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The verdict in 90 seconds
The Amazon Smart Thermostat is the cheapest honest way to get scheduling, remote control and automatic setbacks — provided you have a C wire and live in an Alexa household. It is built on Honeywell Home hardware, it is ENERGY STAR certified, and it delivers the part of the smart-thermostat promise that actually saves money. Its 4.0 owner rating is not a verdict on how it heats a house; it is a verdict on how many people bought it without checking their wiring and how many wanted it to work with Google or Apple. Confirm both before you order and it is very good value.
Best for the cheapest legitimate route to scheduling and remote control in an Alexa household
- Built on Honeywell Home thermostat technology
- ENERGY STAR certified
- Alexa Hunches adjust the temperature automatically
- C wire required — no adapter in the standard box
Why buy it: roughly a third the price of the flagship thermostats for most of the actual saving, because scheduling and setbacks do the heavy lifting.
What owners consistently praise
The price for what it does. At around 80 dollars it undercuts the Nest and ecobee flagships by roughly two thirds while delivering the same core function: a 7-day schedule, phone control from anywhere, and automatic adjustments. Owners repeatedly make the point that the expensive features in this category are conveniences, not savings mechanisms, and this thermostat skips the conveniences.
The Honeywell underpinnings. Amazon did not design a thermostat from scratch; it commissioned one from Resideo, the company behind Honeywell Home. Owners with HVAC backgrounds note this in reviews, and the practical result is sensible temperature control, quiet relays and a compatibility list that covers conventional gas, oil and electric forced air, heat pumps with auxiliary heat, and standard hot water systems.
Alexa Hunches. This is the feature that surprises people. If Alexa can see from your other devices that everyone has gone to bed or left the house, it nudges the temperature without being asked. Owners who already have Echo devices and smart plugs report that it captures setbacks they would never have programmed, which is precisely where the savings live.
The look. A flat white square with a hidden display is not exciting, but owners consistently describe it as unobtrusive and easy to read from across the room, and the touch controls respond reliably.
What owners actually complain about
The C wire requirement, by an enormous margin. This dominates the negative reviews. The standard box contains no adapter, and the thermostat simply will not run on a system without a common wire. Because most American homes wired before roughly 2010 lack one, a substantial share of buyers open the box, pull off the old thermostat, and discover the purchase was wrong. Amazon does sell a version bundled with a C-wire adapter — the confusion is that the two listings look nearly identical. Photograph your wiring first.
Alexa app dependence. Everything lives in the Alexa app: schedules, away settings, temperature history. The thermostat itself offers up and down control and little else. Owners report the schedule interface being buried several menus deep, and households where not everyone has the app find the thermostat less convenient than the one it replaced. There is no web interface at all.
Ecosystem lock-in. No HomeKit, no Google Assistant, no SmartThings. This is a frequent reason for returns and it is not going to change.
Hunches acting when you did not want them to. The flip side of the automation. A recurring gripe is the temperature changing without an obvious cause, usually because a Hunch fired or a routine on another device triggered it. It is switchable, but owners describe hunting for the setting.
Connectivity and setup stumbles. A persistent minority report the thermostat failing to complete Wi-Fi setup, dropping off the network after a router change, or needing a factory reset to re-pair. It is 2.4 GHz only, which trips up owners on combined-band mesh networks. And there is no remote sensor option and no geofencing in the conventional sense, so a house with hot and cold rooms is not helped by this thermostat at all.
Who it suits, and who should buy something else
Buy it if you have a confirmed C wire, you already use Alexa, and your goal is the cheapest legitimate scheduling and remote control you can get.
Buy the Sensi ST55 instead if your wiring is old — the Sensi runs without a C wire on most common systems and supports Alexa, Google Assistant and HomeKit at around 100 dollars.
Buy an ecobee instead if one room is always wrong. The Enhanced supports SmartSensors and includes a Power Extender Kit for C-wire-free homes; the Premium ships with a sensor and an air quality monitor.
Buy the Nest instead if your household runs on Google — see our Google Nest Thermostat review. The whole field, ranked, is in our best smart thermostat guide.
Specifications
| Spec | Amazon Smart Thermostat |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Built by Resideo (Honeywell Home) for Amazon |
| Dimensions | 4.3 x 4.3 x 0.84 in. |
| C wire | Required; adapter sold in a separate bundle |
| Scheduling | 7-day schedule via the Alexa app only |
| Automation | Alexa Hunches and routines |
| Remote sensors | Not supported |
| Ecosystems | Alexa only — no HomeKit, Google Assistant or SmartThings |
| Wi-Fi | 2.4 GHz only |
| Certification | ENERGY STAR, with a claimed 8 percent saving |
| Warranty | 1 year limited |
The bottom line
This is a well-made budget thermostat wearing a rating earned mostly by mismatched expectations. If your wall has a C wire and your house runs on Alexa, it does the job the 250 dollar models do, minus the sensors and the learning, for a third of the money. If either of those two conditions fails, it will be a return — and there is a better-suited thermostat at a similar price for almost every alternative case.
Check price on Amazon → (paid link)
Next: understand the wiring question in can you install a smart thermostat yourself, check the payback in how much a smart thermostat saves per year, weigh the tiers in smart vs programmable thermostats, or start from the heating and cooling hub.