Ecobee Smart Thermostat Lets You Dip Your Toes into Smart Home Integration
by Jaymi Heimbuch, Central Coast, California on 10.15.08
Smart Home systems are great ways to reduce your energy costs by giving you real time information about your home’s energy use and making it easy to conserve. But so far, a full home integration is pretty pricey. What if you just want to make your home a little bit smart for now?
Homeowners can take smaller steps to making a big difference with the new ecobee Smart Thermostat. This cool thermostat manages your heating and cooling system, and hooks up to your home’s WiFi to fully integrate into your utility system.
The thermostat is super easy to install and program using the touchscreen or the Internet. In fact, because it hooks up to your WiFi, you can get updates via Internet any time, any where so you can adjust your heating and cooling settings to fit better energy-saving patterns. Your utility company can communicate with you, letting you know of alerts, updates, and ways to reduce your bill by reducing your energy use.
There is even a “Quick Save” button, where your thermostat will automatically change the settings to optimize energy conservation (could this simply be the “off” button?).
President & CEO Stuart Lombard: "The ecobee philosophy is 'green made easy'! We can make a positive environmental impact if we make conservation a simple and easy choice."
And if later on down the road you find you want to go whole hot and make your home an energy genius, there are optional ZigBee expansion slots to integrate it into a larger smart home set up.
The ecobee Smart Thermostat is $385 – a fairly sizeable investment – but the company says you’ll earn that back in energy savings within the first 12 to 18 months. Combine this with items like Ploggs, smart power strips and other devices making their way onto the market and you're well on your way to some real energy savings.
More on Smart Home Products:
AlertMe Smart Plugs Help Automate Home Energy Use
Smart Metering - Utilities Net-Linked To Your Home Thermostat
Remote Control Your Home's Energy Use with Ploggs
Smart Power Meters and Real-Time Pricing Leads to Saved Energy and Money
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My parents live in a 7000sq ft house and I can definitely see how a tool like this could help them to keep a better grip on their energy consumption to help them cut down.
If I read the info on their site correctly then you have to log on to your thermostat through them. Assuming that is correct I would not recommend the product. If the company goes belly up then you would lose the ability to log on to it unless they provided a work around. Great idea but poor implementation. Allow for a direct connection and I will buy one in a heartbeat!
I agree with Daugene. Why can't this be an embedded device in my home? Using a 3rd party to access my thermostat is stupid!