Momentum Meri smart thermostat review: The opposite of bang for the buck

A smart house system needn’t be costly to ship worth. Or favourite budget-priced smart thermostat, the Honeywell T5, goes for about $125 on Amazon, and it delivers many of the similar options as our favourite high-end mannequin that prices almost twice as a lot. The Momentum Meri smart thermostat—which sells for simply $99 at Wal-Mart—on the different hand, is simply plain low-cost.

The Meri is spherical and has a colourful face to remind you of the household of Nest Learning Thermostats that shook up this sleepy business again in 2011. But in place of a rotating stainless-steel dial, the Meri has a hard and fast plastic collar. Momentum expects your HVAC system to have a C wire for energy, which isn’t unusual, and the bodily set up course of wasn’t a lot totally different from different smart thermostats I’ve reviewed for TechHive. So what’s to not like?

For starters, upon getting the Meri wired up and have configured its most elementary settings, it’s going to immediate you to obtain Momentum’s app from the acceptable app retailer. The thermostat will then show a QR code that you could scan from the app to hyperlink the thermostat to your account.

But the code scanner constructed into the app appeared unable to focus my smartphone’s digital camera on the QR code. The telephone’s native digital camera app had no such drawback, besides that the QR code took me to a direct obtain of the Chinese-language model of the app. I wound up doing a handbook search for the English-language model of the app (obtainable for Android and iOS) and put in it on my telephone.

Momentum

The Meri has a vibrant touchscreen with decision of 320 x 480 pixels, however the touchscreen isn’t very responsive, and the consumer interface displayed on it’s almost inscrutable. Tapping out the Wi-Fi password the thermostat wanted to affix my house community was a mentally painful expertise (it’s additionally price noting that the thermostat can solely hook up with 2.4GHz networks).

The similar goes for configuring any of the thermostat’s settings. The house display shows the present temperature inside your property. Swipe throughout the display and this adjustments to a clock. To entry some other settings, you’ll faucet the energy button, after which contact the plus and minus symbols to boost or decrease the goal temperature.

Jason D’Aprile / IDG

That’s easy sufficient, however you’ll have to entry the “parameters” display for every part else. This is an unlimited listing of more and more obscure choices beginning with Time/Date and System Type choices (easy sufficient, proper?) however occurring to incorporate such settings as “multi-stage hysteresis” (huh?). Momentum supplies just about no clarification for the function of many of these features, and the painfully sluggish response time makes it irritating to scroll by way of them.

This wouldn’t be as large of a deal if you happen to may entry the settings you want utilizing the cell app, however many…