Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent upgrade, should have bought this a year ago, March 10, 2007
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.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You can't go wrong!, July 20, 2008
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!
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Thermostat, January 18, 2007
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.
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