Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I picked up this thermostat at Lowes. I had expected to pay $150 for Honeywell's touchscreen wifi thermostat or as much as $180 for last year's nest. I was pleasantly surprised to see a wifi thermostat option for around $120. I got the thing home, took down my old thermostat (which had 4 wires R, G, Y and W) and installed this one. I turned my furnace back on and... nothing. It turns out I didn't have a "c" wire. There were 6 wires coming from the furnace but only 4 of them were used. I removed the cover from my furnace and took a look. Sure enough there was a "C" spot with nothing hooked up to it so I stripped the (unused) blue wire going to my thermostat and connected it to "C", then went back upstairs and hooked up blue to "C". I turned on the furnace and the thermostat woke up. I thought I was done. I was wrong. I now had to connect to an adhoc network called "new_thermostat_somethingorother" and the only way to force my iPhone to believe it was the real internet was to go into airplane mode before choosing it. I got to the wifi setup page, picked my home wifi ssid and entered my password. I thought I was done. I was wrong. I went to honeywell's web site, created an account, entered my thermostat's mac address and checksum. I then got a very nice user interface for entering on times and off times. I was impressed. I thought I was done. I was wrong. The thermostat had to download a software update. I grow sick of buying stuff new and the first thing it has to do when it gets on the internet is send me away for up to half an hour while it updates its firmware. When the firmware update was over I thought I was done. I was wrong. It turns out that in my haste to get this thing on the 'net, I skipped setting the date and apparently it doesn't figure out what day it is over the INTERNET?!? When I turned on the heat, based on the time of day it went to 62 degrees. But it's Saturday, not Monday right? So I called Honeywell tech support and they had me hold UP and FAN for 30 seconds to get into a diagnostic mode. I then had to scroll to page 39 and change the one to a zero (to delete wifi settings). I could now get to a screen to verify my thermostat knew what day it was. Whew. Now I had to go back and program the wifi settings one last time. This was dumb. Just plain dumb. Hopefully Honeywell fixes this in a future software update to allow date and time to be set through the web interface or make it simpler to set on the thermostat without having to forget wifi settings. Dumb. This was painful. Painful, but mercifully brief. So why do I give this thing 5 stars? Because it works and works well. I don't mind an extra half hour or so of monkeying around and I'm pretty sure I'd have almost as much monkeying around if I paid twice as much for a Nest. Since my thermostat lives in a corner behind a grandfather clock, I cannot believe the nest can "just figure out" when I'm home and I'd rather have a wifi-ready, plain and simple, non-touchscreen thermostat than a Nest, because the Honeywell web site is well laid out and easy to use and there is an iOS app that allows me to get in and change settings from anywhere. Another plus for this thermostat is its shape, I don't have the paint I used in the living room and a small round Nest is going to leave an ugly white square where my old Honeywell manual thermostat used to be for people to see when they walk by the grandfather clock. In short if I bought the Nest, I had to spend up to twice as much AND worrying about matching a paint color from 10 years ago. I think Honeywell is on the right track with this thing only I say go a little further. Honeywell needs to come up with an even more manual-looking thermostat with only 3 buttons on the thing and have ALL the programming done via wifi. I kept stumbling into programming screens when I was looking for a way to find out what day this thing thought it was. The user interface for this thermostat is just awful. The user interface on the web is great. So why not scrap those extra 4 buttons and give us nothing but up/down and hold? Let us handle the rest over the air. I already own a wonderful touchscreen. It's called an iPhone. I don't need another expensive touchscreen attached to my living room wall.