Venstar T7850 ColorTouch Thermostat 7 Day Programmable w/ WiFi (4 Heat 2 Cool)

I owned one at a previous home. I hated to leave it. The WI-FI feature is great, could start the AC or Heat while on the way home from the car. It also gave run time history of the AC and heater which I like to review. I am about to buy another for my new home as I replace the old HVAC.

I searched high and low for a thermostat that would meet my needs and this Venstar is the closest I could find. It is almost perfect, but it has a few disappointing flaws. The good: - Nice clear colorful display, I can read the temperature from across the room and do not need to go squint at a tiny 1980s style gray LCD. - Integrates with my home automation system and is not reliant on an external cloud service the way most "smart" thermostats are. In other words when the company invariably discontinues this product eventually, my thermostat will not become a useless brick like most will. - Supports duel fuel heating systems with no extra hardware required. I have both a heat pump and a gas furnace and prior to this I needed a separate kludge board to integrate the two and select which one operates based on outdoor temperature. The T7850 handles this functionality. The bad: - There is only one schedule across heating and cooling modes. My old "dumb" thermostat had separate schedules for heating mode and cooling mode, this one does not. It is impossible to program it to keep the house the same temperature both summer and winter. This is by far the most serious issue and had me looking for a replacement thermostat but I found no other smart thermostats that did not 100% rely on their proprietary cloud service. - The touch display often misses touches and requires multiple taps to register. This is not the end of the world but it's annoying and a pretty glaring fault in this era where touch displays are a pretty mature technology. If you expect it to feel snappy and responsive like a modern smartphone you will be disappointed, it feels more like a 1990s PDA. - I tried close to a dozen SD cards before I finally found one that would work and it's still flaky. SD cards have been around for long enough that this should just work. - Has only one input for a wired remote sensor which is required for determining when to switch between the heat pump and gas furnace.