Precision Temperature Control

When it comes to designing electronic products and solutions we’ve never been captive to convention. It was clear that the traditional thermostats wasted a lot of energy, unnecessarily inflating energy bills, so we began working on finding a better way of controlling temperature.

How does a standard thermostat work?

Many thermostats have a switching differential (hysteresis) of around 1.5°C. This means they switch heaters on at full power until the room reaches the target temperature, and then switch them off until the room has cooled to the target temperature minus 1.5°C. As a result the room temperature cycles up and down by at least 1.5°C, probably more because of the time it takes for heat to get from the heater to the thermostat.

Even a 1°C change in temperature is noticeable. So if you find 20°C comfortable but begin to feel cold at 19°C or 18°C, you’d have to set a normal thermostat to 22°C to feel comfortable all the time – a real waste of energy because for much of the time the room is hotter than it needs to be.

Celsia is different

Turning a thermostat down by just 1°C saves considerable energy and expense. The Celsia system lets you do just that because we’ve eliminated the temperature cycle altogether using technologies in both the heater PCB and the thermostat.

The Celsia System is designed to maintain room temperatures to within a fraction of a °C.

How? In our heater PCBs we don’t simply switch the heater on or off, we modulate power – for most heaters all the way from 0% to 100%. We use a combination of methods to achieve this depending on the configuration of the heater including selective element switching, surface temperature control and chrono-proportional control.

In the thermostat itself we use ‘proportional control’ which means that as the room approaches the target temperature, we start to reduce the power output from the heaters. For instance if the target temperature is 20°C and the actual is 19.9°C, the power demand will be reduced to about 25%. If the temperature rises further it will be turned down more, if it falls it will be turned up more.