls around you, making them radiate heat to warm you up. A conventional heater will first heat the air, causing you to breathe in hot air and feel uncomfortable. Breathing in hot air can also make you sick. An infrared heater also doesn’t produce any smells from the heating element.
The heater has a max power rating of 700W. This max power can be reached in an average of 3 minutes, far less than conventional heaters. With a low power consumption of 150-watt hours to 700-watt hours, less electricity is needed to heat up a room. And the heater is able to heat up a room with a max size of 30 square meters. An infrared heater can also be up to 40% more efficient than a similarly specked conventional heater. You can adjust the temperature of the panel, from 60C to 125C while also setting the desired room temperature. Doing so allows you to use less electricity, depending on your heating needs. So for example, if you make the panel 125C and the room temperature 26 degrees, your room will be warmed up much quicker than if you set the room temperature to 26 but the panel only to 60C.
By default, the panel will heat up to its maximum temperature of 125C. Via the app, this can be adjusted to a minimum of 60C. This allows you to reduce energy consumption and also ensures that the panel does not get extremely hot if you have kids or animals around, and are worried about them touching the panel.
The heater is mostly operated from your smartphone over WiFI, which means it is a smart heater. Using either the AENO app or the Smart Life app, you can perform a range of functions for the heater, whether you are at home or not. You can turn on/off the heater, set the target room temperature, the panel temperature, activate the child lock, set notifications, see the status of the heater, set the heater to go on a schedule, set the timer and see your energy consumption.
The heater runs on two modes, either Constant heating or Smart heating. The default option upon opening the app turns the heater on and indefinitely heats the room. In Constant heating, the panel temperature setting is used to heat up your room at a constant rate. In Smart heating, you can set the target room temperature (0C to 40C) and the heater will heat your room until the target temperature is reached. When the correct temperature has been reached, the panel turns off, turning back on when the temperature drops. This is a more efficient way to run the heater.
The heater is compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google, so you can turn the heater on/off and change the temperature using voice commands.
The heater also offers hypoallergenic heating for your well-being. It is silent, odourless, there is no air blowing, it won’t dry the air and make you sick and it does not burn oxygen!
If you hate arriving home to a cold room, then this is the perfect heater for you. What I often found myself doing is turning on the heater from the app, just before arriving home. So while I was freezing outside, I arrived home to a warm room. Obviously, you can set the heater on a schedule as well!
Safety:
Should the heater be tipped over, the rollover sensor will automatically turn off the panel and play a sound to alert you. This is a great safety feature as we all know how quickly accidents can happen. And a heater lying on the carpet does not sound like a good idea to me.
How effective is the heater?:
I have a large bedroom and the heater definitely made a difference. I left the heater next to my bed and sat at my desk a lot, which is about 1 metre or so away, and I could feel the warmth in my room. I often kept the panel temperature to 95C and the target room temperature to 24C. In this setting, I found that my room temperature was 22C. If I wanted to get the extra warmth up to 24C, I would need to increase the panel temperature. I never had to do this as I found my room to be adequately warm. This also ensured that the panel was not extremely hot should I or my dog brush against it.
Can it be used during load shedding?:
So this is an interesting one for me, as usually, you cannot use any appliance with a heating element, during load-shedding, if you are running an inverter, as appliances that heat usually use too many Watts. I am running a 3Kva inverter with two gel batteries. Usually, if the aircon is on and the food warmer, our inverter goes crazy and we have to turn these appliances off. But with the Aeno Premium Eco Smart heater, I was still able to run it on the inverter during load-shedding with other appliances, without using too many Watts. Yes, it did add a bit of a load to the inverter, but it wasn’t too much for the inverter to handle. Also, the fact that I can keep the panel temperature down, made a huge difference too!
Energy efficiency:
At the time of writing, we have assumed the cost of 1 kWh to be R1.8237. Looking at my stats having run the heater now and then over 6 days, I used up 8.97 kWh (749W of Power) which equals R16.36. Given that the heater is 700W, and this is smaller than some of the conventional heaters which have a much higher wattage, you will be saving electricity and the environment compared to other heaters such as a fin-type heater. Compared to the standard wall panel heaters which we often see, these are about 400W, which is not enough to warm up a room. I heated up my room overnight in Smart mode and used up 5,49kWh (R10), which is not bad at all.
Where to buy and Price:
Available online from Makro and Takealot as well as available in the following Gauteng stores: IT Stoneridge, IT Lambton, IT Parkmeadows and Cherry on It in Rustenburg. You are looking at just under R5000 for the heater. While this is more than double a conventional heater, you will be saving loads of electricity throughout the use of the heater. And not to mention the ability to heat up your room faster and all the nifty smart features which you will have!
Verdict:
The AENO Premium Eco Smart Heater will be a favourite in your home. It can blend into any environment with its sleek design and glass panel. The ability to control it via your smartphone makes it easy to operate without needing to get up or be next to the heater. The smart features remove the worry of forgetting to turn the heater on or off. And the ability to set the panel temperature and room temperature to get your room just like you like it, while keeping your electricity usage down, is the cherry on top. For those looking for a heater that won’t intrude on your space, I recommend this heater!
The products featured in this review were provided on a trade exchange basis.
