Ecobee

Now, there are some Cadillac kinds.

There's a brand called Ecobee or Ecobee where you can even actually set...

It's almost like a separate...

In other rooms, like secondary thermostats, to where if there's a room, let's just say in your house, that doesn't have good air balance or it stays warmer during the summer or cooler during the winter because of insulation or whatever, something like that, you can put that Ecobee.

And the thermostat's not set really far away from that room.

You can put those Ecobees in, and it'll... that the cooling or the heating of that room.

So the reason I bring that up is because you can spend just about whatever you want to.

But I would say if you've got, you know, in your budget, three to five hundred dollars, you can you can get a lot.

How else would I know that My bill was going way up.

And my first bill was $1,200 when the Ecobee thermostats factory default was to kick the heat pumps off and go to resistive heat at 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

And this is in December.

So I got a rather rude awakening when winter arrived that first year.

The difference between this blunt approach and an intelligent, schedule-aware, occupancy-aware, weather-integrated system can represent a significant reduction in energy consumption without any reduction in comfort and, in many cases, with an improvement in comfort because the temperature is better calibrated to actual needs at each moment.

Smart thermostats from manufacturers like Nest, Ecobee, and Tado represent the first generation of AI-assisted home climate management, and they have been available long enough that their real-world energy-saving performance is well documented.

These devices use occupancy sensing, detecting whether people are actually in the house, combined with schedule learning and weather integration to optimize heating and cooling in a more sophisticated way than a conventional thermostat.

Nest's learning thermostat specifically build a model of your temperature preferences across different times of day and different conditions by observing the manual adjustments you make during the first few weeks of use, and then manages the system autonomously to reproduce those preferences without further input.

Zone-based temperature management is a capability that AI home climate systems have developed to a level that is genuinely useful for many households.

Different rooms in a house are used at different times and by different people with different temperature preferences, and heating or cooling every room to the same temperature at all times is wasteful in proportion to how many rooms you have that are not in use at any given moment.

Smart thermostat systems with multi-room temperature sensors available from Ecobee, Tado, and several other manufacturers can manage each room's temperature independently, ensuring that bedrooms are at the right temperature for sleeping without heating unused guest rooms or home offices to the same standard outside working hours.

The AI manages this zone-based approach automatically based on occupancy patterns and the schedules you establish rather than requiring you to manually adjust each zone's settings.

Yeah.

But on the other side of this, I also got an email or a text from my realtor yesterday from the people that purchased our old house being like, hey, do you have an instruction manual for the thermostat in the house? And I was like, that's an Ecobee thermostat.

It's super common these days, right? So I'm like, and again, these folks aren't technically savvy at all, whatever, right? And I was like, but I'm like, yeah.

I don't know.

It completely destroys the compressor and results in a $5,000 emergency repair bill.

To defend against that, hosts deploy smart thermostats like the Ecobee.

But they don't just monitor it, they restrict it.

They program a locked temperature range into the firmware.

Yeah,

like, do you remember those little batteries, like the little circle batteries in, like, my SimpliSafe has them? Or, like, my Ecobee sensors have them.

Those little

things.

I'm, I'm glad you brought this up.

I switched from, [laughs] I switched from a Tile wallet tracker to one by Ecobee, I think is the brand, and they are thin, credit card size, barely thicker than a credit card, and it has Qi charging.

It lasts, like, six months on a charge.

You just take the credit card and you set it right on the charger.