Honeywell Lyric T6 review: For those on a budget, it will do the job

Recognising that Evohome is a little expensive for some people, Honeywell has also brought out the Lyric T6 smart thermostat. It’s part of an ecosystem of other products, including security cameras and a smart water leak detector. Unfortunately, now a few years old, the Lyric T6 has fallen behind the competition.

The Lyric T6 is available in two versions. The standard T6 connects to existing thermostat wires, while the T6R costs about £15 more, comes on a stand and operates wirelessly.

Honeywell Lyric T6 review: Setup and configuration

Both versions require you to install the remote relay, which hooks up to your boiler and triggers heat on demand. Given that the relay installation involves mains power, you may want to get a professional to install the system.

There’s no hot water support for this system, so you’ll need to keep your old hot water controls.

The Lyric T6 connects to your home network via its built-in Wi-Fi and is configured entirely from the smartphone app. It’s quick to get running, and we had ours configured within 10 minutes. We quite like the design of the unit, although the cuboid body does look rather like a giant keyboard key.

During configuration, you’re prompted to set up the geolocation. This turns off your heating when you leave the set radius, and turns it on when you return, helping save money. Importantly, Honeywell supports multiple users for this system, so you won’t have a situation where your heating turns off just because one person has left the house.

Honeywell Lyric T6 review: Features and performance

In trying to keep the system simple, Honeywell has implemented three modes for the heating: Home, Away and Sleep. The idea is that you have one temperature when you’re at home, one when you’re away and one for when you go to sleep. You can configure the times at which the sleep settings apply through the app.

If you want to take more control of your heating, you can enable the full schedule mode, and set different temperatures at different times of the day. There’s a choice to have the same schedule for every day, different for weekdays and weekends, or a different schedule each day. This is very flexible, but it’s a little annoying that setting your own schedule disables the geolocation mode.

Outside of the schedule or geofenced temperature settings, you can also manually control the temperature of your home using the controls on the thermostat or through the app.

If geofencing is turned on, temperature changes last until the next change: you go away, come back, or sleep mode is activated. If you have the scheduled mode, temperature changes are kept until the next temperature change, or you can set a change to be permanent or to run on a timer. It’s a shame that you don’t get the same range of options when running in geofenced mode.

As with other smart thermostats, the Lyric T6 learns the thermal properties of your home, so it knows how long it takes to warm up. Turning on Optimised Start lets the Lyric T6 turn on your heating early, so that your home is at the correct temperature by the start time that you set. It’s a great feature for those cold winter mornings when you don’t want to get out of bed.

We love the holiday mode, which lets you turn your heating off when you jet off, and back on automatically when you return. Using the app, you just set the date and time that you’re going away and your return time, and that’s it. It’s a great feature and means that you don’t return to a cold house because you’ve forgotten to turn the heating back on.

Honeywell Lyric T6 review: Other features

Lyric supports Apple HomeKit, but it also supports Amazon Alexa and Google Home, so you can control your heating with your voice regardless of the voice assistant that you have.

Also available is an IFTTT channel, which lets you set a temperature on your Lyric thermostat automatically. This can be handy for turning your heating down if, for example, the outside temperature increases.

Honeywell Lyric T6 review: Verdict

Launching the camera and water leak detector, it seemed as though Honeywell was trying to ape Nest’s range of products and create a single app for common smart home devices. Ultimately, the T6 now feels quite old and doesn’t have the same range of features or level of control as its competition.

The saving grace is the price: the Lyric T6 is excellent value. For those on a budget this will do the job, although you’ll find the Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Thermostat E give you more features and are easier to use.