One of the big revolutions in the HVAC industry is around thermostats and controls in general.

The old round or rectangular thermostat with two switches and a mercury bulb are real dinosaurs. In fact, they’re being changed out with such volume that we have an industry recycling program to recover the mercury from old thermostats.

Unlike some home changes, it is doubtful that anyone will miss these old thermostat controls. Thermostats first appeared in the 1830s as a way of regulating the temperatures in chicken incubators. While they helped provide environmental control in a manner that no doubt seemed revolutionary back then, technology moves on and we now have something much better.

The new controls are more precise, more intuitive and offer much better control of your HVAC system. They can deliver improved comfort through temperature averaging and be set in energy saving mode automatically when you leave your home. With hydro working on an on-peak/mid-peak/off-peak basis, it is now easier to cut back on energy use during the most expensive times. A sophisticated thermostat makes it almost effortless to attain those savings and you now don’t even have to be home to do the programming. Pretty cool.

The S30 iComfort thermostat from Lennox and the thermostats from ecobee are industry leaders, saving energy and money for homes and businesses alike. Fun fact: did you know the original ecobee prototype was developed in the AtlasCare boardroom by entrepreneur Stuart Lombard? Frustrated by the fact that the current products required an energy calculator to use successfully, innovators like Stuart harnessed the power and resources of the internet to fashion a product that made use of the latest data to regulate power usage. Today smart thermostats are an increasingly common part of homes and will soon be the exclusive form of temperature regulators as the modern house becomes more and more sophisticated.