When It Pays to Upgrade Your Thermostat

Your thermostat plays an important role in keeping your home comfortable throughout the year. After all, the thermostat is the central hub for controlling the temperature you want to keep your home at regardless of whether it’s hot or cold outside. Unfortunately, the thermostat that you have now might not be doing as good of a job as you think, which could be costing you money. If you want to get the most out of your heating and cooling and save some money in the long term, it may be time to upgrade your thermostat to a model that’s a little bit smarter.

What Are Smart Thermostats?

Smart thermostats are programmable thermostats that give you a greater amount of control over your home environment. These thermostats can automatically adjust the temperature at different times during the day, ensuring that you aren’t spending extra money heating or cooling your home while everyone is at work, at school, or in bed asleep. This can result in significant energy cost savings over time.

Thermostats and Sensors

One thing that makes many smart thermostats even better is the ability to pair them with various sensors around your home. Some thermostats can be combined with motion sensors to automatically adjust the temperature when they don’t detect any movement for a specified period of time. This allows for more dynamic control over your heating and cooling, meaning that you don’t have to specifically program in every time that the temperature should go up or down. They can also be connected to smart home hubs and virtual assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant so that you can add temperature changes to the routines you’ve set up.

Smarter Heating and Cooling

Many smart thermostats offer the ability to add additional temperature sensors throughout your home, giving the device a better view of what the entire home environment is like as opposed to just the temperature near the thermostat. In many cases you can even set up different zone tolerances using these sensors, specifying which areas need to be kept at certain temperatures and which areas can have a bit more variance. This allows the smart thermostat to better decide when to turn on the heat or the air, making your entire home more comfortable in the process.

Maintenance Monitoring

HVAC repairs can be expensive, and regular maintenance is recommended as a way to catch potential problems before they have a chance to become major issues. A smart thermostat can help with this. Many smart thermostat models include maintenance monitors that not only keep track of how long it’s been since your last maintenance inspection but can also identify other potential problems. Some even track little things that you can do yourself like changing air filters regularly to keep your system in top shape.

Is It Time to Upgrade?

There have been a number of studies done on cost savings with smart thermostats and they all offer up the same general results: Upgrading to a smart thermostat can have a notable impact on your energy costs over the course of the year. There’s obviously an up-front cost to them, especially if you add sensors or additional temperature nodes, but they will pay for themselves in savings over time. Keep an eye on your energy costs and maintenance bills to get an idea of what you’re paying every year with your current thermostat, then consider whether upgrading to a smart thermostat might help you to get those costs under control.