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A Guide to Smart Home Thermostats

Thursday, February 28th, 2019

BY JOHN ELLIOT 

The Nest will learn your heating habits and automatically adjust to keep you warm.
Smart thermostats may be the most prevalent of high-tech home products—because unlike toilets you can talk to or music-playing mirrors, they provide sensible, everyday solutions to issues all homeowners face. Equipped with automated intelligence, smart thermostats learn the heating habits of their home's inhabitants (and detect their absence) and adjust the temperature accordingly—a feature that not only offers an ecological benefit but one that immediately pays financial dividends, too.

Due to their popularity and longevity within the market, the core features of smart thermostats are largely similar. What differentiates them is around the edges—design, user experience, personal preference and the like.

Below are a few options for creating a automated environment within your home.

3rd Gen Nest Learning Thermostat

Brought to you by the brains at Google, the 3rd Gen Nest Learning Thermostat is sharp, smart and circular. A ringed screen that easily affixes over your previous thermostat, Nest is a new roommate with a singular mission—to discover your temperature preferences.  After a few days of manual direction, Nest will learn what you like and begin adjusting your home’s temperature throughout the day. But Nest’s futuristic features don’t stop there. As a Wi-Fi-connected contraption, the Nest will allow you to override its automation and adjust the temperature (or connected fans) from anywhere in the world, or set your own schedules for heating and cooling—all from your phone via the accompanying Nest app. Left to its own devices, though, Nest will do its best to save you money, while also saving the environment—automatically setting itself to away mode when the house is empty, and offering easy-to-follow instructions to curb your energy usage even more. For an even greater degree of control over their homes’ temperatures, Nest users can pair their Learning Thermostat with Nest Temperature Sensors (sold seperately), small, equally circular devices that can be placed in different rooms and regions of your home, allowing your Nest to exercise exacting temperature control of those areas.Keep everything organized and optimal with connected technology.

The elegant Ecobee4 is a smart thermostat and much more. The sleek, square-esque screen— like the Nest—takes the position of your current thermostat, but, unlike the Nest, the Ecobee4 comes with an accompanying smart sensor, giving you more exacting control over your home’s temperature—and a leg up on learning your home’s unique heating profile—right out of the box. The Ecobee4 will also track the local weather throughout the day, developing a plan to manage your home’s temperature in accordance with your region’s climate.

As a Wi-Fi-connected device, the Ecobee4 can be controlled from across the room or across the world, via the Ecobee app. Alternatively, Ecobee4 owners can talk to their thermostat as the controller is compatible with Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Homekit—and Amazon Alexa, which is built into the device. Yes, in addition to automatically and intelligently adjusting your house’s temperature, Ecobee4 users can ask the device to dim the lights, play some music, add items to their grocery list or any of the infinite other tasks Alexa is capable of performing. Like other learning thermostats, the Ecobee4 attempts to go green and save you money, automatically setting itself to Away mode when it detects an empty home and offering energy reports so you can better manage your power usage.

The Ecobee4 with accompanying room sensor is available for $249.

Honeywell Round Smart Thermostat

Honeywell’s answer to intelligent temperature control, the Round Smart Thermostat apes elements of the clever tech that preceded it. Like the Nest, the Round Smart is a minimally designed, Wi-Fi-enabled, circular thermostat that can be controlled from anywhere in the world via an accompanying app. Like the Ecobee4, the Round Smart is compatible with a variety of automated assistants and 3rd party software (Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Homekit, Samsung SmartThings) allowing users to control and schedule temperature shifts by using their voice, or in conjunction with other smart devices. What separates the Honeywell Round Smart is its incorporation of geo-fencing, a digital perimeter around your home that, when breached, kickstarts an effect—in this case, an automated change in your home’s climate. Via a combination of geo-fencing and location tracking, the Round Smart has a pretty good sense of where users are and when they will and won’t need a warm home—curbing wasted energy and allowing Honeywell owners to pocket the difference.

The Honeywell Round Smart Thermostat is available for $249.

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