Home Energy: Our Honeywell Lyric Round Wi-Fi Thermostats

I work for Autodesk. Autodesk makes software for people who make things. If you've ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone, or watched a blockbuster film, chances are you've experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with our software. Autodesk gives you the power to make anything. For more information visit autodesk.com or follow @autodesk.

Over the years, since an element of Autodesk's vision is a more sustainable world, I have covered home improvements that I made to our former home in Alameda, California:

• A Modest Proposal: Results of My Home Energy Audit
• A Modest Proposal: Improvements based on My Home Energy Audit
• A Modest Proposal: The Dollars and Cents of My Home Energy Audit

Now that we've moved to Cypress, Texas, I have started to blog about our new home:

• Buying a Lennar Home Designed with AutoCAD
• A Bold Proposal: Solar Plans for My Home Energy in Cypress, Texas
• A Bold Proposal: Proposed Layout of Solar Panels for My Home in Cypress, Texas

As a continuation of that, our home came with two air conditioning/heating units and three thermostats. Our new thermostats are:

Our home is a Lennar NextGen home. It's a house with an attached in-law unit. One cooling/heating unit services the ground floor of the house. The second unit services the in-law unit and the upstairs of the house. Although there are only two cooling/heating units, there are three thermostats so that these areas can be serviced as desired.

What I like about these devices is their simplicity. The device itself has very few functions:

The most frequent usage will be simply turning the knob to the left or right. If desired, I can push the Weather button and get the outside temperature along with a forecast for the next few hours:

In addition, I can push the Home button and let the thermostat know that I'll be away for a while:

When I want to do something more complicated, I use the Honeywell Home app.

Since the thermostats are connected to my network, changes that I make on my smartphone using the app are reflected on the device. For example, I can set a heating schedule (numbers in orange below) so the house is warmed up before I shower and save money by lowering the temperature when we are safely under the warm covers of our bed.

I found that it was a nice feature that I could create a schedule for one thermostat and copy that to the other two.

The device can get a little fancy. It has a geofencing application where it can detect when I am away from home so the temperature doesn't have to be as programmed but can be automatically set to save money.

The geofencing feature eliminates the need to push the Home button and let the thermostat know how long I'll be away. Instead, it senses my absence (technically because my smartphone is not at home) and my return (when my smartphone comes back in proximity to our home). If I enable this feature, I can leave the house in winter and freeze my wife and mother-in-law. :-)

I look forward to a comfortable temperature and saving money as we leverage this technology in our home.

Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental). In addition to the work I do so that Autodesk tools help our customers do more and better with less, I am happy to take steps in my personal life to do more and better with less.