ecobee: a Better Thermostat

Re­cent­ly, there have been some ma­jor im­prove­ments in home au­toma­tion, a cat­e­go­ry that was feel­ing a lit­tle stat­ic. Not long ago, smart pow­er me­ters were promis­ing a con­nect­ed house­hold with eco-friend­ly re­sults and cost sav­ings for con­sumers, but a va­ri­ety of tech­ni­cal is­sues have left that dream,  for the most part, un­re­al­ized. Most house­holds still don’t use re­mote-con­trolled out­lets or light­ing, de­spite (or per­haps be­cause of) the num­ber of so­lu­tions on the mar­ket- Zig­bee and X-10, Z-wave and In­steon. We’ve checked out a few of these sys­tems, and still hold out hope for the fu­ture though.

And one of the lat­est gad­gets to make us op­ti­mistic are smart ther­mostats. For in­stance, we’re fans of the ecobee Smart Si Ther­mo­stat, a wi-fi en­abled, smart­phone-con­trol­lable ther­mo­stat that is Zig­bee-com­pat­i­ble and easy to use. In New York City dur­ing the sum­mer, cen­tral air is of key im­por­tance in mak­ing sure that we ac­tu­al­ly can get any work done, but old­er ther­mostats weren’t very good at reg­u­lat­ing the tem­per­a­ture. We reg­u­lar­ly had to ad­just it man­u­al­ly, and try­ing to pro­gram it would take a man­u­al, plus there was no easy way to ex­am­ine the set­tings, much less ad­just them from afar.

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