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Meross Debuts $70 Matter-Enabled Smart Thermostat
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Have to be a certain age to RELLY appreciate your comment .... and I'm there and then some! You made my day
I have two Nests and use Starling Hub. Had the Nests prior to using HomeKit and Starling Hub is excellent -- designed for integrating Nest products. Same for my Nest Hello doorbell. Has been flawless. The Nest really has Apple DNA in it.
I use Starling Hub to integrate my Nest devices with HomeKit. It is flawless.
I already did that, but its an expensive and annoying solution to add a feature that a 20-year-old dumb thermostat has by default, and would take no work at all to have as a first-screen button in a smart thermostat.
Also, while smart buttons are cool, the battery life of at least the one I got is atrocious; on top of the waste, having your smart buttons stop working every 2 months because the battery died really kills the magic of it all.
Yikes. Our Honeywell somewhat programmable simple $30 thermostat lasts about 1-2 years.
I’m considering ordering this because our ecobee has a “feature” whereby the display turns on whenever you walk by the thermostat. There is no way to turn this behaviour off. Given the layout of our home (a smallish bungalow) this is a mind-bogglingly stupid design. It’s no fun being blinded by the thermostat display when moving past it at night to get to the bathroom.
Comparing a smart button to a dumb thermostat is kind of apples to oranges--one is a temperature measure with a small relay, the other is a wireless transmitter--I really am disappointed in the battery life of my smart button (Wemo Scene Controller with Thread, if anybody is curious).
It's a bit baffling, too, if you compare something a lot more like apples-to-apples: Abode security system door/window sensors. Those are physically no bigger, and have the same basic functionality--send a pulse when actively triggered. Yet the battery in the sensors lasts at least a couple of years, and they're triggered far more often than the button--my button gets used at most a couple of times a day, while the front door opens at minimum a half dozen times a day, often quite a bit more than that. Heck, we had some of the ultra-slim Abode sensors installed for a monitoring project, and they lasted over a year despite triggering hundreds of times a day.
It may have to do with power requirements of Thread (the button) vs. I think Z-Wave (the Abode sensors), but that's more of an excuse than a good reason.
If anybody knows of an alternative controller that uses Thread, has at least two buttons, and doesn't suck (bonus points if it's rechargeable), I'd love to hear about it.
On a related note, the manual for this product is here and makes for good reading if you’re considering a purchase.
I have 6 smart plugs and 8 in wall switches, not one failure in the 3 years i have had them, but two out of the six shelly's have failed after 18 months. Maybe the lower current of 240v is better for them.
I do wonder how much failure rates are affected by what you plug into it--is it the electrical control hardware dying, or the electronics?
A thermostat is the best possible case--very low voltage and current, modest duty cycle, so if it fails, it's definitely the electronics failing. My Ecobee will hit 7 years old this week, and is still humming along fine, as is my 3-year-old Meross garage door opener, which similarly switches very low voltage and current.
On the other hand, I had a fancy Leviton fan smart switch die on me after less than a year. It was still responsive but was stuck "on", so you couldn't turn the fan off, indicating quite clearly the failure was in the power electronics, not the controller. Was that just bad luck, or did the fact it's speed controlling a motor make it way more likely to fry?
Most smart plugs use a hardware relay (you can hear the click), so welding closed is possible if it's switching a lot of current, but seems relatively less likely over the short-to-mid term. On that note, I'd think that the higher voltage of switching 240V would be slightly more likely to cause premature failure of a contactor or solid-state relay than a 120V connection with twice the current, since both cases are AC, although that's much more of an issue with higher-voltage DC.
