AENO Premium Eco Smart Heater review

You’d be forgiven for not knowing much about the AENO Premium Eco Smart Heater, or even the AENO brand in general. A smart appliance manufacturer, it has been quietly going about its business making smart tech for heating, air treatment, and even kitchen products like blenders, and soup makers. Try as you might to resist the allure of smart tech, it’s here to stay, and the Eco Smart Heater is a great way to keep warm this winter.

At around £239.99, the AENO Premium Eco Smart Heater comes in both black and white colourways, and when taking delivery of it, you might think you’ve been sent a new OLED television by mistake. The slim, unassuming packaging holds a well wrapped heater that itself is bordering on what I’d refer to as “wafer thin”. Unlike standard radiators, oil or central heating based, the AENO is essentially a glass panel that heats your room quickly, but crucially, efficiently, and all at an 11mm width.

With features you’d consider standard, such as fall and tilt sensors (so it turns off it, for some reason it falls over), the idea behind the “Eco” part of this Smart Heater is that you tell it the temperature you want it to get to, and it maintains, rather than sustains. What this means in practice is that if you set the auto room temperature to 20 degrees Celsius, it might drop the heat of the actual heater itself, but that’s because it doesn’t need to be constantly pumping out that level of heat to get the room to temperature. This means you are never wasting energy pumping out a consistent heat, and instead, the in built sensor will work out the room warmth, and adjust accordingly.

There are some lovely touches with the AENO Eco Smart Heater. For example, the packaging is entirely eco friendly, but it also comes with fixings for all manner of setups. If you want, you can just plonk it onto the easy to fit stands, but it also includes fixings for if you want to attach it to the wall either horizontally or vertically, and even the ceiling (though it does suggest getting a trained person to fit it that way). Within minutes I had attached the legs and got it powered up, and you’re then quickly onto the smart part of the device, and it’s time to grab your phone.

If there’s any major complaint about the heater, it’s here. I’ve noticed this with other smart tech brands before, but there’s a distinct lack of support for 5ghz networks when it comes to setting up the WiFi. This actually posted a unique problem for me. Since it’d be heating an outbuilding, and the building in question is exclusively set up for 5ghz via a mesh network. Luckily, the WiFi in the heater is good enough it could reach the 2.4ghz network nearby, so all was not lost. But to be clear: this isn’t a case of “fiddle enough and you’ll get on your 5ghz network”. No, it requires a 2.4ghz signal. This caused some dropouts at random times, and the app would notify me of this happening. Again, this is my setup that’s the issue here, and hopefully any potential purchasers will know it requires this type of network.

Once on your network, though, it’s easy as pie. You can switch it on and off, and will even get a handy notification to remind you not to touch the glass, as it’s hot. You can set up schedule times for the heater to activate, or just leave it on to keep the constant heat via the aforementioned ambient room sensor. It’s lovely to be able to warm a room up before you go into it, and as the temperature has dropped here, it’s been warm enough to still wear a t-shirt, without needing to set the heater to silly heats.

It’s worth noting the AENO Premium Eco Smart Heater is designed to heat the room, not the person. The medium size panel means you want it to be kicking out the heating into a room, and not into the back of a sofa, or other furniture. Give it room to do its work and it’ll warm the room up nicely, while not damaging your bank balance too much. There’s no smell like an oil heater, no air being blown like with a fan, and no noise either: you wouldn’t know this thing was even present if not for the warmth.

Solving an aesthetic problem while being wallet friendly on the electric bill is a major boon, and there are even physical buttons on the right side of the panel if you don’t want to get involved with apps and smart tech. That said, you’ll be missing out on the coolest features, and the app keeps a log of when the heater is powered on, and even how much energy it’s using. Integration with Amazon’s Alexa and the like means you can even bark an order at your robotic friend and get your room warmed up that way, too. Designed for rooms up to 30 meters squared, it’s hard to find too much fault with the AENO Premium Eco Smart Heater, as long as you haven’t got a peculiar network setup like me. It’s replaced my oil heater, and shall hopefully keep me snug as a bug in a rug for what’s looking like a pretty cold Winter. Highly recommended.