If you have an old thermostat currently in your home, you know just how outdated the technology has become. In a world where nearly everything can be done remotely, you still have to get up, walk over to the thermostat, and make the manual adjustments necessary to dial in the temperature of your house. While this was standard practice a short time ago, it now seems practically archaic.

Needless to say, purchasing a modern, programmable thermostat can change this experience dramatically. If you add a voice-controlled, Wi-Fi-connected thermostat to your home, you’ll suddenly be able to control it in ways you never before thought possible. As the name would indicate, you can control these models with just your voice, so you don’t have to stop what you are doing to physically adjust the thermostat with your hands. Also, thanks to the Wi-Fi connectivity, you can access your thermostat remotely to make changes – even if you aren’t home.

You might not think that all of this sounds like a big deal just yet. After all, you probably don’t mind getting up to change the thermostat once in a while, and it probably doesn’t need adjustment every day. But here’s the thing – upgrading your thermostat can be just one step in the move toward a fully integrated ‘smart home’. There are various smart home technologies already available on the market which allow you to bring a number of different aspects of your house together into a single interface. When you start to see and understand the vision of an entire smart home, the importance of things like upgraded thermostats really begins to become clear.

When you decide that the time is right to look for a new thermostat, you will want to keep in mind the specifics of your home first and foremost. You don’t want to pay for a model that has features you don’t need, but you also don’t want to wind up with one that isn’t capable of all functions that you would like to have available. Take a moment to list out what you would like your thermostat to be able to do, and then seek out the perfect model to match that list. Once the thermostat has been installed and you have learned how to use it properly, you will find that it is now much easier to keep your home at just the right temperature all year long.