I really appreciate mine. My big use case is that we go away for a week or two over winter sometimes and turn the house down to 55F. The radiators take quite a while to heat the house back up from that temperature, so I turn the temperature back up remotely the morning before we fly back.

That said, I'm quite annoyed that Google is nuking my perfectly functional thermostat, and I will be buying an Ecobee to replace it, and integrating it with home assistant.

So you use smart thermostat functionality once a year? What’s wrong with wearing jackets indoors for half a day once a year :)

55F is the temp I know a lot of people keep their house at in the winter. Mostly older poorly insulated homes where the bill will be absurd if they put it at 72*. Sweaters work. So do blankets.

They do! But my hands hurt typing at 55 after a while and my children get grumpy. I put a lot of insulation and air sealing into my house when I bought it and our heating bills are ... ok. About $250/month during the colder months to keep it at 65-66 in the main floor. I can't imagine 72.

the more likely case is they just leave it on normal when they are gone - like everyone else

It's expensive to run a propane-fueled indirect-fire boiler when you're not home.

In case you've never done it, let your house get into low 40's (F) and it takes days to warm up. The air gets warm fast, but your bed and the floor take a long time to warm up.

When out for some time in the winter I leave things at 14C. (Canadian winters, mind you). Doesn’t take days to warm up when we’re back. And if so - what? People live in places with slightly-above-zero temps without central heating and amazingly they manage to survive. Blankets and jackets are a thing.

It's like four-ish times per year but - nothing's wrong with it, I just prefer the house being up to temperature when I get home. 65 is more comfortable to us than 50 or 55. (Long trips we drop it to 50, long weekend trips to visit grandparent we put it to 55).

Convenience and comfort are nice.

We do the same thing with the air conditioning, but the AC cools the house a lot faster than the radiators heat it. But it's still nice that the house automatically transitions to away and turns off the air conditioning during the day when nobody's home.

Well beyond a basic dumb thermostat I like that my EcoBee can use several wireless temperature sensors. During the day I have it set to only use the downstairs sensors and at night it only uses the upstairs sensors.

Can a $20 Honeywell thermostat do that with wireless sensors? If it can, I will get one.

The issue that the Nest solved for me was figuring out how long it took for the hot water to get to the radiators, and what the bounce looked like after it got there. It'll stop calling for heat before it reaches the final temp because it will still keep going up.

It doesn't need to be cloud-connected to do so, but that's not a feature I'm aware a $20 Honeywell has.

I used to have a Honeywell wi-fi thermostat. It looked like any other thermostat you've ever seen, except you could connect it to a home hub. It was nice because you could exactly what you're describing, but you could also do it in the app.

What made it worth it was being able to turn off the air or heat when you weren't home automatically. Now all or the "AI training" garbage? Yeah, forget that. I used to work in an office with a nest and it was torture if you showed up too early if stayed a little too late.

Everyone always says this stuff, but man these things are such garbage to use: terrible user interface, LCD screen with random blinking elements to tell you that's being edited, response rate slower than a ping to Mars. Modern app-connected thermostats are so much better.

I have the same thing and to be honest, if I had to replace a $200 thermostat every 2 years I would gladly do it. In fact, this whole thing has made me go and research which thermostat will fit where I live.

It's starting to look like when you buy any kind of electronics gizmo with a UI, your choices are limited to:

1. A non-smart device that will work forever but looks and feels like it's still in the 90s

2. A device with a nice, responsive UI, but destined for the landfill because it's chained to a cloud service.

Why are these things mutually exclusive? Across so many product categories, there's seemingly few or no options for a nice UI but without dependence on an Internet service that will inevitably shut down.

Because people won't pay (or the companies(' research) don't think they'll pay) much for the hardware, so it's a loss leader or barely profitable promotion for the subscription service.

Not that straightforwardly in Nest's particular case to be fair, but a lead in to other products, and Nest was perhaps bought by Google before having to worry too much about profit margins(?).

The key usecases for me are:

Adjusting the thermostat (which is downstairs) from bed.

At the airport - oh shit did I turn off the AC for the two weeks we'll be away? Ok I just did.

I got a Honeywell Sensi thermostat that can do that, and also works without an internet connection. Better things are possible.

Luckily, this can all be achieved using a Wi-Fi or (even better) a Z-Wave thermostat that is 100% locally-controlled using something like Home Assistant or any number of other solutions.

The guy I replied to was asking why you'd want an Internet connected thermostat.

I am a HA guy and prior to my ecobee I ran an American Radio Thermostat with local HA support and you could control over curl. But the wifi module was so old that no modern device connected to it when I had to reset it up.

But I agree zwave plus HA are a great option too.

Same. My Nest has probably paid for itself in terms of me being able to remotely disable it while away on trips

I like being able to adjust HVAC based on temperature sensors that are not co-located with the input keypad.

Being able to use the temp reading in a specific room is choice.