LESLIE: Michelle in Pennsylvania needs help to prevent uneven heating. What’s going on at your money pit?
MICHELLE: I have a pretty big house with lots of windows. And so I want to kind of section off parts of the house that I don’t really live in. Problem is those parts of the house are the formal living, formal dining room and that’s where my thermostat is located.
TOM: Ah, OK.
MICHELLE: So, yeah. So I feel like if I lower the thermostat, then it’s going to kick on even harder.
TOM: Yeah, Michelle, there is a solution to prevent uneven heating and it comes in the form of a thermostat – a smart thermostat. And what I’m thinking of is a thermostat that’s called an ecobee – It’s e-c-o-b-e-e. And what’s different about the ecobee Smart Thermostat – it has all the technology you’ll see in other WiFi thermostats, like the fact that you can control it from your smartphone and knows when you’re home, knows when you’re away.
But what ecobee also has are wireless remote sensors, so you can put sensors in different parts of the room, different parts of the house. And then you could tell the heating system what the temperature should be in that room. And it should read that and determine whether it should go on or off. So when the rooms that you don’t use that much, you could have a very cold temperature and the rooms that you do use, you could have a very warm temperature. And it would kind of read just that particular area and not the area where the original thermostat is mounted. Does that make sense?
MICHELLE: Yeah, it does. So what’s something like that going to run?
TOM: Yeah, it’s not terribly expensive and the installation is sort of DIY. I think they’re probably a couple hundred bucks but go to ecobee.com – e-c-o-b-e-e – and you can shop online or you can find it on Amazon. I think it’s probably the answer to your heat distribution problems, because heat pumps are expensive to run. And so you want to make sure that you’re using the thermostat properly.
MICHELLE: Very good. Thank you.
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