Updated January 19, 2024

If you’re looking for more control over how comfortable you are in your Iowa home, more convenience in doing so, and more savings on your monthly energy bills, you may want to consider installing a smart thermostat.

A smart thermostat is a programmable thermostat that connects to your WiFi so you can control and monitor your home’s temperature with a click of a button from your smart device. You might think they sound like a gimmick, but they have many useful features and can offer you a wide range of benefits, such as:

  • Saving on Your Energy Bills
  • Remotely Changing Your Home’s Temperature
  • Alerting You When Your System Needs Service
  • Reporting Your Energy Usage

Read on to learn about these numerous benefits and how to decide if a smart thermostat is worth it for your needs and budget.

Want an experienced HVAC contractor for a quality smart thermostat installation?

Give Golden Rule a call at (515) 393-4526. Our highly trained technicians will help you choose the right smart thermostat for your home. We’ll provide you with our expert recommendations on various thermostat options, including upfront quotes for all of them.

Saving on Your Energy Bills

The best feature of a smart thermostat is that it comes equipped with learning features. It will observe how your household normally changes your home’s thermostat settings throughout the day. Once it has collected enough data from your movement patterns and how long it takes a room to get to your desired temperature, it will automatically set a schedule that will conserve the most energy while keeping your home at a comfortable temperature for you.

A smart thermostat can also come with “geofencing” capabilities that can sense when you’re home or away. The thermostat communicates with your smartphone and adjusts temperature settings once you’ve crossed a set electronic boundary, letting the thermostat know you’re on the way home.

Both a smart thermostat’s learning features and geofencing capabilities help to optimize your household’s energy consumption, reducing your energy costs and taking the legwork out of manually adjusting the temperature throughout the day. For example, if your household is away from home during the workday, the smart thermostat will adjust the temperature to conserve energy and only return to normal settings once you’ve re-entered the predetermined electronic boundaries. Doing so allows your HVAC system to work less when your home is empty. And the less it has to work, the lower your monthly energy bills will be.

Remotely Changing Your Home’s Temperature

Have you ever gone on vacation only to realize that you forgot to change the temperature in your home before you left? Not to worry, a smart thermostat can allow you to remotely control and monitor your HVAC system no matter where you are, as long as you have a cellular connection. Whether you’re down the road or have left the country, you won’t have to worry about forgetting to change your thermostat before leaving the house, and no more paying to heat or cool an empty house.

Smart thermostats come with a corresponding app that you can use to check your home’s temperature, change the thermostat settings, access energy usage reports, and more. Even with a thermostat’s geofencing and learning features, you’ll want to be able to monitor and control it remotely in case you want to change the temperature more drastically than on an everyday basis.

Not to mention, you’ll be able to take action if you spot anything out of the ordinary, such as your furnace no longer heating your home in the middle of winter. You’ll be able to immediately call a house sitter to prevent your pipes from bursting until a plumber arrives or a technician to repair your furnace, saving you potentially thousands of dollars in damage.

Alerting You When Your System Needs Service

While most of us know the importance of maintaining our HVAC systems to extend their lifespans and perform at their best, it’s easy to push checking when your last service date was or whether your air filters are dirty to the bottom of the priority list.

With a smart thermostat, you’ll receive automatic reminders alerting you of any needed maintenance or repairs, removing any hassle or manual effort on your part. In addition, it can also send you regular updates and alerts about your home’s indoor air quality if you want to monitor the relative humidity and pollen levels.

You can also enroll in Golden Rule’s Gold Club maintenance plan, and we’ll call you to remind you about your next maintenance appointment. Plan members also receive three comprehensive precision heating, cooling, and plumbing checks. Contact us today to enroll or learn more.

Reporting Your Energy Usage

Most smart thermostats will send you an energy summary report via smartphone app or email. These reports will show your energy usage trends over time, the energy efficiency of your HVAC system compared to similar homes in Iowa, and how much energy you’ve saved due to better scheduling, good thermostat settings, nicer weather outside, etc.

If you use more energy than normal for one month, the smart thermostat’s report will show you exactly where those increases came from. This provided data along with tips for better energy consumption can help reduce your monthly energy bills, improve home efficiency, and still stay comfortable.

Ready to Install Your Smart Thermostat? Contact Golden Rule.

For over 20 years, Des Moines Metro homeowners have relied on Golden Rule to install trusted HVAC equipment, including thermostats in their homes. When you schedule a smart thermostat installation with our team of trusted professionals, we’ll provide you with various system recommendations suited for your home and budget. Our customers trust us because we honor a 100% satisfaction guarantee, have thousands of 5-star reviews backing up our work, and provide labor warranties for our installations.

You can call us at (515) 393-4526 or click the button below to start improving your home’s comfort and efficiency today.

Contact Us Today for Heating & Cooling Service!


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