Ecobee 3 Smart Thermostat Only $137 Shipped
Hop on over to Walmart.com where they are offering this Ecobee 3 Lite Thermostat for only $136.89 shipped. This Wi-Fi enabled smart thermostat provides temperature adjustment based on the current weather, family schedules, desired settings and information from room sensors. How awesome is that?! As a comparison, Best Buy has this priced at $169.
This is a great thermostat and is cheaper than I paid for it, I believe. It handles hot/cold rooms very well by detecting where people are in a house and cooling/heating for those rooms. It also provides reports indicating how you can save money.
How cool! Thanks so much for the great review!
I did not realize that this was the lite version. It is still a good thermostat, but only for smaller places (where detecting the temperature in multiple rooms is not necessary). Personally, the multi-room feature was very important, so I would have passed on this deal. I could certainly see how this would be a great deal for a ranch style home with an open layout.
Does anyone know the difference between the ecobee 3 lite (this one) & the regular ecobee 3?
The lite doesn’t have the room sensors and, from what I understand, you can’t add them later.
the LIte does support the room sensors now I think, just doesn’t include them. It also can’t support a whole house humidifier, dehumidifier, or other accessory like the 3 can. It looks like it is OOS now anyway
Is a Hvac or contractor necessary to install this?
It depends on your existing system. Most of the time, no, you can do it yourself if you are handy with a screwdriver. In my case, because I had a Honeywell thermostat with the controller installed on the HVAC unit itself (so the thermostat was “dumb”), I needed a contractor to remove that controller and pass through the connections back to the thermostat. From what I understand, this is not a common installation.
If you have a Honeywell thermostat, you can tell if the controller is separate by looking at the wires attached to your thermostat. If there are just a few, then you may have the same situation as me, if there are several (usually 4-8, I believe, depending on the complexity of your system) then you just need to replace the thermostat and can do the installation yourself.
If you have any doubts, just ask your contractor on your semi-annual service visit. They should be able to tell you.
BTW, it took my contractor about 30 minutes per thermostat (I have two units) to remove the controller and install the new Ecobee thermostat.