[Never_Enough]

Don't need one of the super fancy $400 jobs. Want to be able to control it from my phone and be able to set temps for certain times/days.

[qba335i]

I am a huge fan of nest. They also offer extra sensor now so you can control more rooms.

[519.E82]

I too am a fan of my Nest thermostat. Was nice because after rebates (we use to get in Ontario) plus it being on sale it cost only $60 Cad and install was super easy

[dougt.ah3]

Look at the Emerson Sensi ST55 WIFI thermostat ... it's both basic and affordable.

[zx10guy]

I'll keep saying this. Not a fan of having Google spying into my home. So Nest is not something I would ever buy.

I have a Honeywell WiFi thermostat. I reluctantly bought it as I don't like any cloud based solution. I'm smart enough and have the equipment to be able to provide secure access into any network I manage. That said, Honeywell was a compromise for me as they're big enough where I wouldn't worry about them going under and they're not so large where they've got ulterior motives. I've had a Honeywell WiFi thermostat at my vacation property for about 6 years no. No issues what so ever. I have an app on my smart phone which allows me to control the system from in home or away. The system has email alerts on problems such as Internet connectivity being lost and inside temperature being too hot or too cold.

The thermostat saved my butt this past winter. Kept getting alerts about the interior temperature being too cold. That was when the Northeast was hit with the severe cold spell. I thought the furnace had just kicked on and was just trying to catch up as I had the temperature set low at the place when I'm not there. The alerts kept coming so it prompted me to drive out immediately to find out what was going on. Found out the furnace wasn't running even though the thermostat was telling it to fire up. Did more investigation and found out the condensation line froze up backing water (now ice) into the furnace. As a fail safe, the furnace shut itself off. All this grief because the stupid HVAC contractor saved a few bucks by not wrapping the run of PVC pipe for condensation drainage along the exterior garage wall with insulation.

[Jhanksm3]

Love my nest I have 3 of them wouldn't go back

[twin fed]

I use the Ecobee3. I have not had one issue with it and it also has the ability to add sensors to balance out the temp.

[wrickem]

Another Nest vote here. None look better IMO, and ours have always worked flawlessly since the first gen one.

[RABAUKE]

I've had Nest in both of my houses for over 4 years now. When we were coming to our weekend home, now our primary residence I could turn on the furnace or AC before we arrived. The thing is easy to install and has been problem free. And yes, way better looking than anything else. I've also installed the Smoke/CO detectors which work great as well.

[Never_Enough]

You Nest guys are not saying which one you have. I see some of them are near $300. Fuck that

[Never_Enough]

What's the difference between Ecobee 3 & 4 & do you really need the room sensors? (It's just me)
Also, how does the Ecobee compare to the Honeywell? Ecobee looks like it'd be easier to use.

[tdott]

Do you have any other smart devices in your house?
If so I recommend you go with something you already have, or something that has devices you plan to add, or integrates with.

I personally use SmartThings, with a Trane Zwave Tstat and Schlage Door Lock. I added Konnected.io to reuse all my hardwired alarm sensors and bring them into the app so I can see the status of all my alarm sensors. I plan to add some light switches to the system.

[Never_Enough]

Originally Posted by tdott

Do you have any other smart devices in your house?
If so I recommend you go with something you already have, or something that has devices you plan to add, or integrates with.

I personally use SmartThings, with a Trane Zwave Tstate and Schlage Door Lock. I added Konnected.io to reuse all my hardwired alarm sensors and bring them into the app so I can see the status of all my alarm sensors. I plan to add some light switches to the system.

None in this house, but plan to add others later. However, not to this house, but the next one.

[hooligan_F39]

Originally Posted by dougt.ah3

Look at the Emerson Sensi ST55 WIFI thermostat ... it's both basic and affordable.

We've got Sensi thermostats, not sure which model. They don't "learn" like Nests, but they are way less expensive and they integrate with Alexa and there is a phone app.

"Alexa, set 2nd floor to 68 degrees."

[JasonCSU]

I can see why the Nest is popular being a high end, user friendly device. However, I agree with zx10guy about having a cloud service based thermostat monitor my home. While the learning feature of the Nest seems like a convenient idea, why would you want to let Google or any other company know your habits of when you are or are not home?

[HRE_Wheels]

Originally Posted by Never_Enough

You Nest guys are not saying which one you have. I see some of them are near $300. Fuck that

I use Nest Thermostat E, $169 each.

https://nest.com/thermostats/nest-th...at-e/overview/

Love it, no problems here so far.

[dmk08]

I use two EcoBee Lite and love em

[wrickem]

Originally Posted by Never_Enough

You Nest guys are not saying which one you have. I see some of them are near $300. Fuck that

I had a first gen and replaced it with a 3rd generation ($229 from Amazon) and moved the first generation into my rental unit next door. I don’t mind spending the money on it, it works great and it looks so much better than a big hunk of plastic hanging on my wall.

I’ve also got their protect fire monitors and like them too.

I don’t care if they collect data, I highly doubt anybody gives a flying “F” about my heat or a/c consumption. I’m not that important

[qba335i]

Originally Posted by Never_Enough

You Nest guys are not saying which one you have. I see some of them are near $300. Fuck that

I needed the voltage switch/converter with my Nest. I paid over $1,000 to get my 2 units installed.

I have Nest Pro 3rd Gen.

[jlstyle]

One more vote on nest here.
It looks good, intuitive to control and self learning is pretty good.

[JasonCSU]

Originally Posted by wrickem

I don’t care if they collect data, I highly doubt anybody gives a flying “F” about my heat or a/c consumption. I’m not that important

You might think that, but data is valuable. Mined data on your electrical and fuel usage may be sold to companies looking to target sales of new HVAC systems, solar panels, or energy efficient windows to potential customers. Sure, that may seem harmless, but what about the data collected from thermostat models that can track if someone is in the home? Do you really want data being collected on when or not you are home, then being analyzed and possibly sold to other companies?

Not to get too off topic, but think about the many fitness monitors people are wearing these days. Some of those are cloud based, and just think of how valuable health data on individuals would be to the right client. "Why did my health insurance just go up?"

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by JasonCSU

You might think that, but data is valuable. Mined data on your electrical and fuel usage may be sold to companies looking to target sales of new HVAC systems, solar panels, or energy efficient windows to potential customers. Sure, that may seem harmless, but what about the data collected from thermostat models that can track if someone is in the home? Do you really want data being collected on when or not you are home, then being analyzed and possibly sold to other companies?

Not to get too off topic, but think about the many fitness monitors people are wearing these days. Some of those are cloud based, and just think of how valuable health data on individuals would be to the right client. "Why did my health insurance just go up?"

Exactly. Even beyond that. With Google being the predominant search engine, imagine you searching on something and having your search results skewed based on data collected about you through their various devices that can be influenced by back door deals with companies willing to pay to have their sites be first on the search list.

Beyond this, has anyone thought what else these devices are doing on your network? I doubt anyone has spent anytime throwing on a packet sniffer to see what is happening on their network with these devices. I have had this very situation happen to me. DirecTV to be exact. What triggered my indepth investigation was a network printer I was using on my home network. Xerox Phaser 8560MFP/D to be exact. These printers use solid stick ink to print and every time the printer wakes up from sleep mode ink is wasted as the heater elements fire up to precondition the ink sticks for printing. These ink sticks are not cheap. So imagine my irritation when this printer was being woken up from sleep mode every 15 minutes. No one was sending print jobs or accessing the printer during these times. I threw a packet sniffer on and capture some data. To my surprise, the offending IP was a DirecTV DVR hitting my printer. And reading through the packet payload, I was seeing multiple HTTP GET queries pulling stats off of my printer about the web server version and such. So the big questions are why is a DirecTV DVR probing my network and why is it collecting data on specific devices? Since finding out this revelation, all of my DirecTV DVRs have been isolated/walled off from the rest of my network via VLAN and firewall segregation.

And then there's that hacker element. If you think your data is safe, you have something coming to you. Imagine some hack that grabs all this data and gets sold to the criminal underworld. Not only will they most likely have some geolocation of where your home is, they'll have a large historical data set of when people are most likely home, and a good guess as to whether your home is worth "investigating" based on power consumption usage.