Honeywell takes on Nest with new Lyric smart thermostat

Move aside Nest, you’ve got competition.

Honeywell on Tuesday announced its new Lyric smart thermostat, designed for homeowners that have a busy family and lifestyle. Lyric detects where you are using geofencing, based on your smartphone location, and automatically goes into energy saving mode when your home is empty. When the thermostat senses that are you coming home, it begins to cool or heat your home to the desired temperature you set… 

“Most people don’t have a predictable pattern to how they live their lives; why not have a thermostat that adjusts based on your real-time schedule?” says Beth Wozniak, president of Honeywell Environmental and Combustion Controls. “With the Lyric thermostat’s geofencing capability, my house returns to my preferred comfort setting when I’m within a few miles from home. Quite simply, the Lyric thermostat offers me the ability to keep my life in tune – delivering comfort when I’m home and savings when I’m gone.”

The Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat can be controlled with the official Lyric app for iOS and Android, or manually by using the round dial control on the front of the thermostat. The innovative product features a Fine Tune feature that factors indoor and outdoor temperatures, humidity and weather into its algorithm, ensuring that the temperature of your home is comfortable. It also has a built-in proximity sensor that signals the display to turn on.

The thermostat will show a soft halo of light in various colors depending on its status: orange for heating, blue for cooling, and green for away or energy savings. This light illuminates only momentarily when the thermostat is making temperature adjustments. The front-facing display shows the current temperature alongside the home’s heating or cooling status.

Lyric also features touch-sensitive buttons on the center display for accessing current and upcoming weather information, easy-to-understand alerts for when to change a filter, and several other innovative features. The device is both functionally and aesthetically sound, featuring a gloss white finish and several useful controls. Lyric will be available in August for $279.

Do you think Honeywell can compete with Nest?