Upgrading to a Smart Thermostat

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There are many ways to upgrade your home so that it becomes a smart home. You can watch what’s going on outside with a door bell. You can turn on and off lights. You can open your garage from your phone. Depending on what you want, you can easily make these changes.

If you are building a new home you can pay to have many of these upgrades done by your builder, but most of them are simple to do on any home whether it is a new or old. One change have debated on is a smart thermostat.

The Honeywell thermostat that came standard in our home

The thermostat that came with our house a standard thermostat; it was programmable but we never got around to programming it. By upgrading to a smart thermostat it learns our preferences and makes adjustments so we don’t have to. It’s advertised that it is a cost savings by being more efficient and if that is the case we’ll break even quickly.

If you live in Oregon you can get a coupon from the energy trust of Oregon to upgrade your thermostat for $100 off. We were able to get one during cyber week, so it ended up costing only $39. If you live in Washington and are a customer of NW Natural you could qualify for the coupon as well. Once you get the coupon you can go to your retailer of choice to purchase a new thermostat. Here is a link to Home Depot for your convenience.

We decided to get the Nest Thermostat E because it was the least expensive of the options. One difference with the more expensive Nest Learning Thermostat is that it comes with Farsight a feature that allows you to see the date and time displayed. With the Nest Thermostat E only the temperature is displayed.
ecobee thermostat.

The Nest Thermostat is made by Google and is compatible with the other google products as well as Alexa which is made by Amazon. If you want Alexa built in to your thermostat you would want to go with the

Thermostats are very easy to install and they each give instructions on how to remove your old one and install the new one. Taking the old one off and putting the new one on the wall took less time than programming the new thermostat. It’s as simple as taking out a couple of screw and removing a couple of wires.

Old thermostat wiring

If you want to save money on your heating and cooling bill than a smart thermostat can help with this. It’s simple to change out and with the coupon from Energy Trust it makes it much more affordable.

What kind of upgrades are you planning on doing yourself? Thanks for checking out the blog if you find it helpful please share it with your friends and comment on one of the posts!