8.3

Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium

Like

• Full of smart features
• Great app
• Geofencing
• External sensors

Don't like

Some "smart" thermostats take your standard thermostat, add a Wi-Fi connection and an app that allows you to set the temperature remotely and call it a day. Then there's the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium. 

This $250 smart thermostat can be the centerpiece of an entire Ecobee smart home ecosystem if you wind up adding the company's smart doorbell or other home security devices. As a thermostat, it can set schedules, figure out when you're home and away, adjust the temperature for humidity and connect to cost-saving community energy systems.

It may be the Cadillac of thermostats, and it comes with a Cadillac price tag. Is it worth choosing over a Chevrolet?

I recently tested several smart thermostats, evaluating their features, apps, connectivity and user-friendliness. I also took price into consideration when choosing the best of the best. Here's what I found in my home testing of the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium.

Getting started: Installation and setup

Like most smart thermostats, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium requires a C-wire to provide it with power. Older HVAC systems may not have those installed, but fortunately this one comes with an adapter, so if you're mildly handy and not squeamish about wires, there are extra instructions to set that up.

Installation is handled on the Ecobee app, which provides thorough guidance, including my favorite step: asking you to take a picture of your current wiring, because it's so easy to forget which wire goes where. I've installed quite a few thermostats personally and through my testing of products, so your experience may vary based on your experience level, but I had no difficulties getting this one into the wall. It comes with an optional wall plate to cover up the area around your thermostat and make it pop, but you don't need to mount that part if you don't want to.

Ecobee offers a few different ways you can connect your thermostat to your Wi-Fi, including typing the network name and password right on the thermostat, but I think my network name was too long so it struggled to connect that way. I also got errors trying to connect it to my iPhone via Apple's HomeKit, which is supposed to be as easy as scanning a QR code. Those errors were resolved after I turned my phone and the thermostat off and on again, and from then on it was smooth sailing.

The thermostat offers a few different ways for it to learn your habits and set comfort settings for you. You can set up geofencing, which uses your phone to track when you're close to the thermostat and when you're away, allowing it to use more energy-saving settings while you're not home. It can also use your home and away behavior to better customize schedules to meet your habits, taking away some of the work of manually programming schedules.

If you want to manually program schedules, that's easy to do. You can do it right on the thermostat, which has a big (3-by-3-inch) touchscreen display. It's easy to set a schedule for one day and copy it to the next, meaning your weekdays can be evened out, or they can be changed if you operate on a different schedule. The app is great, but you don't need it to do most things.

A plethora of features

The Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium does things you might not expect. It can integrate with smart home and home security systems and it works with Alexa, HomeKit and Google Home. It has geofencing, allowing it to know when you're home or not and to set the temperature accordingly. There's more.

The Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium comes with an external room sensor, allowing it to keep track of multiple parts of your home. We all have that one room that gets extra cold, extra stuffy or extra hot, and having multiple room sensors is an important way to ensure your thermostat is capturing more information than just what's happening in front of its nose. 

The room sensor was incredibly easy to set up, as simple as scanning a QR code and putting it on a shelf. It's a cute little device (or a potential unplanned cat toy). With the room sensors, you can have your Ecobee thermostat "follow" you, detecting what rooms are occupied and setting the temperature to heat or cool the room that's occupied. For example, if I'm in my office in the morning, it can ensure the temperature there is nice while letting the living room get hotter or colder. Then when I get off work and want to lounge on the couch, it'll switch rooms. 

Perhaps my favorite feature, as someone who's looked at a lot of thermostats that have similar features, is that the Ecobee Smart thermostat Premium makes a half-decent Bluetooth speaker. It's a strange experience writing this review while listening to music on the same device that's setting the temperature, but that's technology.

Is it worth it?

If you're paying cash, you should think long and hard about whether a tricked-out thermostat is worth the cash. The US Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program estimates that an Energy Star smart thermostat will save an average of $50 per year, so in terms of cost savings, the payback period on something like the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium is half a decade. Compare that to less than two years for the Amazon Smart Thermostat, which can do a lot of what the Ecobee does.

A smart thermostat, like any technology purchase, is not always a purely money-saving venture. It's a lifestyle choice. You may want to invest in Ecobee's home security devices. You may want a wide range of control and information. You may want something that can play tunes on the wall of your living room. You may want a thermostat that has room sensors because your house heats and cools unevenly.

There is also the question of whether you'll pay full price. Utility companies, local governments and other entities routinely offer rebates, discounts and even free thermostats. Keep an eye out for one of these, and you might be able to snag a Cadillac for the price of a Chevrolet.

How we test smart thermostats

Most of the home energy products we test and evaluate here at CNET have a lot of numbers attached to them: the efficiency of solar panels and the power output of batteries. Not so with smart thermostats. All of the thermostats we've tested can perform the basic functions of turning your heater on when it's cold and your AC on when it's hot. While some of our scoring is based on tangible, mathematical data, it's mostly about the myriad ways you can interact with the thermostat to get the comfort level and energy savings you want.

We've experimented, tested and handled each of the thermostats mentioned on this list, including installing them on a testing rig that simulates a standard HVAC system, programming them and trying their various features. 

The 10-point scores we give smart thermostats are based on these metrics:

• 20% is based on the available smart home connectivity and other features, including geofencing and external room sensors.
• 20% is price, with a formula that rewards less expensive products. Devices that come with an external sensor included are scored based on their price minus the retail value of an external sensor.
• 60% is completely subjective, based on our assessment of what the device offers, how easy it is to install, how easy the app or interface is to use and what features it has that might be nonstandard for thermostats but helpful or useful for consumers.

Choosing a thermostat is a subjective and personal choice, and our goal in scoring is to highlight those products that do the most and do them well. Your buying decision should focus on your priorities, which might not align exactly with ours, so be sure to look at more than just a score when choosing a device you will probably interact with almost every day.