Honeywell Home Lyric Round Wi-Fi Thermostat - Second Generation (RCH9310WF)

They start off by telling you on the box that if you don't have this thermostat installed professionally, you void the five year warranty. That means you, homeowner! The app then lead to very carefully through the installation of the new thermostat, and it does a great job with the electrical and mechanical bits. Thermostat wiring can vary quite a bit, so they have you take a picture, and tell the app what wires you see. These appear later in a diagram when you're doing hook up. Wall mounting is easy and the device even comes with a built-in level so you can get that right. The software installation is not nearly so clear. At one point, you would expect it to list the Wi-Fi services that it can see, but it couldn't find the three services I had blasting in the room. I ended up entering the necessary wifi info for one of them. Apparently it took, but the app did not seem to realize this. This left me continuing to try to reconfigure it, getting an error message that said it was already configured. I never got a "congratulations your thermostat is hooked up to the Internet! "Message from either the app or the thermostat. But clearly that's what happened. The app needs to switch back-and-forth between your Wi-Fi network, and the thermostats Wi-Fi network. But the switches are not made clear, and the activity meter gives no indication what it is waiting for, so you can sit there for minutes waiting for something to happen. They really need to work on this part. I followed the directions for hooking this up to my SmartThings hub, and that seems to integrate just fine. There are still a lot of features involved in all this that I haven't figured out, but the basic seem to be working just fine. Aside from the set up confusions, this seems like a fine product. I'm looking forward to using it. -- revised review: I bought two of these, with great hopes. Honeywell has been in the thermostat business for a long time, and these were to replace two of their old model. The first one stopped working: it would boot, and just sit there through its partially-display sunburst initialization. I could find no documentation for its status. I contacted Honeywell, and we went through some quite technical debugging, involving special wiring and my voltmeter. They were well-prepared to do this, and eventually sent me a new thermostat, which worked fine. Then my second thermostat stopped working, its booting halting somewhere else during initialization. And the first one? It now appears to work, but doesn't turn on the furnace. So these devices have two problems: - they seem to de after a few months, and - their diagnostics are totally useless. This is a shame, since they are little computers with displays, and could in principle supply exact error condition indications, with web-accessible documentation for dealing with them. So, I have reverted to the old thermostats, and am looking for some other new ones.

It's very cool. It works well. Awesome but... it has some trouble with HomeKit. Not totally ready for prime time. The last update seemed to fix some of the connections to my phone. I run the home from my iPad. Very important that you set up a hub. The iHome smart plugs were SO easy to instal but for this I had the HVAC dude out. I didn't want to screw it up. Prolly something a handy dude could do himself. Whatevs. So I'm not that dude. Now the Lyric is set up, and most of the time it talks to my phone and my iPad. Even when I'm gone. But you prolly will get messages in your Apple ecosystem that the Lyric is "updating." It usually plays nice, but sometimes its gonna happen. If you can't deal then don't get this thermo cuz its not perfect. I totally thinks it is SO awesome I just wait for it to come back. It's not like I change the temp 5 times a day. I set it and leave it. Switches on the AC as needed. Will even switch between heat and AC auto. It lights up when you walk by. I kinda like that--pretty cool. UPDATED 5/13/2017: Ok, so Lyric has done some major firmware updates, and Apple updated to iOS 10.3. The thermostat is now totally awesome. Never goes off line any more. It is always synced to my Apple Home--iPad, iPhone whatever. And now 5 stars earned. My best bud saw it and went home to order one for his house. It's that cool... and hot when needed.

This replaced a Honeywell touchscreen smart thermostat that was driving me crazy. So far, the Lyric thermostat is working great. The Lyric app is much improved over the Honeywell Total Connect Comfort app (which seems like it's on the way out, judging by the old-school graphics). The Lyric also has Apple HomeKit integration, which is going to be gaining more traction, especially when iOS 10 is released in the fall. The Lyric is dead-simple to install, with clear step-by-step instructions from the app. Even connecting to my home's wifi was painless. The Lyric looks great, too and feels very well made. I like that the display automatically wakes up and brightens when you walk up to it...a nice touch. IMHO, four simple tweaks would make the Lyric just about perfect and a 5 star product: 1) The display on the Lyric should show the relative humidity below the indoor temp. 2) There should be a way of turning the fan on/off from the thermostat (right now, the only way to turn the fan on/off is through the Lyric app). 3) The app should show, in addition to the current indoor temp and temp set point, much more information and it should be user selectable. Info that I'd appreciate having: Whether or not the system is actually running; How long the system has been running in the past hour/12 hours/24 hours, etc 4) The filter change reminder should be based on actual running time and not just "30/60/90" calendar days. During spring and fall, our system rarely runs, so there's no need to change the filter in 30 days if the system has only run for a few hours that month. Bottom line: The Lyric is a solid smart thermostat and with just a few firmware/software tweaks, will be great.

Negative stars would be most accurate; runs off battery?? NOPE not long enough and it’s going to break our boiler. We bought 2 of these in November for $299 total to replace old fashion thermostats. Thought it would be great because they do not require a “C-wire” or common wire which in short means a power source; because they have a battery instead. WRONG- starting about 2 weeks ago both thermostats started acting crazy; no internet, need X minutes to begin heating (display reads) and the battery lights turned on. How could that be?? These batteries are good for 15 years?? Then our boiler/furnace was acting strange; it was turning on for a fraction of a second and off… on/off/on/off… We knew it had to be linked to the thermostats malfunction because the error messages continued though we replaced the batteries in both, our Wifi was fine, and called Honeywell to troubleshoot the device. We continued working on the problem and called our oil company explaining what has been going on and noting our furnace is actually starting to smell like smoke or it’s burning from the constant on and off. They knew the problem right away and told us how companies advertise these as not needing an additional wire or “C-wire”, but truly they cannot run off batteries alone. So the battery drains and additional power must be acquired; from where?? Oh your furnace. It cycles and causes the furnace to briefly turn on just enough to “steal power” from it and keep the thermostat kind of running. While our boiler won’t break over night; it will eventually if this continues. The solution? Install the power wire (3rd wire) or get a different thermostat. We had an electrician come today and that is not such an easy task, so we just bought two new none Wifi normal thermostats. I will be contacting for a refund; $300 + the cost of an electrician today + the cost of 2 new thermostats! NO thank you. Lesson to learn from anyone reading this; make sure you have a C-wire or can easily install one to avoid this mess.

Works marginally. We bought this Lyric for our second home so we could turn the heat up and down remotely before arriving and leaving. They tend to fall off the home network a lot. The are NOT Alexa/Echo compatible! Once you go through the steps to sync the thermostats with Alexa, all Alexa can do is tell you the temperature in each room; Alexa CANNOT adjust the temperature.

I own 3 of these and intend to purchase one more for our 4 zone house. Initially I had a rough start with these as I do not have a common wire and relied solely on the battery. It does okay without the common but it really dumbs down the capability of the thermostat. I bought the Fast Stat common makers from Amazon which is a product that adds a common to your 2 wire lines without needing to run ANY additional wiring. The common makers did WONDERS for my Lyrics! I have not experienced a single issue since adding the common. My boiler and zone controllers work perfect with the Lyrics!

I loved the features offered by this thermostat so I purchased two of them for my home. I read the mixed reviews but I was hopeful that I could make them work for me. The first one installed easily and connected to my wifi easily. The app was straight forward and worked fine. I then tried installing the second one on my electric heat pump/electric furnace but the instructions were not sufficient for the hookups involving the supplementary and emergency heat. I called the support line and the tech finally admitted that I could not use both supplementary and auxiliary heat with this thermostat. This was a disappointment because the advertisement said heat pumps were supported. After spending several hours figuring out the correct hook ups, the unit would not connect to my wifi. I tried resetting it several times but no joy. I finally returned it. Then, after 6 days, the first thermostat failed to work at all. After attempting to restart it, it gave a message that there was no power for my system and to reset my breaker. After troubleshooting my furnace, there was nothing wrong with it. It is another faulty thermostat that I will be returning. If you decide to get this, I hope you have better luck than I did.

I replaced a Nest Learning Thermostat 2.0 (second version of Nest) with this, as I wanted HomeKit compatibility, and I am also replacing my Honeywell Lynx alarm panel with a Honeywell Lyric alarm panel. While it works, it is no better really, in terms of functionality, than a 1990s "programmable" thermostat with a fancy display and an app. It still thinks that you have 4 phases a day: out of bed, away, arrive, to bed. You cannot set arbitrary times and temperatures. And when using schedule mode, it ignores your presence -- meaning that if we leave during the day, it will stay in whatever phase the schedule says, and not go to "away". Nest did not have any of these problems. Nest would let me schedule random times and temperatures, use our "presence" to switch to our away temperature, etc. Much more modern and not stuck in the 90s for functionality. Also, I had an interesting experience with it recently. We had a minor water leak (overflowing toilet with water going down the forced air register and then leaking into the basement). I turned off the furnace power at the breaker to avoid issues as the water was dropping onto the furnace. After cleaning it up and drying stuff out, I put power back on to the furnace. The Lyric came back, but it ignored the schedule that had been set. But going into the app it thought it was on a schedule and there was no way to force it to go back on it. I finally twiddled things in the app enough (schedule on and off, change one time, etc) that it finally, after a day, started to run the schedule again. Honeywell needs to get out of the 90s and make a thermostat that allows any random set of times and temperatures on any given day, and also has pre-set "away" temperatures (that then reset to whatever the current temp should be per the schedule when you get home), etc. Look at the competition, meet their features, and then add new and useful unique features. I am replacing this with an Ecobee4 since that is HomeKit compatible and gets really good grades. It can't be worse than this one.