I am considering purchasing a smart thermostat for my heat pump. I am torn between Escobee4 and Nest and looking for suggestions.
Factors that influence my decision:
[ol]
[li]I am intersted in any energy savings that may be provided by using a smart thermostat.[/li][li]I have an Amazon Echo Dot, so I am interested in Alexa compatibility. We also have Amazon Fire tablets enabled with Alexa.[/li][li]But, we are also an iPhone family.[/li][li]Part of my motivation is that this thermostat will be accessible to my father-in-law, who lives with us. He is visually impaired and mobility impaired. He is also “hard headed”. I am interested in voice control via the device itself or via Alexa.[/li][li]I don’t have any other home automation at this time. Should I drop Alexa and go with Google before investing more in this technology?[/li][li]Winter is coming and my father-in-law’s health makes him susceptible to cold, but he refuses to put on more clothes. (He pretty much wears briefs and a tshirt all day and night. Call before dropping in at our house!) On the few cool days we have had so far, his habit has been to simply sweep the thermostat over to “hotter than heck”. My wife and I are not happy with the economic impact this will have and want to be able to check/adjust temps while we are away from home.[/li][/ol]
So, what is the experience of the Teeming Millions? Any recommendations?
I have had a Nest for a couple years now and I love it. I haven’t seen any real savings on my energy use, but I don’t use the smart features at all. The thing I like most about it is being able to adjust the settings from my iPhone.
ETA: Mine is a Nest 2. I’m not sure what iteration they are on now.
I have a second gen Nest. I bought it for a couple reasons - ease of programming schedules, ability to set remotely, and algorithms that compensate for the delays in starting/stopping heating in a hot water radiator system. It does the first two excellently and the last quite well. If I had it to do over again I’d probably go with the Ecobee, mostly because Nest the company rubs me the wrong way.
Example: two years ago Nest rolled out new firmware in November. This firmware turned out to have a significant bug that completely borked the time-to-temperature settings (it’s supposed to calculate how much time it will take to reach an upcoming scheduled setpoint based on past performance and current weather, and start early enough to hit the setpoint on schedule). On a system like mine, in the climate I’m in, this is an important feature - it can take anywhere from half an hour to 3 hours to make up my 3 degree C daytime setback in winter. This feature had been working reasonably well aside from an arbitrary 2-hour cap to the pre-heating time. The new firmware was supposed to remove that cap (Yay!) but actually resulted in virtually no pre-heating at all (WTF?!?). I didn’t realize what had happened at first, except that my house wasn’t warm when I expected it to be. I filed a customer support ticket and essentially got blown off, so I went hunting on their customer forums and found that everyone had the same problem. Instead of allowing firmware rollbacks, Nest rushed a revision to their new firmware, did a limited deployment of it (I think just in the UK) where the fix broke other aspects of scheduling, and the long and short of it was that I was without the time-to-temperature feature for most of the winter. Once I knew what was happening I could work around it by fudging the schedule, but that episode soured me to the point where I was considering putting an Ecobee in.
For the record, the time-to-temperature now works better than it ever did, so they did eventually get it right. It was frustrating, though. They pretty much entirely disregard feature requests from their customer base (even really simple and easy-to-implement ones) and generally display an Apple-like “we know how you want your device to work better than you do yourself” sort of attitude.
Don’t know how either of them work with Alexa, but that shouldn’t be hard to find out.
Nest 3 is the latest ‘real’ one. I only say ‘real’ because there’s a Nest E out that from what I’ve heard it’s a stripped down version of the 3.
I have the 3. I like it, but a few months ago there was an update (the one that brought us all the Eco stuff) and the auto-away feature is getting on my nerves. Not much point in having a smart t-stat that knows when you’re not around but can also have the house nice and warm/cool for you right when you get home if the two features can’t play nice with each other.
Anyways, over all I still like it, but it takes getting used to. I couldn’t tell you if it works with Alexa, but you can get at it from any internet connected device. Phone, computer, tablet etc. So whether you’re sitting in your house or about to leave work, you can adjust it.
The other thing that I do like about it, is that I got the Smoke/CO detectors as well. If the they sense smoke, they shut down the furnace/AC so they don’t spread the smoke around. If they sense CO, they also shut down the furnace since that could be the source and in any case, you get an alert on your phone. A fire is one thing (duh), but if you get home to your CO detector making noise, it’s nice to know if it just started or it’s been doing it for 6 hours.
Different issue. I have auto-away turned off because I’m frequently not in the room the thermostat’s in for hours at a time, and it would decide I’d left when I hadn’t. I fully believe auto-away doesn’t play nice with time-to-temperature, because I’m not at all sure how it possibly could. I also have the auto-scheduling turned off and set up my own because I know what schedule I want and didn’t have any inclination to try to get the thing to learn it rather than just entering the damn thing.
You can set it up so it won’t go into away mode when it can see your phone. I don’t recall if it makes a direct (wifi/bluetooth) connection, if it looks for it on the network or if it’s a geofencing thing, but there’s a button in the settings somewhere for it. If you get the Smoke/CO detectors, they’ll also act as motion detectors to make sure that doesn’t happen.
This is the issue I’m having right now. It knows I’m going to be home at 7pm. There’s a set point for the temp I want it at at 7pm. I think it may have figured out the 7pm time on it’s own when I first got it. For the past year or two it’s worked perfectly. I get home, the house is warm. But these past few weeks I’m finding that it’s not warm.
I’m also finding that if I get home early, walking past the t-stat doesn’t get it out of away/auto-away/eco mode like it used to. It just sits there on the wall, staring it me, saying ‘58, cold in here isn’t it…gonna be like 2 hours before it’s warm’.
So, now I’m back to not trusting it and about an hour before I leave work I pull out my phone and change the temp so it starts warming up. I hate to change the schedule too much in case this is something that gets fixed.
The funny thing is, about this time last year I felt like I was fighting with it in the opposite direction. I’d get home to a not warm enough house and eventually figured out that it was turning on, then kicking back into away mode and shutting off.
Anyways, I checked out the reddit forum and a lot of people are having this exact same issue, a lot of other people are claiming it’s supposed to work like this on the premise that it shouldn’t be turning on until you get home, but in that case, I’ll just get a cheapo round honeywell t-stat. It’s not doing what I bought it to do. It’s supposed to learn my schedule, adjust it as needed, and make my house comfortable just as I arrive home. Worked for a while, not so much now.
Anyone who says it shouldn’t turn on before you get home doesn’t live in my house.
Didn’t know about using the phone to determine away status. That wasn’t a thing when I set it up a couple years back. With the schedule I have it working to my satisfaction, so I don’t think I’ll change anything. It might seem boring, but I don’t want the learning schedule, don’t want auto-away. Just the manual schedule and the radiant heating algorithms are worth it for me. Especially the latter. I had huge temperature swings with the old conventional thermostat because the hot water rads have so much heating inertia, while the Nest keeps temperatures in a pretty narrow band.
With the Nest, you can geo-fence it so that it knows when you are leaving your office (or wherever you usually go when you are away) and starts heating toward your “home” setting at that time. I don’t use mine that way, but a buddy does and he says it works great.
As for the OP, sorry, I don’t know about the Alexa stuff, or anything about Ecobee, but the Nest is pretty cool.
So according to Ecobee’s website, the Ecobee 4 not only integrates with Alexa, but has “built-in Amazon Alexa Voice Service.” That is, in addition to being a thermostat it’s effectively a wall-mounted Echo as well.
I never really noticed either, but I am (or was) very good about adjusting the temperature of the house any time I leave for more than an hour or so. One of the nice things that this allows you to do, whether it’s the nest doing it on it’s own or you doing it remotely with any of the other network connected t-stats is that you can adjust it quite a bit further from normal since you can turn it back on before you get home. IOW, If I keep my house at 68, I might have dropped it to 63-65 in winter when I left. With the nest, it gets down to 57-59, but I know that it’ll be back to 68 when I get home with out me sitting in a cold house for the first 90 minutes. With a regular t-stat, that means the furnace would have fired a few times during the day.
ETA, for all the “I don’t have a real schedule so this won’t work for me” people. I said that to, but I decided to let it do it’s thing and after a few weeks it got a rough idea and fine tuned it from there, you might be surprised.
I’ve been researching slightly smarter thermostats a bit. I can’t offer an opinion on these two, but I can offer a word of caution.
At least some smart thermostats from some manufacturers will work just fine with a conventional HVAC system and will not work at all with a heat pump. I have a heat pump and this incompatibility has been a problem for me.
I don’t know whether Nest or Ecobee have models that are or aren’t heat-pump compatible. But be darn sure to check.
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The OP’s item 6 sounds like trying for a technical solution to a managerial problem. If Dad is home he’s gonna turn it up & spend your money. You remotely turning it down will just have him turning it up farther. Unless you hope to bamboozle him with something so complicated he can’t operate it at all.
And if that’s your plan, here’s an example of a cheaper and less disruptive solution: https://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-CG511A1000-Thermostat-Prevent-Tampering/dp/B000BPGP6M/.
Setting aside Dear Old Dad, IMO the energy savings depend entirely on how many hours times how many degrees you can avoid running the heat or cool. Unless everyone is out of the house for many contiguous hours per day or night there’s no savings to be had. e.g. at my place someone is home substantially 24/7, so my interest is better control, not less consumption. The OP’s family situation may differ, but it bears thinking about.
Some people (many, actually) work on the misunderstanding* that if you turn the heat up and a little while later (before the furnace has shut off) they’re still cold, turning it up higher will make the area warmer faster, as if the furnace will crank out hotter air. If that’s the case here, I’ve seen some people move the t-stat elsewhere in the house and mount a “new” dummy one there. Let the person play with it and adjust it all they want while the real one still does the work.
This, obviously, only works if the person doesn’t know enough about the HVAC system to realize they’re being duped.
Another option is to see if you can get them to live with a space heater. A small space heater in an enclosed room, such as a bedroom, will get it very warm in about an hour. Often times before I go to bed I’ll turn one on in my bedroom as the house temp is falling. It works out well.
*not counting multi-stage furnaces which I believe can actually do that.
I installed 8 smart thermostats throughout the house (with baseboard electric heat) and I really regret it. We frequently have power failures long enough to kill their tiny batteries, and they lose their programming. Since they each offer seven different days by four different times for temperature resetting, it is quite a big job to reprogram 224 separate temperatures by following the complicated instructions and pressing little up and down triangles. These days I just keep fiddling with the temperature setting every day in whatever rooms I’m using. I’m considering pulling them all out and certainly wouldn’t consider installing any more.
Have a look at your wiring for the T-Stat you have now. I ended up having to run a different cable (5 strand to 6 strand) to get power to the Honeywell Smart thermostat I installed. It was just as easy to run a new 6 strand vs an individual wire.
I have a hot water boiler and radiators in our old victorian home. Our first winter in the home we had to learn how to manage the thermostat differently than we did with a forced air furnace. You don’t just raise the temperature a few degrees and the furnace kicks on in response, right? We’d raise the thermostat and not feel any difference, so we’d bump it up a couple more degrees. A few hours later we’ve over heated the house and are dying. So we’d then drop the temp too low in response and be freezing 4 hours later so back to bumping up the temp and over heat the house again. It took awhile before we finally found a temp that works and that is what the thermostat is set at all the time in the winter.
I dismissed the idea of a Nest thermostat because since it wasn’t a forced air furnace what is the value? I don’t want/need this thing changing temps through out the day when the latency time is in hours before that temp is really felt. But you’re saying it has algorithms to account for that latency time for a boiler/radiator system??
Yup. Nest calls it “True Radiant” and it mostly works. It calls for heat early, and stops calling for heat early. My system still overshoots in relatively mild weather - if it’s above freezing by roughly 2 degrees C, and between 0 and -5C by about 1 degree. Colder than that and it’s pretty much on the money. This is frankly not as good as it really ought to be, though it’s going to be better than a dumb thermostat. FWIW, what research I’ve done suggests that the Ecobee should be somewhat better at managing the overshoot but I have no direct experience.
Now I should say that system details matter. My system uses a circulation pump. If your system is strictly convection-driven like the one in my grandmother’s old farmhouse used to be it’s going to have significantly more latency yet, and I don’t know if a Nest would be able to cope with that.
I have auto-away turned off because I’m frequently not in the room the thermostat’s in for hours at a time, and it would decide I’d left when I hadn’t. I fully believe auto-away doesn’t play nice with time-to-temperature, because I’m not at all sure how it possibly could. I also have the auto-scheduling turned off and set up my own because I know what schedule I want and didn’t have any inclination to try to get the thing to learn it rather than just entering the damn thing.