Honeywell has announced a new thermostat, Lyric, that tracks the user's location via their smartphone and adjusts the temperature of their home accordingly. It figures out when a household is empty and when residents are on their way home. Users can expect reduced energy usage and costs.
Traditional "dumb" thermostats generally allow users to set the temperature based on the time of day, and the central heating will work to achieve that regardless of other factors. More recent smart thermostats, such as the newly Google-owned Nest, profess to learn the rhythm of a household over time, based on temperature adjustments made by their users.
Lyric is based on the assumption that people do not live exactly the same routine, day by day. It uses an app on the user's smartphone to tell when they are coming and going, in order to then heat or cool their house to the preferred temperature. When it recognizes that a house is empty, Lyric adopts an energy-saving mode.
In addition to a user’s location, Lyrics takes other factors into account, such as indoor temperature (obviously), outdoor temperature, humidity and weather. It uses these factors to "fine tune" the conditions within a house based on the user’s preferences. Honeywell says that this functionality is something that "no other do-it-yourself Wi-Fi thermostat on the market today does."
Users can adjust the Lyric settings manually using the thermostat itself or via the Lyric app wherever they are. The app is available on both iOS and Android. Users can also access weather information via the thermostat and set the preferred temperature for when they are out of the house.
The Lyric thermostat will be available from August, retailing at a recommended US$279.
The video below provides an introduction the the Honeywell Lyric smart thermostat.
Product page: Lyric
