The boring, innocuous thermostat has a scary amount of impact on your home’s comfort and quality of life. You may not have given much thought to your thermostat, but like a dictator, it rules your heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (or “HVAC”) system with an iron fist. Thermostats try to rule the entire house but they only really care about the temperature of the one fixed location of the house they’re in. We’ve seen some amazing thermostats get introduced in the market but they all share this single flaw.
Most homes only have 1 or 2 thermostats for the whole home. When the thermostat turns on the heat or AC, the air pours out of ducts in all rooms indiscriminately. The whole house is either all on or off. Some rooms get a ton of air, while some don’t get enough. The living room could be a comfortable 72º while the bedroom is sweltering. We’ve already seen temperature differences higher than 15º!
This is like having a single light switch controlling all the lights in your home. It’d be pretty frustrating if all the lights in your home had to be all on, or all off. No matter how good the thermostat is, it just lacks the control needed to adjust for room by room comfort. It’s crazy that in a world where everything is personalized and just a click away, the thermostat still only has such limited control.
How thermostats work
Fundamentally, thermostats have a fairly straightforward job. They sense the temperature using some sort of sensor that compares that reading to a homeowner’s set point, and has some circuitry to control your HVAC system. This is how thermostats have worked for decades. Originally, analog thermostats used mercury switches to sense temperature, newer digital thermostats use thermistors. Some of the newest thermostats use even more advanced temperature sensors to get a more accurate reading.
That’s about it! There are smart thermostats out there now that allow homeowners to set their preferred temperature from their phone or internet. Some even offer innovative ways to save money, by shutting the system off when the home is vacant. The problem isn’t the smart thermostat - it’s that homeowners want to be comfortable in every room of their home and no smart thermostat can accomplish that on its own. We need a way of controlling every room separately, the way we have a light switch for every room.
How a thermostat impacts your comfort
Let’s say you’re in the living room, where the thermostat is, and you’re comfortable at 72º. All is well until you go to the master bedroom upstairs, where it’s swelteringly hot! What do we do? We adjust the thermostat a little colder, so the master bedroom will cool down, but now the living room and all the other rooms downstairs are freezing at 67º. If people are trying to get comfortable downstairs at the same time, you’ve just started the thermostat wars! Sound familiar?
This is what we mean when we say temperatures across rooms and floors in a home are really imbalanced when you rely solely on a thermostat. You can get one or a maybe even a few rooms comfortable, but not all of them. If you’ve been through this experience before, you know it can feel like a rigged carnival game that you just can’t win.
How to balance temperatures across your home
Even if a thermostat did understand different room temperatures, it still can’t control the amount of air going into different rooms. You can manually close vents if a room’s too hot or cold but the air needs to get redirected somewhere else. You have little control over where it goes and it usually ends up in the wrong room or causing potentially harmful buildups of pressure in the duct.
If you’re tired of running around opening and closing vents or trying to outsmart your thermostat, check out Ecovent – which supercharges your thermostat by allowing room by room temperature control. Unlike WiFi or smart thermostats, Ecovent can control the amount of hot or cool air going into individual rooms, letting you stay comfortable no matter what. We automagically get to know the unique characteristics of your home, creating a specialized heating and cooling plan that keeps you comfortable, and your HVAC system safe.
