Honeywell Home RCHT8612WF T5 Plus Wi-Fi Touchscreen Smart Thermostat with 7 Day Flexible Programming and Geofencing Technology Black

This thermostat is a very good value. I had little to no problems with the install. I read alot of reviews and figured out everything I needed to do before the item arrived. I would say that HVAC systems can be wired in a number of ways and the generic instructions provided did not match what I was seeing in my HVAC. I did not have a control panel in the air controller where all the wires were connected to. I did notice four wires coming out of the air controller which were labeled W, C, R, and G. I saw 4 wires, W, G, R, and Y, connected to my old thermostat and the blue (c) wire not connected. I also saw that the blue wire on the other end at the HVAC was also not connected to anything. I saw three of the wires W, G, R connected to their corresponding labels coming out of the air controller via wire nuts. I saw the yellow wire connected to another wire going somewhere else, which I correctly deduced was the AC compressor. (I found online that the yellow wire is to tell the AC when to come on) Also going to the AC compressor was a black wire connected to the C wire coming out of the air controller. All of that is to just show the generic directions were no good to me. I am not an HVAC installer and did not know the purpose of the wires before this. I actually found a diagram online which showed me the installation I was dealing with. I decided that all that was needed for me to do was to strip both ends of the blue wire (C) and connect it to the air controller's c-wire, along with with the AC compressor's c wire.When my thermostat arrived, I connected the thermostat to the wires per the instructions. I did overlook pushing up the switch for the jumper RH RC so at first it did not work. After I pushed that switch up, I had power. After reading about putting the phone into airplane mode, I did this to start with and followed the prompts on the thermostat and phone. It connected quickly and seeminglessly. The geofencing has worked well so far. There is limited scheduling ability along with geofencing and it works for me. I have set a temperature for when I am asleep, when I am home, and when I am away. (this is pretty much all that is available when you are using geofencing) There is also a vacation setting which I will be using on my next vacation. I like that I can communicate with the thermostat outside of my home. For instance, when I am on vacation and the temperatures are very high or low, depending on the time of the year, I can turn on the air hours before I get home.It does have the auto change over setting whereby it will change from AC to Heat automatically. It works pretty good because there are two sepereate temperature settings for cool or heat. I have my heat set to 68 and cool set to 76. This prevents the ac from running in the winter and the heater from running in the summer. Of course, if you really want to waste electricty, you could set the two settings temperature close to each other and then the heat would turn on in the summer and the ac would turn on in the winter. (I thought the purpose of these things are to save electricity?)I dont have an ECHO ecosystem, I am a Google home person. I have successfully intergreted the thermostat into my google home. I am able to turn on the air or heat. The only complaint I have is that the thermostat has seperate cool and heat temperture settings but when I tell google to turn my heat, or air to a certain temperture, it turns both settings to the same temperature no matter what the verbage I use.I bought my thermostat through Amazon Warehouse so it is even more of a value buy. Many people do not realize that most of what Amazon warehouse sells is open box products. (brand new products that were sent back). It was not used at all. I always get the ones that says packaging is damaged but the product is new...

First let me start with saying I have now purchased and installed two of these Honeywell Home T5 Thermostats, one for myself about a year ago and one for my Parents for Christmas 2018. Following the instructions I had mine installed and set up in about 30 minutes. I was lucky enough to have had an existing C wire so I did not need the Adapter. It was so easy I thought it would make a great gift for my parents so I purchased them one for Christmas. I took a Saturday to go up and install and set it up for them. I started by removing their old Thermostat off the wall and found out they had an old 4 wire setup with no C wire. Not a problem as this unit comes with a C Wire power Adapter. I went into the basement and following the instructions included was able to quickly install the C Wire Power Adapter between the existing tstat wire and the Furnace main board. Being that I am an IT Professional specializing in Networking Infrastructure, I assumed that was going to be the hard part. In short I was wrong.Upon getting to the part where you connect the Thermostat to the Home WIFI, my bread and butter, no matter what I did I could not get the Thermostat to connect, it would fail every time, or so I thought. I had recently upgraded their Router to a new Netgear Nighthawk AC2600 and broadcast separate 2.4ghz and 5ghz band networks. I made sure we were selecting the 2.4ghz network but it would always fail to register. The strange thing is that I noticed after it would fail, it would still look like the thermostat was on WIFI - the indicator did not have the X below it on the thermostat. I started digging into the issue and after it failed and still looked connected I decided to login to the router and see if the Thermostat showed up as a connected device. Luckily this is easy with the Nighthawk - went to attached devices and low and behold the Thermostat was listed as TSTAT-XXXXX and the MAC Address matched the thermostat. So it was in fact connected to the WIFI it was just unable to complete the registration process. I started running netstat tests to find out why the Honeywell servers were unable to register the device - I could see the thermostat reach out, but the response from Honeywell kept forwarding to different devices on their network. I immediately went to the UPnP settings on the router and to my astonishment UPnP was enabled by default on this router. So apparently Netgear for some reason feels a need to enable this protocol by default which IMO is extremely unsecure. Not only that but it will also auto configure any device on the network that has UPnP enabled as well, even if you didn't set the devices up using UPnP. In my case it was their Security Cameras. I disabled UPnP and ran through the Setup one last time and like magic, it worked without any hesitation, the same as when I set mine up. I can venture to guess that all of the other reviews on here having the same issue, if you check your UPnP settings on your router it is more than likely enabled.Takeaway - Before you start, login to your Router and make sure you do not have UPnP Enabled. If you have a setup that requires UPnP I would look for a different Thermostat.My WIFI is set up as followsBroadcasting in 2.4GHZSecurity Type: WPA2 (AES) PSKHoneywell recommends the PSK be alphanumeric however I have symbols in both mine and my parents PSK and it connected without any issue.Pros --Geofencing - I have not had any issues with it - maybe I am just lucky but running this Thermostat with GEO on for about a year and comparing my usage from last year it has definitely saved me money.-Google Home Control - breeze to setup and nice to be laying in bed and it get down a little cooler or up a little higher than expected to just ask Google to adjust.-I like the look of it and the display is definitely easy for me to readCons -I honestly don't have any. I do not blame Honeywell for the UPnP setup issue, I blame that more on NetGear for them having an unsecure protocol enabled by default.

Four stars because it does lose its server connection periodically.I’m pretty technical (ok, I’m a bit of a geek). I like the Honeywell brand and really like the features of this thermostat. I’ve especially liked how it works with Alexa (and even my Lutron Caseta app). Keep in mind, with IoT devices, you need to pick a manufacturer you believe will stay in business, because if they go out of business, their servers that your device connects through also shut down and you’re left with nothing.So I took a risk buying it, given the numerous reviews that clearly call out that it loses its connection. I hoped they just had issues on their home networks causing the problem. I no longer believe that’s true. My home network has been very reliable, as has my fiber optic 150/150mbps Internet connection. I now believe the problem is with Honeywell’s servers or connectivity.Within the first 48 hours of installing this thermostat, it lost its connection. I reset everything on my home network to no avail. I factory reset the thermostat and reprogrammed it to no avail. It much later reconnected on its own. Since then, I’ve tried resetting my home network equipment but haven’t factory reset the Honeywell thermostat. Never to any avail.That stated, in the months since, I’ve experienced infrequent connection losses (once every several weeks), usually lasting about an hour or so, and generally at times that have not been impactful.Bottom line: I plan to keep it and hope for the best. But if I were starting over, I would simply avoid Honeywell altogether.Good luck in your search!