Resideo's Total Connect Comfort Smart Home Thermostats Disconnect

Resideo smart home thermostats lost remote function during winter cold

By Bruce Brown February 5, 2019

With 100-year-record cold temperatures in Great Britain and the United States, staying warm is a primary goal. Unfortunately, Honeywell customers in the U.S. and U.K. who installed Resideo smart thermostats to control home temperatures remotely haven’t enjoyed full use of their systems, The Register reported.

Resideo’s Total Connect Comfort cloud platform has connectivity problems that may continue through the end of February, according to the company.

While some customers bristled at the restriction to local temperature control after having paid serious money for remote management, the Resideo thermostats still work and follow preset heating and cooling schedules, but remote control and status checks aren’t dependable for now.

As we reported in January, Honeywell Home made the switch to its new Resideo brand name for smart home thermostats just before CES. During CES, Resideo introduced two new T-Series smart thermostats with remote wireless sensors.

Resideo responded to concerns about Honeywell Home thermostat connectivity via Twitter, “Status update: some users may be experiencing connectivity issues with our Total Connect Comfort app. Your thermostat continues to perform as intended locally, and it will reconnect with the app when our maintenance is completed. We apologize if this is causing any inconvenience.”

Status update: some users may be experiencing connectivity issues with our Total Connect Comfort app. Your thermostat continues to perform as intended locally, and it will reconnect with the app when our maintenance is completed. We apologize if this is causing any inconvenience.

— Honeywell Home (@Honeywell_Home) February 1, 2019

Many customers were unsatisfied and unhappy with Honeywell Home’s update.

Twitter user @jencounter tweeted, “@Honeywell_Home servers down for maintenance again?? This has been almost nostop since January. Please, share this with your team: server maintenance shouldn’t affect user experience for weeks. Ever.”

@Honeywell_Home servers down for maintenance again?? This has been almost nostop since January. Please, share this with your team: server maintenance shouldn’t affect user experience for weeks. Ever.

— Jen (@jencounter) February 5, 2019

Digital Trends reached out to Resideo for comment on the reported thermostat connectivity problems.

In an email response, Trent J. Perrotto, Resideo’s senior director of corporate and digital communications, acknowledged the service interruptions and expressed the company’s apologies for customer outages in a situation that may continue through February.

According to Perrotto, strong business growth is one reason for the connectivity issues, which caused a greater load on the system’s cloud infrastructure. Resideo is currently working to upgrade the infrastructure and correct issues with the existing system.

Here’s the Resideo response in full:

Some of our customers that have attempted to control their thermostats via our app have experienced periodic connectivity issues with their connected thermostats recently. Strong growth in our connected thermostats is one cause, which has increased the load on our cloud infrastructure. We’re in the process of implementing upgraded infrastructure across our connected products to ensure reliability due to greater demand, and mitigating issues with our existing infrastructure. We notified our customers by email and social media that they may experience brief, intermittent connectivity through February as we implement new systems.

In our communications, we reassured customers that during these brief, intermittent outages, the thermostats would perform as intended locally, control the heating and cooling equipment correctly, and follow any schedules the homeowner has created. We recognize that many customers purchased these thermostats to control them remotely, and not being able to for a short time is an inconvenience. We remain committed to exceeding the expectations of our customers and providing a greatly improved experience through our planned upgrades. We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences the outages have caused in the interim.

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