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Win­ter is com­ing, which means it’s time to think about how we will warm our­selves if it sud­den­ly turns cold at home. We will be helped: a blan­ket, hot choco­late and a heater. But you can’t just go and buy it, because there are so many of them and we are talk­ing not only about the appear­ance, but also about the prin­ci­ples of oper­a­tion. Oil radi­a­tors, fan heaters, elec­tric con­vec­tors, infrared heaters, mikather­mic heaters serve the same pur­pose — to heat the room, but their prin­ci­ple of oper­a­tion is dif­fer­ent. Let’s get acquaint­ed with the last type, as the newest and this class will be rep­re­sent­ed by Polaris PMH 2120 Wi-Fi IQ Home with the abil­i­ty to con­trol via the appli­ca­tion, as well as voice assis­tants Alice and Marusya.

Specifications

Packaging, appearance and equipment

The device comes in a mas­sive, but typ­i­cal box for this kind of devices. It is made of thick card­board.

It depicts the hero of the review in col­or, his char­ac­ter­is­tics, chips, among which, of course, Wi-Fi and the abil­i­ty to be part of a smart home, and there­fore con­trol from a smart­phone and voice, but more on that lat­er. Inside, we are greet­ed by legs with rollers, as well as foam-pro­tect­ed cor­ners. Let’s take the heater out of the box and take a clos­er look at it.

In its design, the PMH 2120 Wi-Fi IQ Home heater is sim­i­lar to most rep­re­sen­ta­tives of this kind of devices, whether it is an elec­tric con­vec­tor or a mikather­mic heater. But the dif­fer­ences are always in the details. The heater from Polaris looks nice enough, at least as far as the word is gen­er­al­ly applied to a heater. We will install the legs first of all, so that it is eas­i­er to han­dle it.

The work sur­faces, and this is pri­mar­i­ly the sides, are cov­ered with a fine mesh with a dia­mond-shaped pat­tern, paint­ed white. There are no burrs, paint defects, etc. On the top is an addi­tion­al met­al grille and a dou­ble men­tion to be care­ful with sur­faces, as you can get burned. For the same rea­son, the heater must not be cov­ered.

The ends are made of white plas­tic, but slight­ly dif­fer­ent in shade from white met­al ele­ments, but this does not hurt the eyes, but rather attracts atten­tion and specif­i­cal­ly sep­a­rates hot from cold sur­faces. On the one hand, the end is almost emp­ty, with the excep­tion of the han­dle for trans­porta­tion and the plug, under which the fas­ten­ing screws. But on the oth­er side, you can stop and con­sid­er it in more detail.

The first thing that attracts atten­tion is the black con­trol pan­el with a screen. The two-seg­ment screen has sev­er­al icons that light up in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions and oper­at­ing modes: Wi-Fi, lock, Cel­sius, clock, oper­at­ing mode, pow­er indi­ca­tor, and a square win­dow for the IR receiv­er. Under the screen there are phys­i­cal but­tons: ±, when pressed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, the key lock is acti­vat­ed; mode of change of the set tem­per­a­ture; oper­at­ing time change mode; on/off key Every­thing is intu­itive and even a child or an elder­ly per­son can fig­ure it out, although in the first case it is bet­ter to do this in the pres­ence of adults.

At the same end, under the con­trol pan­el, there is a coil on which the pow­er cable is wound. A log­i­cal and cor­rect solu­tion, you don’t have to think where and how to put the wire when the heater is not required. Near the bob­bin, on the right, there is a gen­er­al pow­er switch, they can turn off every­thing, includ­ing the con­trol pan­el, which is usu­al­ly in stand­by mode. The pow­er cable is quite soft and pleas­ant to the touch. The mark­ing tells us that there are three cores of 1 mm² each, which is enough for about 3.5 kW, which means there is a reserve.

In addi­tion to all of the above, the kit has a fair­ly detailed instruc­tion in sev­er­al lan­guages.

Exploitation

Using the device is quite sim­ple, for this we install it on a flat and sol­id sur­face. We insert the plug into the sock­et, acti­vate the switch and from this moment the heater is in stand­by mode. Then it can be turned on either by the cor­re­spond­ing key on the key­board, or remote­ly, through the appli­ca­tion or using the voice assis­tant. Let’s try the sim­plest option.

Basic level of control and operation

As already men­tioned, it is nec­es­sary to bring the heater to stand­by mode, then turn it on with the but­ton on the key­board and the heater imme­di­ate­ly starts its work, pro­vid­ed that the default set tem­per­a­ture (which is 27 degrees Cel­sius) is high­er than that of the envi­ron­ment.

Using the ± keys, you can select the heat­ing inten­si­ty mode cor­re­spond­ing to 1 and 2 kW. To make it clear which mode is select­ed, in the low­er right cor­ner of the screen, 1 or 2 rec­tan­gles light up, respec­tive­ly. The tem­per­a­ture is set after press­ing the key with the sign of degrees Cel­sius and adjusts with the -/+ but­tons in the range from +18 to +36 degrees. In fact, this can be fin­ished, because. this is the sim­plest use case. But the heater can still do a lot of things, which means we will try a cou­ple more sim­ple func­tions, for exam­ple, a timer. It is acti­vat­ed by a but­ton with a clock icon and the let­ter “h”.

The time set­ting range is from 0.5 to 18 hours. After this time, the heater will turn off. The func­tion is use­ful in that you can turn it on for a short time before going to bed, for exam­ple, for an hour and by the time of sound sleep the heater will turn off.

Chil­dren should not use heat­ing devices unsu­per­vised, so the heater from Polaris has a child pro­tec­tion mode. To do this, hold down -/+ simul­ta­ne­ous­ly for three sec­onds, after which a short beep will sound, and the lock icon will light up on the dis­play. If you press any but­ton while the key­pad is locked, the heater will emit 3 short beeps, which should attract atten­tion. But this sys­tem can be fooled a lit­tle if you turn it off by unplug­ging it or turn­ing it off with the switch near the pow­er cord, and then turn­ing it back on. Then the key­board will become avail­able. But for this you need to set your­self a goal.

It is impos­si­ble not to men­tion the remote con­trol, which is able to com­plete­ly dupli­cate the key­board on the heater, but will make it eas­i­er, because. you can not get up and go turn it on. There­fore, the remote adds to the con­ve­nience of using the device. Pow­ered by 1 CR2025 bat­tery. At this stage, the eas­i­est way to work with the heater can be con­sid­ered con­sid­ered, which means you can move on to remote work with Polaris PMH 2120 Wi-Fi IQ Home.

Advanced level of management and operation

For remote con­trol, you need soft­ware that can be eas­i­ly down­loaded from Google Play and the App Store. Fur­ther step by step, since they are sim­ple and intu­itive:

• Down­load and run soft­ware
• We pass the sim­plest reg­is­tra­tion by phone num­ber
• We get to the main screen, where we press the “Add device” but­ton
• In the device search win­dow, there are two options, either we will find those con­nect­ed to our net­work, or we will add a new one
• Select the required from the list

• Let’s pre­pare the PMH 2120 Wi-Fi IQ Home heater for pair­ing, to do this, hold down the tem­per­a­ture and timer set­tings but­tons and hold until a beep sounds. After that, click “Con­tin­ue”
• Find your net­work and enter the pass­word from it
• Some time pass­es, the smart­phone returns to the home Wi-FI net­work, and the heater con­nects to it
• If nec­es­sary, rename the device and bind it to the room and / or to the room
• The heater is now added to the soft­ware and dis­played on the main screen

Now we will be able to con­trol our device when the Inter­net is avail­able. If it is con­nect­ed to a net­work, the Wi-Fi icon on the screen will light up. Con­trol in the appli­ca­tion is sim­i­lar in func­tion­al­i­ty to the instru­ment pan­el and remote con­trol. How­ev­er, there are also dif­fer­ences. The first is the banal turn­ing off of the back­light, because. you can sim­ply turn off the screen and it will stop glow­ing, all infor­ma­tion is avail­able on the smart­phone screen. The sec­ond more sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence is the work sched­ule. The abil­i­ty to work on a sched­ule can only be com­mend­ed. Prob­a­bly every­one fell into the off-sea­son, when the heat­ing had not yet been giv­en, and it was already cold out­side. In this case, you can set up, for exam­ple, to work for every day, a cou­ple of hours in the morn­ing and a sim­i­lar time in the evening.

The con­trol func­tion from a smart­phone and sched­uled oper­a­tion allows this heater to be clas­si­fied as smart, and it also has every right to be part of the smart home infra­struc­ture. But what is a smart home with­out voice con­trol? There­fore, you need to try con­trol­ling the voice assis­tant Alice. We will do this in the Yan­dex appli­ca­tion, so we launch it.

• Launch­ing Alice
• Select the “Smart Home” tab
• Add a new device and click on the item “smart home device”
• We do not select the type of device, but look for it in the list or enter Polaris IQ Home in the search bar
• Click “link to Yan­dex”

• We enter the cre­den­tials from the Polaris IQ Home account, name­ly the mobile phone
• Enter the code from the received SMS
• Con­firm account access
• Update the list of devices that is in the Polaris soft­ware
• We see which of the devices were con­nect­ed. Our device was defined as “Ther­mo­stat”.

How­ev­er, this did not stop Alice and she calm­ly turns it on and off. Thus, we have 4 ways to turn on the heater, and each is good in its own way in a cer­tain sce­nario.

To make it clear how and where to install this heater, it is worth remem­ber­ing that it has 2 types of heat­ing: ther­mal radi­a­tion and con­vec­tion. The first type will heat the sur­faces on which the sides “look”, and do this at a con­sid­er­able dis­tance from them. And con­vec­tion, as expect­ed, will heat the air and go up. From the front and rear sides, there will be no heat­ing, this can be seen from the pho­to­graph of two weath­er sta­tions.

Despite the fact that the weath­er sta­tion is locat­ed below the heater, the radi­a­tion still hits it and you can eas­i­ly see the tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ence, and this is after 4–5 min­utes.

It is worth remem­ber­ing about safe­ty and that the sur­faces are still hot and in no case should you lean against them and do not cov­er the heater. In addi­tion to pro­tec­tion against over­heat­ing, there is a rollover pro­tec­tion, it works when tilt­ed from 40 degrees or more, well, or just when it falls. Some­thing shifts inside, a click occurs and every­thing turns off.

Buy

Outcome

Sol­id heater with two types of heat­ing. It will keep you warm on cold autumn or win­ter evenings and you won’t have to wait for the whole room to heat up, because it will warm you up pur­pose­ful­ly. Do not for­get about banal secu­ri­ty mea­sures, because. we are deal­ing with a heater that has hot sur­faces, so it is bet­ter for chil­dren to be super­vised. With remote con­trol and voice assis­tant func­tions, it will be a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to add the PMH 2120 Wi-Fi IQ Home to your smart home infra­struc­ture.