Any recommendations for smart thermostats with remote sensors? Our older house is two stories, but only has one HVAC unit. The thermostat is downstairs which can make the heater run too much at night during the winter if we are not careful. I'm looking for a themostat where we can put a sensor in the upstairs bedroom that is used to control the temperature at night.

Ecobee (DIY) and Trane (professional) both have excellent smart thermostats with remote sensors. Not sure about the Ecobee but my previous house had a Trane unit where I could set it to control on the bedroom sensor at night and the den sensor during the day.

I put in 2 Nest's
hated them, reinstalled my old Honeywell Pro Series.
The Nest's would never work right, reviews are terrible

Big fan of ecobee. Remote sensors in bedrooms is great

Ecobee with remote sensors

Ecobee

VAXMaster said:

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Ecobee (DIY) and Trane (professional) both have excellent smart thermostats with remote sensors. Not sure about the Ecobee but my previous house had a Trane unit where I could set it to control on the bedroom sensor at night and the den sensor during the day.

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You can also do this on the Ecobee. We use this feature as well.

I also like the amount of data I can pull from the Ecobee.

Ecobee with remote sensors here.

I'm using the Honeywell T9 (one upstairs and one downstairs). Works great.

I have the Ecobee with remote sensors, but all it does (from what I can tell) is takes the average of all the sensors (including the thermostat) and that is what is shown as the temperature of your house. So it is useful, but not as useful as you may be hoping for. There is still only one controller for the whole house. You would still be setting the HVAC to turn on/off at what you determine is a "comfortable" temperature. It is nice to have the additional information for the temperature of other parts of the house.

Running Honeywell Homes connected with a RedLink on both floors for going on 5 years with no issues.

Heard horrible stories about Nests, good reviews on the Ecobee.

jamesf said:

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I have the Ecobee with remote sensors, but all it does (from what I can tell) is takes the average of all the sensors (including the thermostat) and that is what is shown as the temperature of your house. So it is useful, but not as useful as you may be hoping for. There is still only one controller for the whole house. You would still be setting the HVAC to turn on/off at what you determine is a "comfortable" temperature. It is nice to have the additional information for the temperature of other parts of the house.

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They're also occupancy sensors so it can ignore a sensor if no one is in that room. You can also set priority to a certain sensor for a particular schedule. For example you could prioritize your upstairs at night or between a certain a schedule.

This. I disabled the sensor on the actual thermostat because it would drop too quickly compared to my other rooms the AC would cycle off and the other rooms would still be hot. Enables me to cool rooms that take much longer to cool to reasonable temps.

I'll repeat. Stay away from Nest. Most HVAC technicians will tell you they are hell on equipment.

Aggie71013 said:

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This. I disabled the sensor on the actual thermostat because it would drop too quickly compared to my other rooms the AC would cycle off and the other rooms would still be hot. Enables me to cool rooms that take much longer to cool to reasonable temps.

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This is what I did as well. In fact it was the whole reason I got the Ecobee in the first place. The upstairs thermostat is at the top of the stairs, which is pretty open so in the winter it is just catching the temp of the heat rising from downstairs and was never calling for heat so the bedrooms were freezing. We installed the Ecobee and put sensors in all the rooms and have it set to not read the temp at the actual wall thermostat and has made a huge difference.

Another vote for ecobee. I've used them for 9 years and they are great. Mainly have them for the remote sensors which they work great for.

I'll just echo that you can choose what sensors you want the ecobee to go off of and when.

For our downstairs unit, it averages the bedroom sensor and thermostat for most schedules. At night, it ignores the thermostat and only uses the bedroom sensor.

We're doing a remodel which puts our upstairs thermostat in an area of the house open to the attic (briefly was even open to outside), we set that thermostat to always ignore the thermostat and just go off the sensor in my son's bedroom.