Honeywell Debuts New HomeKit-Enabled Lyric T5 Smart Thermostat

I'm designing my dream house, which I hope to build in a couple of years, I want it to be a smart home, so I'm glad to see the price of these coming down to something more reasonable.

Right now as it exists in my head (and in UnrealEngine), my house has five stories (counting the basement and the rooftop solarium) with an elevator and a lazy river that runs through it. Once I talk to an architect and a builder, I may have to scale it back to a single room with a window unit and a plastic tub in the yard for swimming.

The question is, does this operate over the local LAN or insist on using a remote server for eveything?

Nest loses all its smart features if it can't reach its internet server.

One thing I love about the philips Hue lighting system is that it doesn't depend on an external server to operate.

These thermostats are nice, but to me are seriously lacking in true innovation. Ecobee is nice in that it has multi room sensors from which to read temperature and determine when to use each to call for cooling or heating. But here is what is missing. The industry needs to add devices that can control the flow of air to rooms and the flow of air on the return side. This could be done with replacing the existing air registers with these new devices, or devices that sit inside the registers. With this capability, the thermostats could maximize the flow of air into the rooms calling for cooling or heating which would be more efficient. They could also for multi level homes pull return air from the upper floors where the heat rises when cooling, and visa versa with return air from the lower floors when heating. The system could dynamically prioritize which rooms to cool or heat based on where you are in the house at any time. This is what is needed next. Some may say you cannot just cutoff air to one room, and not deal with back pressures etc. I agree, but there are safe variations and certainly air can go out in secondary spaces, but perhaps with such capabilities, duct systems would be designed in the future to handle more peak capacity per room for these types of automatic balancing systems. This would reduce energy consumption, auto balance air distribution with seasonal changes, and reduce time to achieve comfort levels where you are in your house. Bring on the integration.

Bummer, requires a "C" wire. Nest is still the only "smart" thermostat that doesn't require it so I'm stuck with that. Nest is a pretty disappointing product offering much less utility than I'd had hoped. I actually don't expect to get any more utility from any other smart thermostat, but, would at least like it to integrate properly with HomeKit since all my other "smart home" devices do. Resolving the "C" wire issue in my house isn't really practical.

Ecobee comes with an adapter that will create a virtual C-wire. My install didn't need it but it was in the box.

What's the better buy? The T5, the Lyric Round or the Ecobee? I'm about to buy 2 of these.

I haven't had direct experience with the others but I've been very happy with Ecobee.

http://shop.keenhome.io/blogs/community/nest-and-future-smart-vent-integrations

Doesn't say Ecobee works with it but I assume this is the company, they were on sharktank a season or two ago. I've considered getting it for the bedrooms in our house to start with.

I like that a lot. Only in preorders though, I hope this doesn't become a kickstarter-esque vaporware product. I'd put these everywhere in my home.
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Seems like the room-sensor is kind of a joke though. the house I'm remodeling has central heating (very rare in New Hampshire) on an LP Gas furnace. I'll add central AC next year (even more rare in NH). Most houses up here use Pellet stove, wall-coils, 2-3 propane furnaces or just fireplaces to heat their house.

The Ducts coming off the hot air furnace don't have any controls. There's on or off. Seems like the room sensor won't allow my bedroom to get more heat than the living room..that technology is still a way off.

I've been happy with the room sensors. They can sense which room is occupied and then change the temp that drives the thermostat. This way if I'm in my office with lots of electronics (typically a few degrees warmer than the remainder of the house) it will adjust accordingly.

I really like the smart vents that someone else linked above. If Ecobee integrates those with the sensors to control flow to various rooms based upon different temps and occupancy I'll be very happy. I've also been looking at window controls although I haven't found anything with home kit support yet. Living on the beach we can rely mainly on natural temperature rather than AC, my ideal would be that the house opens windows to regulate temperature as much as possible but then closes when it cools off at night or if there is rain (rarely) or on those handful of days when it gets into AC territory. HomeKit controlling all of that and raising/lowering the Lutron shades would be perfect.

Seems like the room-sensor is kind of a joke though. the house I'm remodeling has central heating (very rare in New Hampshire) on an LP Gas furnace. I'll add central AC next year (even more rare in NH). Most houses up here use Pellet stove, wall-coils, 2-3 propane furnaces or just fireplaces to heat their house.

The Ducts coming off the hot air furnace don't have any controls. There's on or off. Seems like the room sensor won't allow my bedroom to get more heat than the living room..that technology is still a way off.

Correct, Ecobee doesn't redirect HVAC from one room to the other by itself.

If you're having a movie night in your living room, would you rather have the living room heated/cooled based based on:
A) the actual temperature of the living room (that you're sitting in)
B) the temperature of the hallway where your thermostat is mounted

To your point, if you are in your living room and Ecobee runs the HVAC until that room hits your set temperature, this can cause other rooms in your house to be hotter/colder, but nobody's in them at that moment, so ...

And if you have a situation where you're in your living room watching TV, and someone is in another room (or rooms), Ecobee will run the HVAC until the average temperature from the remote sensors in occupied rooms hits whatever temperature you've set.

Having had it for a year, I can't imagine running my HVAC based on the just one "temperature check" .. which is usually a traditional thermostat located in a central hallway (for most houses).