Trane® Home

When we spent $21,000 to have our furnace and A/C upgraded, part of the selling point was the exclusive Trane panel and mobile app. They sell you on how technologically advanced the system is and how much data it collects and analyzes. Super cool idea and selling point! I have a hard time believing that when the panel itself can only do a fraction of what far cheaper/less exclusive panels can do. We had an OLD EcoBee before this, and it functioned in a far superior manner. The mobile app is absolute garbage, especially when compared to EcoBee or Nest. Half the time the data doesn’t even load. It deletes history, which tells me that if it can’t even show me the data, it’s definitely not using and learning from any data. The in-room monitors also cannot be viewed separately, which is frustrating if I’m curious how our 2nd floor bedroom is looking before we get home. All we can see is an “average of all monitors,” which is not helpful. And many times when I go to change a target temp setting in the mobile app, it thinks for a long while then times out and won’t process the change. I thought perhaps it was my phone, so then I used my spouse’s and a friend’s phone just to check and the same thing happened in their apps. If you’re going to charge for a superior product, you’d better darn well have a superior product and product experience. Do better!

Feeling a little cold today and want to tap your temp up a degree or two? You have to remember to set it back to Run Schedule or this app and thermostat combo makes your adjustment a permanent hold temp and it will ignore your schedule and maintain that particular temp until you tell it to follow the schedule again. That means, it will keep your home at that temp all through the night. The smart thermostat I used to have would only hold that adjustment until the next scheduled temp change and not…forever. That’s not very smart to me. Also, a tech changed my thermostat out with another of the same model and now when I open the app, it shows two selectable thermostats I have to choose from…”New Thermostat” or “Old Thermostat”. The tech told me this would happen and that Trane does not seem to want to fix it though customers complain about it. It adds an extra step to opening the app and making an adjustment. It’s not the end of the world, but why can’t the user delete a thermostat that no longer exists? Not very smart. The next time I have an issue there will be 3 thermostats…one “New” and two “Old”. The Trane system is a great system…the proprietary thermostat is going to be a step backward for many people for these reasons and others that I’m not going to get into but others here have. Does it work? Yes. It does appear to be reliable, thankfully. Just slower and with less functionality and more inconvenience than the current high end thermostats that have been on the market for the last decade.

Our new house came with a Trane XR724 smart thermostat already installed. Scrolling thru the menus showed it had WiFi capability. Cool I thought! I was at first disappointed to find out it only works with a Nexia hub or app, which I had never heard of before. So I installed the app on my iPhone and created an account. Then it came time to get the app and the thermostat to talk to each other. The good news it’s the app takes you step by step thru the process. For security reasons I recommend configuring your router to have a guest WiFi separate (lan access blocked) from your main WiFi and tell the thermostat (via the app) to use the guest WiFi. Once everything is configured, the app talks to the “cloud” and then the “cloud” talks to the thermostat and the thermostat reports back what it’s doing. The thermostat can be fully controlled from anywhere there is an internet connection. However, I have not been able to get Alexa to work with the Nexia app. The Alexa skill for Nexia is enabled but Alexa says it can’t find the thermostat.