As summer is raging on and your energy bills are making you cry and rethink all of your life decisions, you might be considering updating your thermostat to a smart thermostat to help you conserve energy.
Smart thermostats are great for saving energy, but also for saving time. Once a smart thermostat is set up, you will spend less time adjusting your setting and managing your home’s temperature.
One of the options that you will have is the ecobee, whose ecobee3 is the latest release. Here’s a review of the ecobee’s features, to help you compare it against other smart thermostats you might be shopping. The ecobee3 will run you about $250.
ecobee Overview
The wireless ecobee strives to solve one major problem with ordinary thermostats: they only measure temperature in one location, typically a hallway, so a home’s living spaces are often not as comfortable as they should be.
The ecobee3 uses remote sensors to measure the temperature throughout the house, so that all of your family’s favorite rooms are getting the correct adjustments for cooling and heating. These sensors are also measuring occupancy, so they won’t be heating or cooling a room unnecessarily, like when a room, or the house, is empty.
The thermostat is also capable of collecting other data, including motion, proximity, and humidity along with outside temperature, to help round out your home’s energy profile so that it can optimize comfort and savings.
The ecobee has a phone and tablet app, and can also be controlled from a desktop computer. This allows you to manage your home’s temperature settings from anywhere. This is a great feature to use if you get stuck at work late and don’t want to start heating or cooling your home at the normal time, or even if there is some unexpected weather.
Ecobee Features
The ecobee is a beautiful device, with a full-color LCD touch screen with 320 x 480 pixel display. You can use is with all the popular smart home products and hubs, including the Apple HomeKit, the Amazon Echo, Samsung SmartThings, and IFTTT. Data protection is a big factor for smart home technology users, and the ecobee uses latest encryption technologies to ensure that data is protected. Here are some of the device’s best features.
- Knows if you are home, and which rooms are occupied, even if your device is set to “away” and will automatically adjust
- It can do the same thing for the reverse situation; if you are away during a “home” period, the sensors will note inactivity and adjust to that you aren’t wasting money
- Room sensors help the ecobee intuitively turn on and off heating and cooling only in rooms you are using
ecobee has a built in protection system that will alert you if there are radical changing in temperatures – like if a door or window is left open in the winter – so that your home’s heating and cooling isn’t affected - The ecobee can tell the difference between you and your pets, so if you have a hyper dog or cat, they won’t cause the sensors to heat or cool spaces they shouldn’t
Photo by: ecobee
