Venstar Skyport 4+

Reading the negative reviews dissuaded me from installing wifi module in the thermostat. I installed a new HVAC system 4 months ago and didn’t want or need a Nest thermostat so I took what they recommended; it works for my needs.
I installed the Wi-Fi card and have been using the Venstar app for around 4 months. It isn’t perfect, but there are workarounds when errors occur (e.g. force close app if unresponsive). I haven’t had a single problem with keeping it connected to wifi, but I always give non-roaming devices dedicated IP addresses on the router, so you might try this.
I don’t use 1 or 7 day programming cycles and prefer to adjust as I go. I connected to Alexa and she’s perfectly capable of “turn the heat to 75”. If you want Nest functionality you buy the Nest thermostat. If you’d be happy to adjust your thermostat using your phone while lying in bed, the unit and this app are perfectly capable of delivering.

Have two thermostats controlled by the app. Main reason to use the app is to automatically change the thermostats from Home to Away when we are gone for an extended time (a couple days). Right now the maximum geofence radius is 20 miles.

The most recent example is we left home 3 days ago and the “heat too” temperature was lowered 10 degrees per my settings. When we returned home today the “Heat too” temperatures was restored to the home setting but the temperature in the house was still 8 degrees lower because the approximately 20 minutes it takes to travel 20 miles is not enough. This needs to be something more like 50 miles.

Also don’t know for sure how the app works with more than one phone, ie if I am gone and my wife is home is the thermostat setting changed or does it recognize someone is home and not change the setting. I do know that when I tried change the geofence distance on my phone to if the latest version of the app fixes my concern I couldn’t even change it until I deleted the app from my wife’s phone which is equally frustrating.

Great app has been great since the start been a user for almost 10 years now, early adopter. Have another brand name and another house and this one is far superior in almost every way. Funny, how a big national multi billion dollar company can’t pull together an app as well as this company can. The only thing I would love to see, would be a hold button on the thermostat in the app where you could override the existing temperature schedule and then select say hold for 24 hours before resuming schedule and then another button for say hold six hours before resuming schedule. If you got a selectable pop up, select how many hours you want to hold that would be nice but not necessary. We like to have the schedule so the system always perverts back to reasonable temperatures but we also like to override it frequently and then the schedule might be coming up for a change shortly which does the temperature change we just made.