Vent: My $800 smart thermostat made my heating bill go up 15%

Everyone online swears by these things for savings but mine kept turning the heat on when I wasn't home because it "learned" wrong. Has anyone else had a thermostat that actually cost you more money in the long run?

3 comments

3 Comments

robin6283d ago

Read a article the other day that said a lot of those "smart" thermostats actually push people to use more energy, not less. The algorithms just don't figure out your real schedule... they guess based on some average and end up running the heat when nobody's home. Turned off the learning feature on mine and just set a simple schedule myself, bill went right back down. Those things are smarter than they need to be sometimes.

mary_west3d ago

Not kidding, my cousin's smart thermostat decided one winter that the house should be 74 degrees at 2am because it "learned" he liked to get up and walk around at night... the thing was adjusting for some phantom habit he never even had. He ended up just taping a piece of paper over the camera and programming it like a dumb old thermostat. Technology tries too hard sometimes, you know?

joel_clark372d ago

Taping the camera is smart, I turned off the learning mode on mine after it jacked up the heat during a vacation.