Following on the ridiculously over-priced acquisition of the smart thermostat company (Nest) by Google--they spent BILLIONS on a thermostat, we are now seeing . If you read the language about the ZEN thermostat, they are taking a direct swipe at the over-priced and over-rated Nest thermostat.
Good for them. Competition is a wonderful thing, and Google will never, ever get their money back because competing products like ZEN are going to crush Nest.
The ZEN appears to support heat pumps, which are widely used in the southeast and the south...but here's the thing....heat pumps don't do well if you are constantly changing the temperature. They are most efficient if you set the temperature to one thing and leave it. That's what I do, and I have very modest heating and cooling bills. During the heating season, if you start monkeying with the temperature, the "auxiliary" heat kicks in, which is just an electric heater built into the heat exchanger. And that electric heat makes your electric meter spin like an out of control merry go round.
So the ZEN thermostat is attractive, but I cannot come up with a single reason to buy one, other than the cool factor. And I'm way beyond cool.
I don't want smart dishwashers and smart-aleck dryers and obesity-checking snitch refrigerators sending everything I eat to my doctor whether I want it to or not. Just because those things CAN be done does not mean they should be done. And it makes everything cost more.