I Continue to Add Technology With No End In Sight
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I should have written about this purchase a while ago. A smart thermostat is a no-brainer when it comes to making your home more intelligent. The utility companies push for you to have one of these in your home and reward you for adding this to your home’s ecosystem. It may be a gift card or some credit, but it is something you should push to receive.
In my last house, we were an early adopter of the Nest thermostat with the 1st series. I loved the idea of a thermostat “learning” our heating/cooling habits and adjusting accordingly. For the most part, it did just that! The Nest learned when to raise the temperature and lower it based on how often we were home/away. I could check in on it occasionally with the iPhone-friendly application and easily adjust it at a swipe of the finger or a slight turn of the thermostat face.
Nest became less friendly when Google bought it some years later. Sure it worked, but it did not work well with specific applications outside the Google-supported software. Knowing we were moving to a new house, I was going to jump to the Ecobee unit. I had heard from several other friends about this unit, and I am always looking for something better.
With the Ecobee, I received an additional sensor to be placed in another portion of the house. I opted to buy additional sensors for different rooms to be monitored. This allows the thermostat to monitor certain rooms and adjust when to heat/cool based on those rooms’ temperatures. The tiny sensors can be placed anywhere and are very inconspicuous (See picture below). I can say they work well, and you can get an accurate reading of each room they are placed in looking within the Ecobee phone application.
To put it simply, this thermostat “just works.” It adjusts as needed and works every bit, as well as my Nest did. If I have one complaint, it has too many capabilities. I haven’t scratched the surface on everything this thermostat can do. It is Alexa enabled, so you can have it adjust everything just by talking to it. As if I did not have enough voice assistants in my house as written in an earlier piece. As I was reading up on this unit, I became aware it now has Apple’s Siri. We use both within our home.
I can tell you what capabilities I am using. Besides the obvious, which is the temperature control of the house, there were the subtle commands of having my Roomba vacuum cleaner operate. I tell Alexa, through the thermostat, to have Roomba clean, and it works. I have played music through this thermostat. Don’t expect ear-crushing bass through this unit. The size is small, and we can’t be too demanding after all. This is about all I have it do at this moment.
So this unit is very robust in its offerings and will be more open to working with 3rd party applications than Nest. I have worked with it over the last six months and have had no negative issues thus far. It just works!
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