By Jason Snell

March 11, 2024 8:50 AM PT

I put my dumb space heater on HomeKit

My workspace is what is apparently called an “unconditioned space,” in that it’s a lighly insulated garage with no access to my home’s central heating system. In the winter that’s an issue, so I’ve resorted to using an oil-filled electric space heater to make the space habitable.

Those Delonghi heaters are pretty great at quiet, sustained heat, but the first one I bought used an old-style analog timer to turn itself on and off, which meant that it ticked constantly, and that made me very unhappy. I bought another one that offered a digital timer, but it couldn’t tell the difference between the weekend and weekdays, meaning I frequently heated the garage on a day I wasn’t working, or—even worse—opened the door to discover I hadn’t turned the timer back and the place was unacceptably cold.

After a few years of wrestling with these issues, I finally decided to see if I could solve the issue without buying more heaters. Using a smart outlet didn’t work—when turned on after an extended power outage, my heater is nonfunctional.

Instead, I bought a $26 Wi-Fi infrared blaster, taught it how to speak the language of my heater’s included (and fairly useless!) infrared remote, and now I was in business. (Of course, I had to do some work to get the heater and the IR remote to see one another, but after a few trial-and-error attempts, I got that part locked down.)

Unfortunately, my IR blaster doesn’t support HomeKit—but, you guessed it, there’s a Homebridge plug-in for that. Once I had my heater in the Home app, I could use Automations to turn the heater on automatically very early in the morning (it takes hours for the heater to work its magic) and then turn itself off in the afternoon.

This worked pretty well, but on a warmer morning, the heater would heat things up a bit too fast, and while the Delonghi heater does have its own thermostat, it’s never struck me as being particularly reliable. But I do have a $35 Wi-Fi thermometer in my office, and it works with HomeKit! So I created an additional automation that automatically turns off the Delonghi heater whenever the garage gets above 70 degrees.

I’ve been reluctant to write about this set-up because, frankly, a lot of smart home set-ups don’t stand the test of time. But this is the second cold season that I’ve automated the heating through HomeKit, and it’s worked solidly every time. When I go on vacation, I turn off the one early-morning automation, and the heater never goes on. I just have to remember to turn it back on when I get home.

Maybe someday I’ll find a Wi-Fi-controllable space heater that I like. Until then, this one does the job just fine.

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