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Honeywell announces Lyric, a competitor to the Nest smart thermostat

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Honeywell has announced the Lyric smart thermostat
Honeywell has announced the Lyric smart thermostat
Users can control and program the Lyric thermostat wherever they are via a mobile app
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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 control and program the Lyric thermostat wherever they are via a mobile app

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

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3 comments
Daishi
Honeywell sued Nest for a bunch of patents, most of which were duplicates of already expired patents: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/12/2942861/nest-answers-patent-lawsuit-honeywell-troll
Of the 6 patents Honeywell sued Nest for the only one that isn't expired is essentially allows for "power stealing" from the control wires rather than using a replaceable battery or common (power) wire which is at least kind of obvious.
I have a Nest and I love it, every component of it seems well thought out and designed starting with the baseplate and install. I'm glad to see Honeywell releasing a competing product instead of just trying to sue the competition but I think they have their work cut out for them.
Cyrous Gheyri
Both Nest and Honeywell smart thermostat need to be the smartest with using the most green HVAC. In almost all residential building there are pockets of energy that always go to waste . In attic you have heat energy and in crawl space or basement you have cool energy. These pockets of energy can be brought to living space with a thermostat that can sense three area (living space, attic, crawl space) using renewable such as solar by means of convection (issued US patent 8556689).
Grunchy
Unnecessarily complicated, no provable benefit. Still, there are gullible chumps to be fleeced... BTW how to tell if you are a gullible chump? You are convinced the smart thermostat is doing something for you. With no actual evidence.