Awesome. Thanks!
I’ve got a Nest thermostat and Nest Protect smoke/CO detectors, two Alexa Dots, and iPhone/iPad/iMac with a forced air gas furnace. It all works together swimmingly.
By naming the thermostat as “Heat” in the Nest app, I can call out “Alexa, set the heat to 68” and about a half second later, my wish is carried out.
If you’re worried about Dad cranking up the heat to levels suitable for baking cookies, you could use the Nest app to schedule the desired temp every hour. Pro tip that may not be obvious - you can set up one day’s schedule, then copy and paste it to other days.
If you do that you may find you’ll have to turn off the learning feature. IIRC it ‘learns’ by noticing that you’ve made the same adjustment at the same time on two consecutive days or the same day of the week two weeks in a row. So you could tell the t-stat to reset the house temp to 65 every few hours*, but if dear old dad cranks it up to 75 every time he notices, the Nest will eventually figure it out and leave it there.
*If may actually cost more to leave have the temp swing up and down all day long like that than to just leave it. I’ll still recommend seeing if you can get him to use a space heater, either in one room/den/bedroom or even just pointed at him where he usually spends his day. Even a heated blanket might work better.
I have a Sensi and I’m very happy with it. Bonus: Works with Alexa.
My HVAC guy, who I trust, steered me away from the Nest. He said he had one in his home but removed it and installed a Sensi. There is (or was) some bug in its design that was annoying the crap out of folks. Sorry, wish I could remember more details.
mmm