The newest idea in home
automation is letting your thermostat track your smartphone, and only blast the
air conditioner when you're at home. WSJ Personal Tech Columnist
Geoffrey A. Fowler put Honeywell's new Lyric thermostat to the test.
When it's hotter than Hades
outside, wouldn't it be nice if your air conditioner knew you were coming home
and cooled things down inside?
That's the idea behind two new
"smart" climate-control systems, the $279 Honeywell Lyric thermostat
and the $279 Aros window air conditioner made by Quirky and General Electric.
GE -0.56% They blast the AC when you're
at home, and not when you're out.
Welcome to the era where your
AC keeps tabs on you. These Internet-connected appliances take commands from
apps and work by tracking the location of every smartphone in your
household—yours, your spouse's, and Grandma's too. (In a pinch, you can still
control them manually.)
I installed Lyric and Aros in
my San Francisco home, and in two friends' homes in warmer Bay Area climes. We
found both devices can go a long way toward liberating you from fiddling with
thermostat dials, and possibly saving energy. But neither are quite smart or
simple enough to just set and forget.
These appliances are attempts
at reinvention by Honeywell and GE, two of the biggest brands in climate
control, now under attack from Silicon Valley. Nest Labs raised the bar in two
ways when it launched its first consumer-installed "smart" thermostat
in 2011: First, we now expect our home heating and AC to be smartphone-controllable
and have some intelligence to supposedly help save us money. Second, many of us
no longer balk at paying $250 for a dial that used to cost less than $50.
To make their systems more
competitive, Honeywell and GE (working with partners at product development
firm Quirky) added Wi-Fi and remote-control apps and simplified their
interfaces with big, clear displays. But their biggest innovation is tracking
location.
The app knows when your family
is or isn't home by drawing a virtual circle around your house, visible only to
your smartphone, called a "geofence." In my tests, this worked as
promised: Every time I moved past the perimeter, my phone would quietly alert
the app, which then sent commands to the appliances via the Internet. Both were
also smart enough to understand my family—it conserved energy only when
everyone had left the house and kicked back on for the first person to return.
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