Honeywell takes on Nest with Single Zone Thermostat

With heating prices on the rise and the threat of colder winters, a smart thermostat makes a lot of sense. New to the arena is Honeywell, which has just announced its Single Zone Thermostat.

As with Nest, the Single Zone replaces your existing heating controls, letting you adjust everything from your smartphone, either locally of over the internet. By being able to monitor and control your home’s temperature from anywhere, you can save money and energy by only heating your home when it needs it.

In some regards Nest is the smarter system, as its thermostat learns how your house operates over time, adjusting your heating settings automatically to make them the most energy efficient.

With the Honeywell Single Zone Thermostat, you have to manually program your schedules (hot water and heating are supported). It’s a complete seven-day system, letting you make changes to by the day, with all settings being saved to the cloud via the provided internet gateway.

Where Honeywell gets a real advantage, is that the Single Zone Thermostat is compatible with the company’s excellent Evohome system. This gives you complete room-by-room control, letting you set each one individually, so that you’re not heating parts of your home that you’re not using.

It works by replacing all of the thermostatic radiator valves in your home with smart ones that talk to the internet gateway and controller. Its downside is that it’s fairly expensive, even for modest-sized homes.

However, with the new Single Zone Thermostat, you can start off small and expand to the full system later if you like what you see. The product is available for £140 (£39 less than the Nest), which includes the thermostat and the required internet gateway. We’ll bring you a full review once samples are available to see how well the system stacks up against Evohome and the competition.