If you haven't seen it, the heating system in our house is a gas furnace. We have the one furnace heating up the whole house. So we only have the one thermostat to control the temperature of the whole house.
I haven't been really happy with it, for two reasons: first, it is not precise at all, often needing us to "play" with it just to get to a comfortable temperature but more often than not going from just a little too cold to just a little too warm; second, the first reason coupled with a bad location means we never change the settings, even during the night. I had been meaning to get some sort of programmable thermostat so I could set it and forget it, knowing it would save us some energy by keeping the temperature lower during the night.
So early this week I bought a 7-day programmable touchscreen thermostat from Honeywell. This, my friends, is the Cadillac of thermostats. It's more expensive than the other ones, at about 150$, but since we only have the one (as opposed to having one per room) I thought it was worth the expense.
Vero agreed so I would shut up about it.
I installed it yesterday. This thing is worth every penny and then some. Wow.
First of all, it has a seven-day programming. That means you can have a different program for each day of the week. Plus, it has four settings per day (called "wake", "leave", "return" and "sleep"). For each of them, you can set a time and a temperature and the thing will adjust it for you. You can program every weekday the same and every weekend the same (like we did), or each day individually, or any grouping of day... in other words, it will match your schedule.
Then it goes one step further with their "intelligent" "adaptive" whatchamacallit, which is this thing where the computer (heck, we can't call this a "thermostat" anymore...) "learns" how your heating system behaves every day and uses that information to determine how much time it needs to adjust the temperature. For example, I want the house to be at 22 degrees at 5AM. Typically, that would require me to set the "wake" program at 22 for 4:30AM or something, so the house is warm by 5. But not with this thing! It learns how long it takes to warm up the house and adjust itself for the next day, so all I have to say is "22 degrees at 5AM" and it will kick in the heat at 4:32, 4:46 or 4:50 or whatever is right.
It also controls cooling, so if you have a furnace and an air conditioning unit, which we don't, you can set the "heat" and "cool" degrees and the computer will start the furnace or air conditioning depending on the temperature of the house.
Then you get into the smart programming stuff...
At any time, you can change the temperature of the house by hitting a button. Doing that, you tell it to "hold" the currently scheduled temperature -- the schedule says 22 degrees, you just asked for 25. It will hold the current schedule until a certain time, a time which you can set; by default, it holds until the next schedule. So if it's a little cold one night, you raise the temperature a bit and it will hold it until your "sleep" schedule, at which point it will resume the regular scheduling and the temperature will drop back down. No need to worry (or even remember) to re-adjust the temperature, it does it itself!
And for the sugar on top, it has a "vacation hold". That means "set the temperature at this level and hold it like that for X days", ignoring your schedules. So if you leave for a couple of days, no need to completely re-program the schedules (and set them back after)!
Plus, it's touchscreen, backlit and completely digital (precise to half a degree Celsius). What more could you want?
This thing makes me feel like somebody out there sat down and thought about how a thermostat could make my life easier. Shows there's analysts and programmers out there actually thinking!
Now, this is a pretty expensive piece of equipment. I wouldn't really recommend it for the East coast, where electric heating is controlled independently in every room. Way too expensive. Although if you have the money, go for it. But houses out there with one or two central control points, like ours, would really benefit from this thing (specially if you have a crappy little mercury-based thermostat). It might be psychological, but it absolutely feels like the temperature is more constant now. I'll see at the end of the month if it really reduces energy costs...
