Here’s a way to control the temperature in your house from far, far away. The Ecobee “Smart Thermostat” has all the stuff you’d expect with a standard digital thermostat and adds a pretty nice-looking touchscreen interface and – gasp! – a wireless connection, allowing you to log in and control it via the web. It’s not super-duper expensive either, at $385. The company claims you’ll make that much back in under a year and a half with all the moolah you’ll save optimizing your energy usage.
The Smart Thermostat will ship in early 2009 but Ecobee is taking pre-orders. You’ll want to line up someone who knows what they’re doing to install the thing, too, as it’s “not a self-install device.”
[via TreeHugger]
Erik wrote at November 13th, 2008 at 9:32 am
This unit has only the bare minimum (to qualify for energy star) of 4 pre-programmed temp changes per day; has only 30 min resolution! Ridiculous that an advanced, expensive unit would have such obvious limitations.
Robert Shaw units provide 6 pre-programmed temp changes per day. This means you can have wake/breakfast, lunch, return home/dinner settings, or, as I use the extra settings: late-night, wake/breakfast, regular-day, return-home&dinner, after-dinner-tv-watching (yes i only really need 5).
Other units also provide 15 min or better resolution.
Apparently, there is still a lot of room for improvement in web accessible thermostats.
One question I have is does one have to register with them, or, if I have my own dynamic dns capable router, can I bypass their web site? Axis security cameras work this way: if you want, you can feed your web cam thru them and they’ll do the work of keeping track of its IP address if it ever changes, but, if you have your own dynamic dns capable router, you can bypass their hosting service and get directly to your web cam from the internet. I’d hate to have to go thru a third party permanently.