Upgrading to an ecobee4 Smart Thermostat

As you may know, we have spent the last year upgrading our older, yet new-to-us dream home into a tech-savvy smart home with the help of The Home Depot. All opinions are 100% mine.So far, we have upgraded to a smart garage door, installed a video doorbell, added a video security camera to the side of our house, upgraded our kitchen island lightbulbs to wifi enabled bulbs, installing smart light switchessmart locks and today we are discussing the perks of a smart thermostat!! 

The ecobee4 thermostat saves $$

Because this smart thermostat comes with room sensors, the ecobee4 thermostat can help sense occupancy, and you can set the thermostat to lower temperature based on whether it senses occupancy or not. As a result, the ecobee thermostat is Energy Star certified and US residents can save homeowners up to 23% on their heating and cooling costs by using this technology! 

ecobee4 has built in Alexa

You can ask the thermostat questions, like “Alexa what’s the weather,” or “Alexa turn on a timer for 30 minutes,” or “Alexa play today’s hits” and the ecobee4 kindly obliges. 

You can control the ecobee4 anywhere from your smart phone

The convenience of turning the thermostat up or down from the phone in your pocket is so awesome! We love it particularly because our house was built with the intent to control the temperature in four main areas. Our living/kitchen area, the master bedroom/office, the basement, and the upstairs. The previous owners separated the areas in order to customize the temperatures in those areas differently. It’s really cool because we can set each area at a different temperature! It’s so convenient to look at our phones and see what the temperature of the basement thermostat is set at.  Plus we put each ecobee at different settings vs the upstairs and main level thermostats at at easy glance on our phones.

When guests come and stay in the basement, it is amazing to check the temperature of that part of the house to make sure they are comfortable without invading on their privacy to check the thermostat. The kids have a separate thermostat upstairs also, so it’s nice that we can make sure they aren’t changing the temperature themselves.

The ecobee app is amazing.

It  walks you through the installation process step by step, and is by far the best instructions we have seen in this series. 

You can get a $50 rebate if you are a Utah resident.

{If you aren’t a Utahn, check for rebates in your area on the Home Depot website}.

The room sensors are state of the art!

Our guest room is colder than the other rooms around it and the thermostat is in a nearby hallway.  So we put an ecobee room sensor in that room for our guests to help the thermostat know when to kick on to keep our friends and family more comfortable. Plus they sense occupancy, so when the room is empty, the sensor knows!

They are tiny, look in the picture below of our guest room. It’s barely noticeable on the nightstand.  

It’s definitely worth it to make sure our guests aren’t freezing.

It was easy to sync the room sensor to our ecobee4 too. All I did was place the sensor nearby the ecobee and it recognized that it was nearby. 

We love having a smart thermostat. Isn’t technology incredible!?!

xoxo,

Brooke

If you are curious about the other smart home upgrades available out there, check out part 1-6 of our series below: 

Part 1: Smart Garage Door Opener by Chamberlain

Part 2: Ring Video Doorbell 

Part 3: Wifi enabled Phillips Light Bulbs

Part 4: Ring Security Camera

Part 5: Wifi Enabled Light Switches by Leviton

Part 6: Schlage Smart Locks 

 

Published on January 11, 2019

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