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Smart Thermostats

Smart thermostats can save substantial heating and cooling energy. The amount you save depends on your home’s performance, you heating/cooling equipment, the quality of the smart “t-stat”, and your willingness to let your home be a bit cooler in winter at a few points in time (or all the time) than the temperature you prefer. And the saving will vary in summer for the same factors including your willingness for your home to be a bit warmer and/or more humid in summer.

Smart t-stats have a wide range of capability and represent the latest stage in the evolution of thermostats. They are not only programable and Wi-Fi-enabled, but much more.

Programmable

The fundamental attribute is that they allow you to program them so that your heating/cooling system operates only exactly when you need it to operate. And no longer. And also they are better at achieving exactly the temperature you select instead of veering too high or low.

Part of this is as simple as being more intuitive to set than many other t-stats so that programming is easier. However, a smart t-stat goes further and will also learn your habits and trim the time your heating and cooling system operates.

Wi-Fi-enabled

Another capability is that a smart t-stat can communicate via Wi-Fi with you and sometimes with other appliances, devices, plugs, and lights in your home allowing you to remotely reduce their energy consumption, not just trimming space heating and cooling.

Geographic control

Many sense your smart phone or tablet’s presence and automatically adjust the heating or cooling. For example, if you leave home for work early, the smart t-stat will turn the heat down earlier than you programmed. Or come home early, it senses when your smart phone is a few miles (or whatever distance you set) from home and starts heating up your home anticipating your arrival. [Note: this capability is in addition to sensing you are approaching the smart thermostat. Many models default to turn off their display to save electricity, but turn their display on as you approach anticipating you may want to see the settings and other information.

Learning

The best smart t-stats learn your patterns to trim heating and cooling system operation beyond your programming.

For example, instead of keeping your home at 68F/20C all day on a particularly cold winter day you are at work, wasting energy keeping your vacant home warm, a smart t-stat is programmable, allowing you to set it in advance to allow the temperature to fall to say 65F/18C or even 62F/16C while no one is home.

However, the smart t-stat can override your programming based on your actual arrivals home from work. Perhaps you’ve programmed your smart t-stat to warm the house by 5:30, but that proves too optimistic. Work goes later than you planned and/or traffic is worse, and the smart t-stat notices that you are actually arriving home around 6:15pm. It will only override your programming and warm your house to the desired temperature at 6:15, the time it anticipates your arrival based on your patterns that it detects and learns.

And yet, if you get off work on time and traffic is not too bad, it will sense your arrival and quickly get your home to your desired temperature upon you arriving home unexpectedly early. Or even better, since it is connected, you can contact it on your way home by your smart phone to tell it to warm your home by the time of your expected arrival.

Or you change your plans, deciding to go out to dinner on your way home from work, just call and tell it to delay warming your house until 8pm. Your heating system will use far less energy without compromising your comfort.

In the same way, on a hot summer’s day, your smart t-stat may allow the temperature to rise from 68 to 74F/23C or even higher during the day when you are away. And only cool it down just before you arrive home.

The smart t-stat learns your daily patterns and anticipates them. Controlling your heating/cooling system to reduce energy consumption when you forget to program it. Or program it incorrectly. Or your patterns are inconsistent with your programming. In short, it can control your heating/cooling systems more precisely to meet your needs than you can program any thermostat.

In homes with zoned heating and cooling, some smart t-stats will learn which room(s) are typically occupied and heat or cool only those rooms as need for the comfort in those rooms. For example, keeping a home office warm on a cold winter day while the other rooms are allowed to cool.

Recording

Some smart t-stats will produce time of operation and consumption records for various periods of time.

Although arguably only a thermostat that can learn your patterns and improve on your programming is a smart thermostat, we believe thermostats which are programmable, Wi-Fi enabled to communicate to remote displays and controls, and modify programming based on your smart phone’s location (geo-fencing) is a smart thermostat. Especially because we’ve read that some smart thermostats are poor—or at least slow—learners. For now, you’ll see two columns of smart thermostats: some claiming learning capability and others not.

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