Upgrade · Heat · the controls · BER file 26 Sep 2026 · checked 8 Sep 2026
Heating controls: SEAI pays €700 towards the timer, thermostats and valves
Heating controls are the timer, the thermostats and the valves. SEAI pays €700 towards them, against a typical price of €3,000 for a semi-detached house (SEAI, SEAI H1 2026). They don't stop heat leaving the house: they stop you paying to heat rooms and hours you don't use.
A wall thermostat: one of the controls the grant pays towards, with the timer and the radiator valves.
Overview of Netatmo Thermostat in Michle, Prague · Jiří Sedláček · CC BY-SA 4.0
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€700
The grant, the same for every type of home
SEAI heating controls · read 7 Sep 2026
SEAI rule23%
Of SEAI's typical semi-D price paid by the grant
€700 of €3,000 · SEAI H1 2026
Published figure€3,000
SEAI's typical price, semi-detached house
SEAI median costs · SEAI H1 2026
Published figureUpdated · grants checked · BER file · prices SEAI H1 2026 · How we know · Corrections
Where this sits · the heat chain
The heating only puts back what the house loses. A heat pump works best when the house loses less.
- Fabricwalls, roof, floor, windows
- Airdraughts and ventilation
- Heatheat pump or boiler, radiators, controls
- Usebills, comfort, the BER
- The idea behind itFabric first: the heat-loss line
- You are hereHeating controls
- Next questionHow much does SEAI pay towards heating controls?
The heating controls grant covers 23% of a typical semi-D job
What SEAI's grant pays against SEAI's typical price, semi-detached house. SEAI rule
The heating controls grant covers 23% of a typical semi-D job
Against SEAI’s median costs, grants cover up to 87% of a heat pump and 82% of cavity wall insulation, but 23% of heating controls and 19% of solar panels.
Each bar is the job's median cost for a semi-D (SEAI, January to June 2026); the filled part is the grant on the individual route. Heat pump: €10,500 for the unit, €2,000 for the heating system and, since 29 Sep 2026, a €2,000 boiler scrappage grant: €14,500 of €16,741, or 75% without the scrappage grant, which needs an oil, gas, solid-fuel or storage-heating system removed.
Sources: SEAI grant pages, transcribed in pipeline/inputs/grants_2026.csv, 3 Oct 2026 · SEAI, Median costs of individual energy upgrades, Jan-Jun 2026 (H1 2026), 2026
The numbers
| Job | Grant | SEAI median cost | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heat pump | €14,500 | €16,741 | 87% |
| Cavity wall insulation | €1,300 | €1,585 | 82% |
| Attic insulation | €1,500 | €2,101 | 71% |
| Windows | €3,000 | €7,110 | 42% |
| Internal wall insulation | €3,500 | €9,843 | 36% |
| External wall insulation | €6,000 | €23,219 | 26% |
| Heating controls | €700 | €3,000 | 23% |
| Solar panels | €1,800 | €9,500 | 19% |
What heating controls are, and why they save anything at all
Heating controls are the timer, the thermostats and the valves. They decide when the heating runs and which rooms get it, and they save money by not heating an empty house.
What actually gets fitted
A day's work by a plumber and an electrician, and afterwards the heating does what you tell it. The pieces are dull and they matter.
The house gets split into at least two zones that run separately — the radiators and the hot water — and in a bigger house you can split upstairs from downstairs as well. Every radiator gets a valve with a number on it, so a spare bedroom can sit at 15 while the sitting room sits at 20. A timer that holds a full week goes in, so Saturday isn't Tuesday. And the boiler gets wired so it only fires when something is actually calling for heat.
If there is an old copper cylinder in the hot press, it gets a timer, a thermostat and a lagging jacket at the same time.
Compared with a typical old set-up
| What's often there now | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Zones | one — heat the water, heat the house, or both | at least two, run separately |
| Room by room | one thermostat in the hall, or none | a valve with a number on every radiator |
| The timer | on, off, and a boost button | a week's schedule, different every day |
| Hot water in summer | fire the whole boiler for one tank | heat the tank on its own, to a set temperature |
| The boiler | runs whenever the timer says | runs only when something calls for heat |
| Empty rooms | heated with the rest | turned down and left |
SEAI put the gain at up to 20% of the energy the system uses. That is a share of the bill, so the money it's worth depends on how dear your heat is now: a unit of heat costs about 14.4c on gas and 18.0c on oil.
Grant €700 regardless of property type. SEAI median cost €3,000 for a semi-detached and €1,745 for an apartment, so the grant covers a fifth of a typical job. Home must have been built and occupied before 2011. Not available alongside a heat pump system grant. Amounts verified 2026-10-03.
Where the saving comes from
Nothing here makes heat any cheaper. Controls save by making less of it.
Most of the waste in an old system is heat that went somewhere nobody was: a whole house warmed to get one room comfortable, a full tank heated in July for one shower, the heating running for an hour after everyone left. Zones and valves end that. So does the boiler interlock, which stops a boiler cycling on and off to keep itself warm when no radiator is asking for anything.
It is the cheapest thing on this list after the attic, and the only one where what you do afterwards changes the answer. Set every valve to maximum and put the timer on all day and you'll have spent the money for nothing.
No published cell on this site has heating controls in its cheapest grant-eligible route to a B, so no modelled saving or repayment time is shown for it here — the model reaches the target more cheaply by other means, and it does not model how a household uses a timer. SEAI's "up to 20%" is their figure, read on seai.ie 8 September 2026.
Questions people ask
- How do I know if my controls are poor?
- SEAI have a short test. Can you heat the hot water without turning on the radiators? Can you turn on the heating without heating the water? Can you set different times on different days? Is there a separate thermostat on the cylinder? A no to any of those means there is something to gain here.
- Is this just a smart thermostat?
- No, and this is where people get caught. An app on your phone that turns the same old system on and off is not what the grant is for. The work is zones — space heating and hot water controlled separately, at least two of them — plus thermostatic valves on the radiators and a timer that can hold a week's schedule. The app is optional.
- Can I get this and a heat pump?
- Not on the individual grants. SEAI say the controls grant is not available if you are applying for, or have already claimed, a heat pump system grant — a heat pump comes with its own controls. If you are going the whole-house route through a One Stop Shop, controls are part of that package instead.
How we know
- Ratings: From SEAI's BER Research Tool (files of 8 Sep 2026 and 26 Sep 2026): certificates for homes sold or let, and every certificate for houses built before 2011. A BER is a standard calculation, not a meter reading.
- One job at a time: Our model reworks each certificate with one job done, on the BER file of 26 Sep 2026. Its heat loss matches SEAI's own figure to a median ratio of 1.00. A group figure, not an assessment of your house.
- Grants and prices: SEAI's grant pages, read on the dates shown, and SEAI's median costs of individual upgrades for 2025. A median is a middle price, not a quote.
Sources
seai.ie · heating controls · seai.ie · heating upgrade grants · seai.ie · Median costs of individual energy upgrades
Found a mistake? Every fix is dated on Corrections. Method in full: How we know.
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Updated · grants checked · BER file · prices SEAI H1 2026 · How we know · Corrections