Smart Thermostats Key Product Criteria

ENERGY STAR certified smart thermostats are required to:

• Work as a basic thermostat in absence of connectivity to the service provider.
• Give residents some form of feedback about the energy consequences of their settings.
• Provide information about HVAC energy use, such as monthly run time.
• Provide the ability to set a schedule.
• Provide the ability to work with utility programs to prevent brownouts and blackouts, while preserving consumers’ ability to override those grid requests.

In addition to these requirements, they must meet the temperature accuracy and standby criteria shown in Table 1.

Finally, as shown in Table 2, EPA certified smart thermostats are required to meet the energy savings criteria for reduction in cooling and heating system runtime, and report electric resistance heat use for heat pumps. In order to demonstrate compliance with these energy saving criteria, smart thermostat service providers use EPA-provided software to analyze and combine a year of data from hundreds of their customers’ homes, reflecting how the thermostats were actually used, to calculate national savings metrics for heating and for cooling. The lower 95% confidence limit is similar to an average but takes into account the chance the particular homes that were sampled were all higher savers. The 20th percentile means that 4 out of 5 homes in the sample saved at least that much.

For more information, please see the full smart thermostat ENERGY STAR specification (PDF, 641 KB).