They start off by telling you on the box that if you don't have this thermostat installed professionally, you void the five year warranty. That means you, homeowner!

The app then lead to very carefully through the installation of the new thermostat, and it does a great job with the electrical and mechanical bits. Thermostat wiring can vary quite a bit, so they have you take a picture, and tell the app what wires you see. These appear later in a diagram when you're doing hook up.

Wall mounting is easy and the device even comes with a built-in level so you can get that right.

The software installation is not nearly so clear. At one point, you would expect it to list the Wi-Fi services that it can see, but it couldn't find the three services I had blasting in the room. I ended up entering the necessary wifi info for one of them. Apparently it took, but the app did not seem to realize this. This left me continuing to try to reconfigure it, getting an error message that said it was already configured.

I never got a "congratulations your thermostat is hooked up to the Internet! "Message from either the app or the thermostat. But clearly that's what happened.

The app needs to switch back-and-forth between your Wi-Fi network, and the thermostats Wi-Fi network. But the switches are not made clear, and the activity meter gives no indication what it is waiting for, so you can sit there for minutes waiting for something to happen. They really need to work on this part.

I followed the directions for hooking this up to my SmartThings hub, and that seems to integrate just fine. There are still a lot of features involved in all this that I haven't figured out, but the basic seem to be working just fine.

Aside from the set up confusions, this seems like a fine product. I'm looking forward to using it.

-- revised review:

I bought two of these, with great hopes. Honeywell has been in the thermostat business for a long time, and these were to replace two of their old model.

The first one stopped working: it would boot, and just sit there through its partially-display sunburst initialization. I could find no documentation for its status. I contacted Honeywell, and we went through some quite technical debugging, involving special wiring and my voltmeter. They were well-prepared to do this, and eventually sent me a new thermostat, which worked fine.

Then my second thermostat stopped working, its booting halting somewhere else during initialization. And the first one? It now appears to work, but doesn't turn on the furnace.

So these devices have two problems:

- they seem to de after a few months, and

- their diagnostics are totally useless. This is a shame, since they are little computers with displays, and could in principle supply exact error condition indications, with web-accessible documentation for dealing with them.

So, I have reverted to the old thermostats, and am looking for some other new ones.

It's very cool. It works well. Awesome but... it has some trouble with HomeKit. Not totally ready for prime time. The last update seemed to fix some of the connections to my phone. I run the home from my iPad. Very important that you set up a hub. The iHome smart plugs were SO easy to instal but for this I had the HVAC dude out. I didn't want to screw it up. Prolly something a handy dude could do himself. Whatevs. So I'm not that dude. Now the Lyric is set up, and most of the time it talks to my phone and my iPad. Even when I'm gone. But you prolly will get messages in your Apple ecosystem that the Lyric is "updating." It usually plays nice, but sometimes its gonna happen. If you can't deal then don't get this thermo cuz its not perfect. I totally thinks it is SO awesome I just wait for it to come back. It's not like I change the temp 5 times a day. I set it and leave it. Switches on the AC as needed. Will even switch between heat and AC auto. It lights up when you walk by. I kinda like that--pretty cool.

UPDATED 5/13/2017:

Ok, so Lyric has done some major firmware updates, and Apple updated to iOS 10.3. The thermostat is now totally awesome. Never goes off line any more. It is always synced to my Apple Home--iPad, iPhone whatever. And now 5 stars earned. My best bud saw it and went home to order one for his house. It's that cool... and hot when needed.

This replaced a Honeywell touchscreen smart thermostat that was driving me crazy. So far, the Lyric thermostat is working great.

The Lyric app is much improved over the Honeywell Total Connect Comfort app (which seems like it's on the way out, judging by the old-school graphics). The Lyric also has Apple HomeKit integration, which is going to be gaining more traction, especially when iOS 10 is released in the fall.

The Lyric is dead-simple to install, with clear step-by-step instructions from the app. Even connecting to my home's wifi was painless. The Lyric looks great, too and feels very well made. I like that the display automatically wakes up and brightens when you walk up to it...a nice touch.

IMHO, four simple tweaks would make the Lyric just about perfect and a 5 star product:

1) The display on the Lyric should show the relative humidity below the indoor temp.

2) There should be a way of turning the fan on/off from the thermostat (right now, the only way to turn the fan on/off is through the Lyric app).

3) The app should show, in addition to the current indoor temp and temp set point, much more information and it should be user selectable. Info that I'd appreciate having: Whether or not the system is actually running; How long the system has been running in the past hour/12 hours/24 hours, etc

4) The filter change reminder should be based on actual running time and not just "30/60/90" calendar days. During spring and fall, our system rarely runs, so there's no need to change the filter in 30 days if the system has only run for a few hours that month.

Bottom line: The Lyric is a solid smart thermostat and with just a few firmware/software tweaks, will be great.

Negative stars would be most accurate; runs off battery?? NOPE not long enough and it’s going to break our boiler. We bought 2 of these in November for $299 total to replace old fashion thermostats. Thought it would be great because they do not require a “C-wire” or common wire which in short means a power source; because they have a battery instead.

WRONG- starting about 2 weeks ago both thermostats started acting crazy; no internet, need X minutes to begin heating (display reads) and the battery lights turned on. How could that be?? These batteries are good for 15 years??

Then our boiler/furnace was acting strange; it was turning on for a fraction of a second and off… on/off/on/off… We knew it had to be linked to the thermostats malfunction because the error messages continued though we replaced the batteries in both, our Wifi was fine, and called Honeywell to troubleshoot the device.

We continued working on the problem and called our oil company explaining what has been going on and noting our furnace is actually starting to smell like smoke or it’s burning from the constant on and off. They knew the problem right away and told us how companies advertise these as not needing an additional wire or “C-wire”, but truly they cannot run off batteries alone. So the battery drains and additional power must be acquired; from where?? Oh your furnace. It cycles and causes the furnace to briefly turn on just enough to “steal power” from it and keep the thermostat kind of running. While our boiler won’t break over night; it will eventually if this continues.

The solution? Install the power wire (3rd wire) or get a different thermostat. We had an electrician come today and that is not such an easy task, so we just bought two new none Wifi normal thermostats. I will be contacting for a refund; $300 + the cost of an electrician today + the cost of 2 new thermostats! NO thank you.

Lesson to learn from anyone reading this; make sure you have a C-wire or can easily install one to avoid this mess.

I own 3 of these and intend to purchase one more for our 4 zone house. Initially I had a rough start with these as I do not have a common wire and relied solely on the battery. It does okay without the common but it really dumbs down the capability of the thermostat. I bought the Fast Stat common makers from Amazon which is a product that adds a common to your 2 wire lines without needing to run ANY additional wiring. The common makers did WONDERS for my Lyrics! I have not experienced a single issue since adding the common. My boiler and zone controllers work perfect with the Lyrics!

If I had rated this during the first week it would have got five stars. The setup was so easy - wonderful. I don't have a regular schedule so it is good that when heading home the heating automatically turns itself on, and when I leave it turns itself off. That is exactly what I wanted. And great that I can remotely see what the temperature is in the house and change it if I want.

Then one day I was feeling cold, so before leaving work I push the temperature at home up a couple of notches... But apparently it presumed I meant 'go hotter and hold that temperature for ever', so in the middle of the night I was sweating; apparently if you ever change the thermostat you have to remember to go back and tell it to revert to normal schedule before you go to bed - stupid!

Now I am away from home for a week. As I left the temperature went down as expected - great - over night it stayed down - great - but each morning it went back to "home" temperature and heated the whole house just as if I had been at home. I checked the settings and it said that it knew that I was "away" but stilled turned the heating on full - stupid. Does 'away' only work if one leaves the house during the day and is forgotten if one goes away overnight?

The whole point of this device is that you can set it and forget about it, but you can't as you have to remember if you have made a change, and the away function seems problematic, so for me, sorry, that only gets two stars if I have to constantly check it is working properly.

Works marginally. We bought this Lyric for our second home so we could turn the heat up and down remotely before arriving and leaving. They tend to fall off the home network a lot. The are NOT Alexa/Echo compatible! Once you go through the steps to sync the thermostats with Alexa, all Alexa can do is tell you the temperature in each room; Alexa CANNOT adjust the temperature.

I bought two of these. One for upstairs and the second for downstairs. They are about 12-15 feet apart I.e. just the height of a stairway. I bought them with the understanding I have no c wire and the product literature said it would work. For a while there were no issues. Then the upstairs unit started going offline and losing WiFi. I contacted customer support and they told me I needed to move my WiFi closer. I moved my WiFi as they suggested so it is within 12 ft of the upstairs unit. This did not help. Next the upstairs started burning through lithium batteries every week. I contacted customer support and they said I needed a c wire. They ignored the fact I had no issues with my other unit. When I brought it up that I have two and only one has an issue they would say we need to have you add a c wire because that is the issue. They did send an adapter for a 4wire system. The adapter did not work. I have a 30 year old unit and following the c wire bridging on their website did not work either. 4 months later the upstairs unit burns through lithium batteries within 2 days. I have spent more in lithium batteries than it takes to buy a inexpensive $24 unit. At the same time I have contacted customer support another two times and they will not respond. I do get a customer service satisfaction survey but no actual response.

If you have a c wire get it. But beware they have horrible customer service and will do anything to keep pushing you off so they don’t need to rma a unit.

Looks nice but have to reset it every week. Keeps coming off the wifi.