Customer Reviews

Honeywell TH8320U1008 7day 3/h 2/c Vision PRO 8000 Touchscreen Programmable Thermostat

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I just had a new AC system put in, and the installer suggested I replace my Honeywell Chromagraph III, which I loved. However, he was right and it was old, and had no backlight, so at night I had to keep a flashlight nearby. He wanted to go with another brand, but with my previous experience with Honeywell, and because of the excellent reviews here, I insisted on the Honeywell TH8320. I don't regret it for a second. Does everything my previous thermostat did, and more! Like the other unit, it automatically switches from heat to cool (but NOTE: it comes set as a default as Heat OR Cool, so you have to go into the Installer instructions to make it automatic, but it's easy to do that), it can have an always-ON night light (bye bye to that flashlight now!), it has a FAN Circulation mode (runs 35% of the time, which is great and at night you aren't frozen out), it has a wonderfully easy to use touch screen, and this one can do a whole lot of other things I don't need (like run 3 heat and 2 cool systems, plus heat pumps and emergency heat). Basically, all 4 of the Honeywell 8000 units are nearly identical -- 3 are supposed to be installed by professional installers (the 8320, which is this unit; the 8321 which adds humidity control, and the 8110, which only has hook ups for 1 heat and 1 cool system but has all the same features), and the 8500, which is designed as a do-it yourself thermostat. I don't have that one, but because my 8320 had 2 manuals (one for the homeowner and one for the installer, my guess is that the 8500 tells you everything you need to know without pretending it is for the professional installer). And believe me, my installer didn't even look at the installer manual and didn't know how to to switch to the fully automatic function or the night light, and he didn't have a clue that there is a special installer TEST program to test his installation, but luckily I read BOTH manuals and showed him. So if you get one of these units -- and I highly recommend them -- make sure you read BOTH manuals. As I said, the Installer manual has some very important features. But the unit itself is great, and even my wife loves it!

I have a habit of replacing thermostats in houses with high tech, programmable ones that try but never really make it "easier" to use. IE, the wife says, "how do I make it warmer in here?" and I reply "push the red button." What seems obvious to one person, it's necessarily so to another.

So we've had a junky old thermostat in this latest home of ours and we absolutely hated it. It was easy to set (move the little lever on top left or right) but doing so made a HUGE difference (+/-5 degrees) and it was impossible to ever get it set "just right." Even when set close to where we wanted, the temperature swung about 5 degrees before activation/deactivation so it was always either too warm or too cold.

I finally fixed it with this thermostat. This is easily the best thermostat I've ever owned. Installing it was much less problematic than others I have bought. I'm not a contractor but neither do I fear yanking the panel off my heat pump/furnace to see how it's wired, and wire up the thermostat accordingly. The manual walks you right through setting up the "one time" setup options and then voila, it works!

Programming is a cinch. My wife has made programming changes to it a few times so that makes two of us that think the interface is very user-friendly. We leave the backlight on low all the time, so it is easy to find and alter in the middle of the night, which we do very infrequently now that we've got it set "just right."

One gotcha: by default, temperature settings and times are "targets" and this thermostat will attempt to be at the target temperature at the set time. So if you have it set to warm up the house to 68° at 7AM, the furnace will kick on before then to make sure the house is warmed up to 68 at 7.

Bah! I'm still happily under the comforter at 6:30 and if the heat kicks on, I start roasting and wake up. Not good! But that is easy to change.

I also bought the outdoor temp sensor, which I'll get around to hooking up soon...

UPDATE: I did get that temp sensor hooked up last summer, and it works GREAT! We refer to it far more often than walking over to the window to look at the outdoor thermometer. The thermostat has continued to work flawlessly. So well, we nearly forget that the thermostat exists.

This thermostat has lots of capability. Easy to program. Easy to override for temporary temperature. Note an important capability that only this unit has is the air circulation feature where the blower/fan runs 20min in every hour. This moves the air and prevents cold/hot spots. The temperature in the house will be uniform and comfortable.

My wife and I had suffered with an old mechanical thermostat for several years but I held off buying a digital replacement because I couldn't find clear documentation on heating systems on the net. I recently did another google search and turned up sufficently clear instructions so I went ahead with the purchase.

It's really a shame that this upgrade is not documented more clearly because with clear instructions it really is a trivial upgrade and it has made a huge improvement in our homes temperature stability.

After some fairly complete reseach on the web which proabably took about 1 hour, it took me another hour to install and setup the new thermostat.

While I haven't had the new thermostat for long enough to know if it is reducing our electricity consumption, given how precisely it controls our temperature and automatically reduces consumption during times when we're not home or asleep, I expect it to make a big difference.

The thermostat allows one to program 4 distinct periods per day(with different settings per day of week), each with a different target temperature. The thermostat's microcontroller then tries to adjust the heating and cooling to hit those targets. It is my understanding that it learns over time how early it needs to start making a temperature adjustment based on previous attemps. I have not really experimented with this but it does appear to come very close to achieveing the exact programed temperatures at the programed time.

I really wish I had made this upgrade years earlier.

This thermostat is great! At first it seemed a little daunting, but once I read through the instructions once and tried it, it was a lot more intuitive than I thought it would be. Now it is easy to program, easy to override, and saves me money on heating or cooling rooms when they aren't being used. I program the playroom for heating in the early morning on weekends when the kids get up early to watch cartoons, and leave it off the rest of the week. The four periods a day are enough to cover most any situation. It gives a nice backlight glow when you use it and it can be a nightlight if you leave the backlight on. I dreaded changing thermostats, but I bought one and then bought two more for the other parts of my house. It works great!

I'm very pleased with the product which I find easy to program and use. I would certainly recommend this model and am glad I purchased it. I think the installation was more involved than I thought and whether it was compounded by the fact that I was replacing a very outdated thermostat or was just confusing (wasn't sure exactly what type of heat pump I had installed) - it took much longer than anticipated. In the end I had my friend who is a heating and a/c guy stop by to see what I had done wrong - and he corrected it. If you are a handy person - go for it. Otherwise you might want to have a technician install. Again, after getting by the installation - it has surpassed by expectations.

Buyer beware....I purchased this thermostat justifying the cost versus other models with the energy efficiency. After owning the model only two years, it has been deemed "not fixable" by Honeywell but is not being replaced under the five year warrnaty as stated in the book because it was purchased online and not installed by a technician. The install is not that difficult and it obviously worked fine, but now they claim that the policy is void if not installed by a professional. If you want the warranty, buy elsewhere.

This is a nice looking, easy to use stat, with a lot of cool features, just as the other reviews state. However, I took mine down after a month because it drove me crazy. The problem with it is it tries to be too accurate! The furnace or AC keeps turning on or off too much. There is no way to adjust it to give a +/- 1 or 2 degree variance, so it tries to keep your house at EXACTLY whatever degree you set it at, all that does is wear out your equipment (igniter, compressor) prematurely. Every other t-stat I have ever owned (even cheapo ones) have had a place to set the over-run and under-run, but not this one. I called Honeywell on this and was told that Honeywell has decided that people can feel one degree change in temp. so the feature was removed in this (premium) stat.

This model thermostat is actually a "professional" model, in that it was designed to be installed by an HVAC pro. However, a DIYer can easily install it, as long as you know exactly what type of system you have and remember to set the proper option settings.

I have installed several retail thermostats over the years, and they all worked right out of the box. However, when I installed this one, my heat and cooling were reversed. I looked through the manual and found that you must use the menu system to specify the proper cooling system type (I have a heat pump). Once the setting was correct, it worked perfectly, and is by far the best thermostat that I've had.

I recently bought this product because I got tired of setting my manual thermostat everyday. I've had it for a few days and so far it's been easy to use and program, the touchscreen is the icing on the cake.

Things you should know before installing:

1) Look up wiring diagrams for your current thermostat to figure out which wires do what. This will help you with wiring your honeywell..

2) Know if your heating system is multi-stage (with Emergency or Aux heat, etc). This will help you configure your Honeywell to the type of system you have.

Once you know this information, installation isn't all that difficult. Now, the interface for configuring advanced options on the honeywell takes a little deciphering but is easy to understand. It even comes with 4 testing modes to let you know if you've configured it right. The documentation is short, but has enough information to let you figure things out on your own.

All-in-all I'm very pleased with the customization abilities, touchscreen interface, and documentation that came with the product.