Thermostats & Climate

The best Honeywell thermostat for most homes in 2026 is the Honeywell Home X8S: it has a large touchscreen, room sensors, Matter support, and it works with Alexa, Google Home and Apple Home. But the X8S isn’t the only good option, and the right pick depends on your budget, your HVAC system, and the smart … Read more

What is aux heat on a thermostat? It’s the backup heat on a heat pump system. When the heat pump can’t keep your home warm on its own, the thermostat turns on a second heat source to help, and many thermostats show “Aux” on the screen while it runs. Seeing it on a cold morning … Read more

Do space heaters use a lot of electricity? Yes, compared with almost anything else you plug in. A typical space heater draws 1,500 watts on high, which is 1.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) for every hour it runs. At the current US average of about 18 cents per kWh, that’s roughly 27 cents an hour, or about … Read more

A smart space heater does what a regular one does, plus a few things that make it easier to live with: you can set it to an exact temperature, run it on a schedule, check it from your phone, and turn it up with Alexa or Google Assistant. For a cold bedroom, a home office, … Read more

A thermostat wiring diagram shows which wire connects to which terminal, and what each one tells your heating and cooling system to do. Once you know the letters (R, C, W, Y, G and O/B cover most homes), the wiring behind your thermostat is much easier to read. The one rule to remember: go by … Read more

A Nest thermostat not working usually shows you something: a “Delayed” countdown, an offline warning in the app, or a house that stays cold (or hot) while the display says it’s heating or cooling. These look like three different problems, but they often have the same cause. In a lot of homes, the thermostat simply … Read more

The best programmable thermostat is the one you’ll actually keep programmed. A schedule that lowers the heat while you’re at work or asleep is where the savings come from, and a thermostat that makes the schedule easy to set (and easy to change when your week changes) is the one that keeps saving. Today, every … Read more

ecobee sells three smart thermostats today: the Essential, the Enhanced, and the Premium. They use the same app, work with Apple Home, Alexa, and Google Home, and look a lot alike on the wall, so the ecobee Essential vs Enhanced vs Premium choice can be confusing. The real differences are in occupancy sensing, what comes … Read more

A HomeKit air purifier shows up in the Apple Home app next to your lights and thermostat, so you can turn it up with Siri, check the air quality from your phone, or have it switch to sleep mode at bedtime. The catch is that most of the big purifier brands (Levoit, Coway, Blueair, Winix) … Read more

A thermostat only knows the temperature where it hangs, which is usually a hallway. If the upstairs bedroom runs four degrees warmer or the home office is always cold, the hallway reading doesn’t help. A thermostat with remote sensor support fixes that: you put a small wireless sensor in the room you care about, and … Read more