Let's talk fancy pants thermostats and home automation...

[old-fart]

Ok, so we are building a new house and are 5 weeks from possession. As part of spending a lot of money, I'm looking into programmable thermostats and home automation. At this point, I'd have to say the leading candidate in the thermostat fight is the Ecobee3 over both Nest and the Honeywell Lyric. Here's a bit of a comparison. The new house will be dual-zoned, so I might two of the damn things, but I think that is true for Nest and Lyric as well.

I believe it will integrate nicely with the relatively cheap Smartthings hub. Ecobee provides an open API and already there have been a few geeks write some code to provide nearly complete integration.

Which brings up another interesting point - what are folks thoughts on actually paying a company like ADT for monitoring as opposed to leveraging something like SmartThings for an alarm system?

Mods: feel free to move this to technology sub-forum if that makes more sense.

[Calgary14]

I read an article yesterday (Herald?) that said most homeowners are now buying a $240 (external) camera for their house rather than a security system. The new ones are triggered by motion and can be hidden. They only take pictures when there is motion and can be linked to notify the owner via email. Definitely something to look into.

I have a couple smart light switches in the house and they are great. They are controlled by an app and can be set to go off/on using my phone and can also be set to a schedule. Basically they make it look like someone is home when they aren't.

My guess is that the more 'smart' a home becomes the more people will opt for certain smart devices rather than a traditional home alarm system. That being said I'm not sure all the devices can completely replace a home alarm.

[EldrickOnIce]

Home was robbed a few weeks ago.
Kicked in doors at 5:30pm.
Alarm did not deter.
Alarm did keep them in the house less than 4 minutes.
Worth it? I thought so, but is definitely debatable.
Home automation would have provided pictures/video. Whether that would have been helpful is hard to say.

[You Need a Thneed]

Dropcam can work together with nest, issuing each other's occupancy/motion sensors.

My house has a Honeywell prestige 2.0 thermostat. Seems to work great so far.