Need a smart thermostat for a dumb house

Post date: 2018-04-26 06:59:14

My house has an old forced-hot-water heating system with radiators. It is dumb and slow. Which easy-to-program thermostat should we get?

The heating system has just one zone. It takes a long time for the radiators to heat up and then a long time for them to cool back down. Different radiators put out different amounts of heat, so some rooms can be too hot and others can be too cold.

We don't have central AC. We don't have any smart appliances.

We understand that a thermostat is not going to fix these problems. The heating system is what it is. But we'd still like to upgrade our thermostat. Specifically, we'd like to be able to

Program a daily schedule.

Override that program temporarily if the house feels too cold or too hot.

Override the program for a few days when we are going away, to save on heating costs and emissions.

We'd like to be able to do this without having to push unresponsive hard plastic buttons hundreds of times while reading a low resolution LCD screen to navigate through days days of the week and times of day.

We don't need to talk to our thermostat and we don't particularly want our thermostat to send our heating information to Cambridge Analytica.

When I look at reviews of smart thermostats, they all seem to focus on fancy heating systems with multiple zones, heat + AC, ventilation, and remote access via apps. I don't really care about any of that.

I just want a thermostat that is easy to use and program for our dumbass old forced hot water radiators.

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