Since their invention, household heating and cooling systems have changed the way homeowners live. No longer do we need to gather around the hearth at night for warmth or suffer through suffocatingly hot weather. Our homes can be whatever temperature we want them to be. Modern technology has advanced our home climate control capabilities further, giving us more tools than ever before to keep our homes comfortable.
Looking to make use of one of these new and exciting tools in your home? You may be interested in installing a smart thermostat. Combining computing technology with modern HVAC systems, a smart thermostat can change the way you live. That may sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but trust us, at Watts Heating and Cooling, we know a bit about heating and cooling. Here are just five of the many benefits of having a smart thermostat.
1. Ease of Use
Let’s be honest, did anyone ever really understand their first thermostat? Sure, maybe you adjusted some knobs or pushed some buttons to get to your ideal temperature, but did you get the results you wanted, or did you wake up to a boiling house in the middle of the night? It’s fine, we’ve all been there. Programming a thermostat can be confusing, and some people just decide to swear it off entirely.
Luckily, those days are behind you. One of the benefits of a smart thermostat is the ease of use. With much more clearly designed displays, you’ll be able to adjust the environment with ease. Have additional smart technology in your house? A smart thermostat can connect to that. Changing the temperature in your home can be as easy as asking your smart speaker to drop things down to 68 degrees.
2. Harness the Power of Machine Learning
With a smart thermostat, your heating and cooling can become easier to control over time. The longer you use it, the less you may find yourself needing to change it at all. Another benefit of a smart thermostat is having a learning system controlling your heating and cooling. Some come equipped with household movement sensors, allowing them to detect when people are up and active in your home. That means that, in addition to your input, your thermostat can figure out who’s at home and how to adjust the temperature in your home or in each room over the course of the day.
By learning your schedule, it can save energy on heating and cooling while you’re out for the day and make sure that your home is the perfect temperature when you return. This also helps it fix problems you may inadvertently cause. Worried about whether you left the AC running the whole time you were at work? Never fear, your smart thermostat is there to handle it.
3. Control Your HVAC Wherever You Are
A smart thermostat is much more interconnected than thermostats of the past. This interconnectivity opens up a whole new world of possibilities, allowing you to control your heating and cooling no matter where you happen to be. Many smart thermostats have smartphone apps that allow you to tap into the controls from anywhere you have an internet connection. At its most basic, this means that you can adjust the temperature without having to get up from the couch. While that’s a nice benefit, it’s is only scratching the surface.
Let’s say you decide to head home early from the office, but your heating isn’t scheduled to kick on for another five hours. With a smart thermostat, you can adjust the heat before you even hit the road. Or maybe you’re going on vacation and want to cut back on your heating and cooling usage while you’re out of town. Just access the app, and you can put your systems in a holding pattern until you get home. After a few weeks with remote control, you’ll see why remote access is one of the most popular benefits of a smart thermostat.
4. Get Notified of Changes and Needs
Heating and cooling are easy to forget about, especially if you’re not at home all the time to keep tabs on your system. Because of this, problems can sometimes slip past a homeowner’s notice. Maybe the indoor temperature is wandering out of your ideal range, or maybe there’s something wrong with the actual HVAC system in your home. By installing a smart thermostat, you can dedicate another set of eyes (so to speak) to watching the status of your home heating and cooling. It’s another one of the many benefits of a smart thermostat, giving you more visibility and insight into the inner workings of your home HVAC.
By letting you know when the temperature in your house changes beyond the usual, you’ll be able to adjust on the fly to keep things just how you like them. Some systems will also give you a heads up when it’s time to schedule routine maintenance or even if repairs are needed for something more immediate. Just sit back, relax, and let the smart thermostat handle the logistics for you.
5. Save On Energy Usage
The best long-term benefits of a smart thermostat are the savings on power usage and utility bills. It’s not some mechanical feature built into it; it all just ties back into how much a thermostat can learn. By monitoring and fine-tuning to your heating and cooling needs, a smart thermostat can precisely control the climate in your house. No overheating or overcooling, only using the exact amount of energy to maintain the temperature you want.
Additionally, the longer you have the thermostat the more it will be able to tell you about your energy-use habits. This data can be used to project how much energy you’ll use in the coming months, as well as find ways to make your home run with even more efficiency. Some models even encourage you to further push your energy-saving goals, giving you awards or ratings in monthly reports on your energy usage. Regardless of whether you’re in it for a five-star rating or if you just want to spend less money heating your home, the data is invaluable for getting the most value out of your smart thermostat.
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