Control your life a little better with a smart thermostat. Most people will say that a wifi enabled/controlled thermostat is a curious gadget that is unnecessary.

Those people have never awoken at 3am freezing because California weather decided to go from Summer to Arctic Tundra in the span of half a night. What do you do when you are too cold to get out of bed to switch your thermostat from cooling to heating?

Remote enabled thermostats are the middle ground between a system that will either heat or cool and a Jewish grandmother that decides that you are definitely too cold and need a sweater.

By going this middle ground you keep the convenience of remote access and the stability of control.

When we moved from a heater to a heater AND air conditioner we found that most thermostats do not automatically switch between the two. Yes you can set a temperature but the best these old fashioned devices can do is to EITHER cool to that temperature or heat to that temperature.

If you live in a place where the temperature dances swan lake across the board in the span of a day or two, controlling wich way it is set is your responsibility and early morning burden.

We installed the Honeywell Wifi Thermostat. Cheaper than going full grandma with a Nest system, the Honeywell allows you to set the upper and lower bounds for optimal temperature comfort. The system can live in this automatic setting indefinitely with its own power hookup and backup battery.

Installation was easily done by an unprepared layman with only prior electrocution experience. The directions super easy to follow and the size of the device covering where your old dumb thermostat used to be without having to patch up wall holes.

Best features so far have been the schedule, where you can set different setting for times of day and days of week (sleep in on a weekend in relative extra warmth) and the ability to turn it of and on remotely.

We have left for vacation forgetting to turn the system off manually only to remember that we have the power to push a remote button and save on our bill by not having an active system cooling and heating and empty house.

Also if you have such a system you can be like this guy, and finally get some sweet sweet revenge!

Next time: “Fix all the Posture – aka When Wearables Nag”.