They also may have access to little remote temperature and presence sensors placed around your home. Most smart thermostats contain a presence sensor, so if you don’t walk past them they may assume you aren’t home and turn off. “For smart thermostats, the big breakthrough is that they know you’re not home and so can shut down when you aren’t around,” he says. How smart thermostats save energy and moneyĭan Holohan, founder of and author of several books on home heating, says that the most important tool for smart thermostats is their awareness of where you and your household are. And a smart thermostat allows you to make adjustments on the fly through the device’s app or a voice assistant like Alexa. In addition, smart thermostats can detect when members of your household are and aren’t around by employing some combination of presence sensors and geolocation, using your smartphone’s wireless signals to determine where you are located. Smart thermostats can also calculate how long it takes for your specific system to heat and cool your home and then use that for scheduling. Some smart models can learn your household’s schedule and anticipate what your preferred setting will be throughout the day, and they can even adjust themselves automatically. A programmable thermostat adds the ability to create a schedule for automatic adjustments, so that you can have your set temperature shift throughout the day and night, but these adjustments are limited next to what a smart thermostat can do. That means you typically have to turn the thermostat up and down throughout the day to manage your home’s comfort. An old-timey dial thermostat lets you set a desired temperature and then tells your heat or AC to turn on until your home reaches that temperature from either heating or cooling. If your home doesn’t have central air, or if you use steam or hot water radiators or radiant floors, a smart thermostat isn’t likely to save you much energy or money.Ī smart thermostat is considered smart because it can proactively manage your climate-control system in a way that traditional thermostats can’t. However, smart thermostats produce the best results only if your home’s climate-control system relies on a furnace and/or central air conditioning. If your home is located where extreme temperatures in either direction can result in a steep bill of hundreds of bucks a month, the current, $250 Nest (or any of the other picks in our guide to smart thermostats) is a purchase that could pay for itself in savings pretty quickly. But the real hook with the original Nest was its vaunted ability to knock as much as 30% off your home heating and cooling bills. The Nest Thermostat, released in 2011, was a revelation, with striking good looks and built-in AI to program itself. The first blockbuster smart-home device was a thermostat, of all things-the undisputed champ for Least Sexy Home Appliance.
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