"My main interest/use for the thermostat is to be able to monitor/control the temperature of the home when we are not there for purposes of ensuring that the house isn't too cold and in danger of freezing."

Wouldn't leaving the heat on at it's lowest setting accomplish this? You'd avoid all the other stuff that's giving you angst.

Hi jrb451. Thanks for the reply. Leaving the heat on would definitely accomplish the goal as long as the heat is working. If for some reason something goes awry, I'd like to be alerted to that fact. This is for our non-primary residence.

"it's really all about having something Reliable (capital intentional!) that is robust in communications/sending alerts if something goes awry."

If one of the thermostats fail, then you have the other two as a backup. One part of the house may get no heat, but with the other two zones working it is unlikely that part of the house would go below freezing. I think you are OK with the Ecobee.

I think they are only smart when you have a computer with wifi turned on all the time. I used to have a second home that I lived in on weekends. Both homes had the Honeywell wifi enabled thermostats. They are not considered smart, but they did exactly what I wanted. I would turn them off when I was not there and turn them back on to run a programmed schedule when I left for the 1-hour drive between the houses. In Texas I'm dealing with cooling and not heating so much.

The ecobee would be my choice for your situation.

If you have internet connection available for this house the Honeywell Vision pro series with red link is tough to beat.

Nothing spells reliability in thermostats better than Honeywell in my honest opinion.

With red link capability you can control the system (multiple stats even) from smart phone and even your computer / laptop remotely.

Ecobee is pricier and mostly for commercial application space IMO.

The business where I work has four Emerson Sensi thermostats. They're not the most deluxe for features compared to some of the others mentioned but have plenty functions for the needs here. Anyway, the connection routes through Emerson/Sensi's network server and there are occasions when it's temporarily down, typically not more than a few hours but there was one outage that lasted most of a day. The phone app and the web-based portal both are inaccessible when the network server is down ... even if the WiFi connection itself isn't affected (the thermostats continue to work, they're just not remotely-accessible). Don't know if the others mentioned route that way, through a specific server/network provided by the manufacturer.

All, thanks so much for your contributions to this thread. We decided that "smart" thermostats were overkill at the moment so we're getting Lux programmable ones (still overkill but when we live there FT we will appreciate them). For temperature monitoring I'm looking at the Neatmo monitor -- if others have suggestions, please recommend.

I think this is a good decision. I've been in the market for themostats, and I also decided to skip the smart thermostats and just get a programmable one. While many of the smart thermostat features sound slick, when we thought about it, we didn't think we'd end up using many of them. I was also concerned about cases when the wi-fi or electricity go out. And if a smart thermostat breaks, there are layers of troubleshooting involved. I liked the idea of setting the thermostat remotely, but honestly, my schedule is so predictable that a programmable will do just fine.

Early on, I'd considered the ecobee, but I called their customer support with a pre-purchase question. I waited on hold for over an hour before I gave up. I took them off the candidate list right then and there. Had I already owned an ecobee and needed tech support, I would not have been happy being on hold for that long.

I think in this case, less is more. If we are in the market for a thermostat in another several years, I may reconsider the smart thermostat as the market will have more maturity.

Another possibility for simply monitoring the temperature is an IP security camera. these can be had for as little as $50 and can transmit video streams in addition to audio and temperature. You'll need to leave your modem/router on but not your computer.

I had a similar issue with an empty house 800+ miles away. I used an internet-enabled monitor from Acurite. It had 3 temperature/humidity sensors that I put in all the bathrooms. I then turned the heat down to 55F and watched. They have/had a website where you log in and monitor the readings, graphs and all. It may have been $100 or so, I don't remember. It did require a full time internet connection, directly to the router (no wifi, no local PC).

Using a thermostat, if the system fails you won't be told. If the power goes out, you loose connectivity. I used a UPS to back up the router and Acurite base unit.