Thinking about buying a Smart Thermostat for your home or condo? See the top 5 reasons these smart devices are worth the investment.
What is a Smart Thermostat?
A Smart Thermostat is a great new series of products that help you heat and cool your home automatically without having to think about it. They are aimed at being more user friendly than programmable thermostats and the manual thermostats of years past.
The 3 main vendors that offer these thermostats are:
5 Reasons You Need a Smart Thermostat
1. Remotely Control Your Thermostat
All 3 of the thermostats listed above connect to your home WiFi network so that they allow you to remotely control the temperature remotely using your iPhone or Android smart phone. It also allows the thermostat to monitor the current temperature and automatically adjust based on the current weather forecast. Another great perk is that you can control some these smart thermostats using a home assistant like Amazon Echo or Google Home. If you are interested in that level of automation, check out our post on how to control your lights with your voice.
2. Auto Away Mode
The part I like the best about my thermostat it automatically detects if someone is around the home or not. If it doesn’t detect movement in the home, the thermostat will go into an “Away” mode where it doesn’t run the heat or air conditioner as much. When I’m on my way home from a meeting or from being out of town, I simply launch the App from my iPhone and tell the thermostat to start heating or cooling my home from afar.
At Home Mode
Nest Auto Away Mode
3. It Learns Your Patterns
All of the smart thermostats try to learn your usage patterns so that they can automatically start to heat/cool your home at the appropriate time. For instance, if it detects that your household wakes up around 6:00AM, the heat or AC will start to run slightly before 6:00AM so that your house is at a comfortable temperature when you wake up. Slightly older programmable thermostats offered these features, but they had to manually be programmed.
4. Make Saving Energy and Money Fun
In an effort to help you save energy (and money), many of these thermostats try to make saving energy fun. They do this by showing you how much energy you are using on a daily basis. Thermostats like the Nest also display a little green leaf on the thermostat when you are setting the temperature to an optimal setting. I know this sounds a bit mysterious, but it does help change my actions if I’m deciding to set the heat to 69 degrees or 70 degrees.
5. Amazing Rebates
If you are looking to pick up one of these smart thermostats and you live in the Chicagoland area, you are in luck. Currently, ComEd is offering rebates for purchasing and installing either a Nest Learning Thermostat or an EcoBee3 Thermostat. Thermostats purchased and installed between October 5th, 2015 and May 31st, 2016 are eligible for a $100 rebate. If you have your device installed by a certified contractor, you could receive a rebate of $125. If you happen to have missed this window of rebates, ComEd continues to offer other rebates for Smart Thermostats in addition to other rebates for weatherizing your home. For more information on this rebate, check out the ComEd website here.
Need Interior Design Help?
Need help with designing a stunning living room to accent your new smart thermostat? We offer interior design services for those who need a little design help to those that need a lot of design assistance with designing and furnishing their home. If you don’t live in the Chicago or Milwaukee area, fear not! We offer online interior design services allowing us to help you with your design problems anywhere in the world.