So you left your house, only to realize minutes — or perhaps hours — later that you forgot to turn the heat down. Ah, fret not. The odds are the same thing hasn’t just happened to your next door neighbour, but likely the owners who were living in both your homes prior to either of you showing up on the block… and most definitely the inhabitants long before them!
Thankfully, in this connected little online world of ours, it's nothing that should cause you anxiety for a moment longer. You can thank the recent advent of smart thermostats for that. In perfect tune with your home’s heating and cooling, these devices are able to remember what temperatures you like, learn your schedule, program themselves to reduce energy and significantly cut down related costs.
What kind of costs, you may wonder? Glad you asked! According to leading home automation producer Nest, smart thermostats can create an annual 10% to 12% savings on heating and 15% savings on cooling — or about $131 to $145 in savings a year.
Better yet, smart thermostats are designed for the way you live today: compatible 24/7 with your Pixels, iPhones and Androids, in addition to Amazon Echo, Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings and so many of the smart home platforms you favour.
Want some more good news? Jiffy can readily recommend the very best ones currently available across the North American market. Heck, we’re happy to come install them any of them for you. Just say when.
On that note, here are a few of our favourite smart thermostats, plus the standout features we particularly love — and are confident you will, too!
ecobee4 Smart Wi-Fi Thermostat with Built-in Alexa Voice Service
This is the newest model from the Canadian brand, and a top-of-the-line thermostat at that! With multiple sensors, it’s able to maintain a comfortable temperature throughout your home, not just in one spot. And unlike its otherwise equally endowed predecessor, it has Amazon’s Alexa voice service built into so you can use voice commands control your HVAC system.
ecobee3 lite Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat
The remarkably intuitive ecobee3 lite provides reports on how much energy you’ve saved based on run times, before proceeding to offer recommendations for further conservation. How’s that for insight? Yup, there are plenty of smart devices out there that know they’re smart. Now here’s one that is just as concerned with educating you. Unlike the other models from ecobee, the ecobee3 lite doesn’t come with room sensors, but they can definitely be added.
Honeywell Lyric Round Wi-Fi Thermostat - Second Generation
Another Honeywell marvel — at least in our books — this one’s equipped with a real-time clock to preserve time settings, including daylight savings. This means you can go on vacation without being too concerned about power failures or electrical disturbances back home, which otherwise would cause severe issues to your thermostat’s ability to automatically regulate temperature during your stay abroad.
Honeywell Lyric T5 Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat
Thanks to push notifications that prompt you to swap out your filter — while also cautioning against extreme indoor temperatures — the Lyric T5 basically helps you to eliminate the guesswork. That’s not the only thing it eliminates, either. Because when you take into account Honeywell’s general affordability in relation to its many smart thermostat contemporaries, the Lyric T5 effectively gets rid of a portion of the cost you might have been expecting to pay. In fact, don’t act surprised if your overall satisfaction with the product soon has you going into full pitchman mode to your spouse: “Well, honey, Honeywell’s gone and done it again!!”
Nest Wi-Fi Smart Learning Thermostat
There’s a lot you can say about the Nest Learning Thermostat. It stands alone in terms of gorgeous design. We’d like to highlight its 2.1-inch, 24-bit colour LCD display. Why does that matter to you? Simple. With a 480 x 480 resolution, reading the device is now even more effortless than ever before. Adding to that, the Farsight feature makes it aware of when you're around. It proceeds to light up so you can inspect the temperature (or time) from across the room — with little more than a mere glance. Nope, no more nearsighted encounters in the middle of the night!
Nest Thermostat E Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat
Nest’s cheaper model is still an excellent choice. Forget merely pairing to the usual array of smart and smart home devices, this Nest thermostat works with the majority of standard of 24V heating and cooling systems — no matter if they’re of the electric, forced air, gas, geothermal, heat pump, hot water, oil, radiant or solar variety. In other words, since it’s so compatible, you will surely save a heck of a lot of time narrowing down the right device to buy. And compared to the Nest Learning Thermostat, it’s got a polycarbonate, ceramic-feel finish, as well as a frosted display which blends into walls.
In addition to being an award-winning device that keeps you connected and in-the-know, Sensi’s accompanying app offers you a little bit of everything. Geofencing that uses your smartphone’s location to automatically adjust your thermostat? Check. Colour shift to let you know at a glance whether your system is heating or cooling? Check. Flexible scheduling, smart alerts and auto changeover? Check, check and check. This nifty app even allows the Sensi Wi-Fi Thermostat to installed in as little as fifteen minutes. Which means when you call Jiffy to come get the job done, we’ll be in and out in a… well, we guess that should be a bit self-explanatory by now, right?
