I replaced a $30 thermostat with a $150 smart one and my bill went up

Last month I swapped out my old dumb thermostat in Austin for one of those fancy wifi ones. I figured it would save me money by learning my schedule and adjusting itself. After 30 days my electric bill was actually $22 higher than the same month last year. I think the problem is it keeps turning the AC on when I'm not even home because it's trying to "optimize" something. Has anyone else seen their bill go up after switching to a smart thermostat?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_taylor29d ago

Yeah I feel your pain, I did the exact same thing up here in Dallas and my bill went up like $15 the first month. I convinced myself I was being all futuristic and smart but really I just have a fancy light switch that bullies me about my thermostat settings. Honestly I think I wasted more time checking the app on my phone than I ever saved in energy costs. But I will say after a couple months it started to level out, or maybe I just got used to paying more.

jakejones29d agoMost Upvoted

Man the $15 thing hits close to home. I'm up in Fort Worth and my first bill with my Nest was $17 more than the month before. I kept telling myself I was being smart and saving the planet but really I was just frustrated that my fancy thermostat kept kicking the AC on right when I was trying to sleep. I swear I opened that app like 20 times a day just to see if it was really doing anything useful. It took like three or four months before I stopped obsessing over every little change. Now I barely look at it except when I get an alert that my house is somehow 80 degrees when I'm at work.

knight.felix29d ago

Oh man, I gotta push back on this. You're probably looking at this the wrong way. $22 more on one bill doesn't tell you anything useful unless you compare it to the weather that month. Last year might have been cooler or less humid. The smart thermostat is doing exactly what you paid for it to do - it's keeping your house from getting too hot and humid so your AC doesn't have to work twice as hard when you get home. That "optimizing" you don't like is actually preventing your system from running for hours straight trying to drop the temp from 85 to 72 when you walk in the door. Give it a full season to learn your patterns, and mess with the settings more. Most people just slap them on the wall and never touch the schedule or home/away features.