love this new thermostat, replacing my 10 y.o. programmable honeywell thermostat. Before buying this, I tried the Google Nest and absolutely hated it! So glad I went back to Honeywell ... the leaders in thermostats.
I had previously owned the Honeywell T5 Smart Thermostat and was happy with how it operated for the most part for a number of years. When it started to have some connectivity issues I decided it was time to upgrade. I debated getting the "Amazon Smart Thermostat" since it was created by Honeywell, and the price was good, but I was swayed over the to the T9 because of some the Amazon Thermostat limitations, and I liked some of the additional features the T9 has.
First off if you are upgrading from any of the Honeywell T-Series thermostats (or the Amazon one for that matter) the wall plate is exactly the same so you just unplug the old one and plug the new one in. in my house I have a radiant heat boiler for heating, and a forced draft AC. So basically two separate systems for heating a cooling. The T9 not only is able to combine them in a single thermostat, but it is able to understand that the blower fan should not come on when the heater is working. Also during the set up it verified if it was a hot water or steam heat system. That was a first for any of my thermostats past or present.
Setting the thermostat up is pretty straight forward. It connected to my wireless (2,4Ghz) just fine, even though I have a mesh WiFi network, and that is not always the case with many devices that require 2.4Ghz). It also completed the set up BEFORE it performed a software upgrade. So I did not have a three minute pause in the middle waiting for software updates. I already had the Honeywell home application on my cellphone, so adding the new thermostat to my account was a breeze. It would have been nice if there was a way to clone my schedule over from the old one, but that is not really a big deal. Overall it works great and looks nice on the wall, and so far I am not having any of the connectivity issues that showed up on the T5.
Other thoughts: - I appreciate that you can use the thermostat to perform a majority of the settings instead of being forced to use the phone app like a lot of other units like the Nest line. Exceptions being things like Geofencing that is tied to the cell phone, or Honeywell account settings.
- The display is bright by default. I mean really bright. I ended up turning my non-active display all the way down to 10% (from 70%) and the sleep mode to 0% at night since there is no reason for it to light up the room after 9:30 at night if you are not interacting with it.
- Alexa works great with the T9, and if you have remote sensors, you ask Alexa the temp in the individual rooms you have them installed.
- If you use the remote sensors you can prioritize the heating an cooling a few different ways such as the average temp in you select it to throughout the house, the temp in the room you have sensors if it detects movement, or you can pick one sensor and make it the room that the thermostat uses to manage it's heating and cooling.
If you have multiple people living in the house, you will need everyone to have the app installed if you want to use Geofencing properly, or else the one phone you have it installed on, will control the home/away mode.
The thermostat looks great and is well built all around. My only complaint is the geofencing isn’t the greatest I have the app logged into all my family’s phones and usually only about 2 of 4 phones actually trigger the geofence. The problem got worse after all the phones got updated as well.
Excellent device. I purchased two of them, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. I Love the capability to monitor everything from my phone or tablet. The program mobile settings are amazing. The option to add additional sensors works wonders. I highly recommend it.