Old thermostat, new thermostats

[Ozz]

Yesterday, I changed out an old household thermostat, must have been 30 years old. Pretty good service life, it had switched on and off for over a million times, on the wall doing it’s job.
Now we need much more work from our thermostats, we want them to not only switch on, and switch off, but we want them to be able to be seen across the room, so we know what the temperature is without being a few inches from them, with our reading glasses on.
The new programmable thermostats are so nice, they warm our homes up in the morning when we roll out of bed in the winter, after a cooler temperature at night, so we can snuggle in bed with grandma’s quilt.
They go about the job of saving us energy costs by adjusting the temperatures up and down depending on the seasons, while we earn our livings away from home. The furnace and air-conditioning fan can be programmed to run continuously at night when we sleep, then switch to automatic fan operation when we awake. Some will kick the fan on if the weather is neutral, for 10 minutes, the off for 20 minutes so the air in our homes will not be stale. They call it the ‘Comfort circulating fan feature.’
Fancy name, I wonder how long it took them to come up with that…
The smart thermostats know what day it is, has a very accurate clock, they even know when daylight savings time changes, and compensates for it.
You can set the ‘hold’ feature for a wide range of times; if ‘Aunt Tilly’ is staying with you for a few weeks, (Heaven forbid) and knows that she can raise the temperature in the house a few degrees; (Up to 85) then push the hold button. You can program the thermostat to reset to normal programming after 5 minutes, or for up to 4 hours. (Sorry Aunt Tilly)
The thermostats have built in compressor delay, keypad lock-outs, automatic switch-over from heat to cool if wanted, and many, many more wonderful features. Mine came with a 5 year warranty.
Time will tell, but I doubt it will last the 30 years that the old guy I took off the wall did.