How Aqara's new W200 is WAY MORE than just a thermostat

It's been a long time since I've seen a thermostat that's this innovative, including support for Apple's adaptive temperature control and clean energy guidance in iOS 26, but the W200 is about a lot more than just heating and cooling your home. It also has a millimeter wave sensor, talks to your car doorbell and smart locks like the new U400, and it can also run automations in your home and that's just scratching the surface. When I first saw this thermostat at CES, I was so impressed with the concept that I'm actually partnering with a car on this video to tell you all about their new thermostat and what I'm doing with it in my home. In the box, you get some stickers that we'll get to later. There's an installation manual and something I was excited to see, a trim plate. If you're replacing a larger wall thermostat, you might want this to cover the area that your old thermostat did so it doesn't look unfinished. Then there's a mounting plate we'll use to wire your thermostat into your system. This is easier than you might think and we'll get into those details soon too. And then of course there's the Acara W200 itself. So this setup actually starts before taking the W200 out of the box. The W200 supports most common heating and cooling systems in North America, but you'll want to pop the cover off your current thermostat to make note of the wire terminals used. These letters and numbers are an industry standard. I'll link below to details from Acara to confirm your thermostat numbers and letters match what they support. Like many modern thermostats, this will require a C-wire or common wire, which gives the W200 a little extra power to run all those smart features. I've installed a number of smart thermostats over the years and this installation is just like those from an HVAC perspective. So if you'd rather get your local technician to install this thermostat for you, they should have no problem wiring it up and getting it running. Then you can be nearby to add it to your smart home when the wiring is complete. There are a lot of features I want to get to with this thermostat, so I'll keep the installation part brief. Shut off the circuit breaker, go to your thermostat, pull the front off and take a picture of it with your phone for reference. Then use the stickers Acara supplied to label each one of the wires. Take the wires out of the old thermostat, replace the old thermostat with the mounting board from Acara, then attach the wires to the spots that match the labels you added. Consulting Acara's manual for any questions. Once it's all wired, put the Acara W200 on the mounting plate and then turn the circuit back on at the breaker. Then you'll see a QR code to scan to set up the thermostat in the Acara Home app. This is important for this thermostat as it gives you easy access to software updates and also lets you control some important settings that we'll talk about. Once inside the Acara Home app, it asks you to specify temperature ranges for what it calls scenes. These are home, away, wind down and sleep. Get some values in the Acara app that sound reasonable to you, but don't overthink it. These can be adjusted later and you won't be using them if you move over to Apple's Adaptive Temperature. Adding this thermostat to Apple Home then lets you set up a parallel set of ranges in similar fashion, day, night, home and away. Why bother with Apple's Adaptive Temperature? Well, if you use Apple products, it does a lot more than just know when everybody in your family is home. It also anticipates your arrival. If you're using Apple Maps, let's say for directions, your home knows when you're gonna arrive and can adjust the temperature accordingly. Another great detail is that it can auto adjust between heat, cool, auto and off. Obviously my home won't need the air conditioner when it's 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside and the same is true for the furnace in the summer. In trying different thermostats, I often ignore these smart temperature systems because I'm too worried it will miss trigger and make my house way too hot or way too cold. Acara's thermostat automations look great and as an Apple fan, I think Adaptive Temperature could finally be an automated temperature system that could stick with me for the long term. And while Adaptive Temperature is great if you already use Apple devices, this thermostat also has some nice integrations if you already use other Acara products as well or you wanna add those later. If you have, let's say an Acara FP300 or another Acara sensor with a temperature sensor inside, you can use them as the data source to heat and cool your home instead of the sensor on the thermostat. One detail Acara told me they're adding in a software update is the ability to schedule a change for the temperature data source. For example, between let's say 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., use the FP300 I have in my bedroom. Otherwise, use the living room thermostat temperature. And then ideally, third-party matter systems like Apple Home wouldn't know the difference and just start receiving the temperature from my FP300 at night instead of the thermostat sensor. All this heating and cooling is certainly nice but stopping the video here would be missing, I think, some of the best parts. This thermostat is equipped with an Acara millimeter wave sensor. Out of the box, the thermostat uses this to turn on and off the display. And there are actually a number of layers to this display. When you're not using the display, it shows a clock with a wallpaper. It appears there'll be quite a number of theme packs in the Acara app for this, but at the time of recording before the official thermostat launch, there are only a few. Then you can also configure additional scenes for the thermostat. Add a screen and choose a layout that fits your needs. The gray tiles are like smart controls or buttons that can trigger automations on one of your Acara hubs, similar to smart Acara screens you might have seen from other parts of the world. The black tiles can be filled with services, as Acara calls them, like a weather report or a special kind of clock. One idea is you could set up a screen to control the room lights right from the Acara touchscreen. I ended up configuring my thermostat with a single screen showing a weather report. You get this by swiping from the main temperature control screen and seeing the weather. Our thermostat is pretty close to our entryway, so it's a nice way to check what kind of a coat I need as I head out the door. Another detail of the display I noticed at CES and at home is just how responsive it is to touch. It's as responsive as really any of my Apple products. But what about that millimeter wave sensor? Yes, of course, it shows up via matter as an occupancy sensor, and you can use it for any automations, just like Acara's other millimeter wave sensors. Another cool detail is that you can change the adaptive temperature in Apple Home to consider the at-home status only when people are in the living room. If this would be helpful to you, I'd love to hear in the comments. I think it's a neat demo of what the tech can do, but it's not gonna be practically useful for me. The living room is such a central place for me where people are moving around all the time that I haven't found a practical use for the millimeter wave sensor to do something like triggering the lights. But a lot of thermostats are in hallways, and using this to automate hallway lighting as you walk through could be really helpful. If you have an Acara doorbell, like the Acara G410 or my Acara G400, you can connect it to the thermostat along with an Acara smart lock like my U400. By the way, the Acara smart lock U400 is really the smart lock to beat right now. It supports Aliro UWB, which means it works with Apple HomeKey Ultra Wideband. I just have to walk toward my door from the outside, and as long as my iPhone or Apple Watch are with me, it unlocks. There's also a keypad for pin codes and a fingerprint reader and NFC tap to unlock, not to mention an old-fashioned keyhole. Now, back to the thermostat. Once you connect it to your lock and doorbell in Acara's app settings, you'll see snapshots of your front door when someone rings the doorbell. Then you could unlock the door from the thermostat by tapping on the lock icon right there on the screen. My thermostat is so close to the front door that I don't use this feature beyond testing. But if I had, let's say, a split-level home or a second thermostat zone upstairs, I could see this being very useful. It's also nice from a safety perspective to be able to easily see who's at the front door without going and opening it. Then unlock the door if you want to to let the person in. Speaking of unlocking, if you've watched this channel for a while, you know I love how Acara hubs unlock so many great Acara Zigbee sensors you can put around your home to detect leaks, know if doors or windows are open, trigger things with a button press, or more. The W200 thermostat is also an Acara hub, not only with Zigbee, but also for Thread. This means you can add Acara Thread or Zigbee devices to your smart home by using the thermostat as a matter bridge. If you're new to Acara, this could be a nice way to connect some door and window sensors. Then you could shut off your HDVC system whenever you open a window. Or what about adding some of those temperature sensors I talked about earlier? All of this is much more competitively priced than the sensors required for many smart thermostats. But if you're like me and you already use a different Acara hub, like my Acara Hub M3 to control your smart home, then you can add the Acara W200 to that hub to run automations there. Now, like a lot of Acara launches, I wouldn't be surprised if this sells out fast. If you wanna pick up an Acara W200 for your home, check out the links at the top of the description. Thanks again to Acara for not only powering so much of my smart home, but also supporting what I do here as a creator by sponsoring this video. And I have a link right here to a playlist of a number of other Acara products I've recently talked about, including the U400 lock, the G400 doorbell. Thanks again so much for watching, and I hope to see you in the next video. Thank you.