i talk to my wall now and it behaves

My rental came with a thermostat from what I can only assume was an estate sale. A round beige dial with a red needle, mounted at exactly my shoulder height, and the only way to know the temperature was to squint at a number the size of a lentil. My landlord Gene, who is eighty if he is a day, told me it "still works fine" and he is correct in the way a rotary phone works fine. It works. It does not cooperate.

So this spring I asked Gene for permission, promised to put his beloved dial back on the wall when I leave, and installed the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium in one afternoon. Now I say "set it to 68" to a rectangle in my hallway and the furnace obeys. I'm still not over it.

the honest bit, with receipts

The feelings part, and the confession: I did not buy this for the energy savings. I bought it because the beige dial was at war with the entire hallway and I am a person with a design degree and no immune system against ugly objects. The savings are the excuse. Every review points out the Premium is the most expensive thermostat in Ecobee's lineup at $249.99, and every review is right, and deals in the $150s to $190s show up often enough that paying full price would be a choice.

six things, and one of them is about my candles

It looks like it costs what it costs. The redesign gave it a metal (zinc, per the specs) body instead of glossy plastic and a much larger square screen, 2.9 inches on a side, and the difference from the old plastic slab is the difference between a rental bathroom mirror and a real one. Tom's Guide called the new look much better and I co-sign from my own hallway, where guests now ask about the thermostat, a sentence I have never typed before.

The little remote sensor ended a war I was having with myself. A SmartSensor comes in the box, and it's a puck you put in the room you actually care about, so mine lives on the bedroom dresser where the radiator loses its arguments. The thermostat can average between rooms or favor the sensor, and my bedroom went from sauna at midnight to consistently, boringly comfortable. The annoying part: extra sensors come only in a two-pack for $99. You cannot buy one. Someone made that decision on purpose and I would like a word.

Siri and Alexa live in the wall now. The Premium has both built in, with a mic and a speaker, so I walk past it saying "hey Siri, set the heat to 68" like the building's most comfortable wizard. It also does weather, timers and general assistant things. The honest caveat, which reviewers flagged and my ears confirm: the built-in speaker sounds like a walkie-talkie in a tin cup. Fine for "the high today is 51." Tragic for music.

The air quality monitor is the feature I forgot existed until it tattled on me. There's a sensor inside the thermostat itself that reads CO2 and VOCs and shows a scale from Clean to High with suggestions like "open a window." Reviewers called it of limited use and mostly I agree, I glance at it the way I glance at weather radar. Then one February evening it went yellow mid-candle and I want to discuss that in the tangent, because a betrayal occurred.

No subscription to run the actual thermostat. Schedules, geofencing, presence detection, the app, all included, which matters because ecobee does sell a separate security monitoring service at $5 to $10 a month, and I want to be clear that I pay none of that and the thermostat does not sulk. It also works with HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant, SmartThings and IFTTT, so whatever temple your smart home is built on, it probably has a pew.

Installation was two screws and one call to my dad. The base plate goes on the wall, the wires land on labeled terminals, and the face clicks on. My system had no C-wire, which is the wire that keeps a smart thermostat alive, and ecobee includes a little adapter for exactly that case, which is the kind of foresight more companies should be embarrassed into copying. My dad's contribution was "take a picture of the wires first," which I had done, and "is it level," which the base's built-in bubble level had answered. Thanks, Dad. Genuinely.

the candle incident, a tangent with a victim

Honestly, let's address the yellow icon. I own a small, defended collection of expensive candles, because burning a good candle while the radiator ticks is one of the load-bearing pleasures of my entire life. The night the thermostat flagged the air as something other than Clean, I checked the app like a notified criminal. VOCs, up. The suspect list was short. It was the candle. It is always the candle.

So I opened a window in February in the Midwest, which is a punishment, and watched the number drift back down while my socks did nothing to help. Here's what got me, though. I spent years not knowing that my cozy little ritual fills a room with something the sensor can see. The dial couldn't tell me. The ecobee can, and now I burn the fancy ones with a window cracked and the cheap ones on regular nights, which is a system nobody asked me to design and I designed it anyway.

the soft landing

The gas bill after the first full month was lower, not life-changingly lower, but lower, in the boring quiet way that good habits pay out. The hallway looks designed now. On purpose, even, which is the truer thing I could say about it.

Gene came by in April for the water heater and stood in front of it for a while. He said the dial was prettier. He's right, it is, and I think about that more than I expected to.

I keep meaning to log the temperature in the bedroom against the hallway for a whole week, sensor versus wall, real numbers, a chart maybe, and every time I set it up I get distracted by how nice it is to just

Warm hallway. Obeying wall. One dial, resting with honors in a closet.

• ava 🌡️