List Price: $76.67
Sale Price: $64.25
Today's Bonus: 16% Off
I live in an apartment, and the old honeywell thermostat was pretty basic. And located right above all of my electronics, so guaranteed to be reading the wrong temperature virtually all the time. This thermostat is a huge improvement. With an additional sensor (purchased separately) I can now move the sensor to my location (say, bedroom at night) and the heating system will mainly focus on that area instead of the living room. It can actually use 2 inside sensors and one external (for reference, I guess and all extra purchases, just so you know) and average the inside TC's to control the temperature. I would heartily recommend this setup. And it's not very difficult to program. The face plate can "pop off" the wall mounted base plate so you can do the programming in a more convenient place, like the couch or the kitchen table! Well done design-wise.
Update: Feb 2, 2013.
Well, the control unit has failed after about 2 months. I was just on the phone with customer support, they sent another thermostat when I expected an exact replacement. I'm surprised to see the other reviewer had his unit replaced. I was literally just told that the unit is not available (no longer manufactured, discontinued) and cannot be replaced. I'm not saying that their lying, as they may have decided that this unit is not reliable and have pulled it.
I will try to send the first unit back to the seller and get my money back. Then I will try to order an exact replacement and give it another try as I really do like the unit. It failed when I popped the "convenient" faceplate off to replace the backup battery. While we did get the unit working again in a basic capacity, the programmable functionality is gone. Unlike the other reviewer, my remote unit works just fine, and it can still be set to read off of that remote sensor. It just won't hold any program.
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I have bought two of these for two different homes. They work great if you have an unbalance heating system that gets some rooms hot while leaving others cold. In theory, you can just take the sensor (sold separately) with you from room to room and the thermostat will react to the temperature reading on the sensor, thus heating the room you have the sensor in to the requested temperature. Both houses where I have installed these have very poorly balanced heating systems. It is handy, with a few caveats.First off, installation can be a bit tricky if your existing system does not exactly match the diagrams in the installation manual. It took me a few tries, but I did get it wired properly in about an hour. If you're not comfortable with handyman projects, don't even look at installing this yourself. On the upside, this is designed for low-voltage systems, so there's not really any way to hurt yourself.
Secondly, this thermostat has WAY too many buttons. I don't even know what most of them do. Unless you are an utter and complete temperature-control geek, the functions and buttons on this are completely over-the-top. So much so that if you ever go to reprogram this you must have the manual, because you'll have a tough time remembering how to do it. Plenty of thermostats get by with four to six straightforward buttons to achieve all the functions a normal person needs...
Lastly, the range on the sensor isn't spectacular. One of the houses I installed this in has some cinderblock walls, and even with line of site to the thermostat, the sensor was out of range. It seems to have pretty good range through drywall, etc., but the cinderblock was too much.
Overall, this can be handy and is much cheaper than any other unit I've found with a remote sensor. If that sensor is what you need, this is worth the money, but if you don't need the remote, skip this one.
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