Honeywell has introduced the Lyric T5, its latest Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat with support for Apple's HomeKit platform.
The Lyric T5 has a square, glossy black design with built-in touchscreen controls for adjusting the temperature and other settings, or the smart thermostat can be controlled at or away from home with an iPhone or iPad using the accompanying Honeywell Lyric app [Direct Link] from the App Store.
Meanwhile, like Honeywell's more expensive Lyric Round smart thermostat, HomeKit support enables the Lyric T5 to be controlled with Siri voice commands or through Apple's new Home app on iOS 10. The Lyric T5 is also compatible with Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, Stringify, and Yonomi, with other partners to follow.
The Lyric T5 can help homeowners save money by entering energy saving mode when someone leaves the home, based on the location of their iPhone or iPad via geofencing technology. Likewise, it can detect when the first person returns to start making the home comfortable ahead of time.
Like the Nest, ecobee3, and many other smart thermostats, the Lyric T5 is able to learn a home's heating and cooling cycles, enabling it to bring the home to the optimized temperature at the requested time. There is also the option to set up the thermostat on a more traditional seven-day schedule.
The thermostat's other features include auto changeover between heating and cooling mode, filter change reminders, and extreme temperature warnings.
Lyric T5 will be available in October for $149 online and at select retail stores. Honeywell products are typically available at, among other places, The Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace Hardware, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart.
Top Rated Comments
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.
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.
I haven't had direct experience with the others but I've been very happy with Ecobee.
[doublepost=1474990640][/doublepost]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.
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).