Goodyear gets overlooked in conversations about Phoenix-area
heat, but it shouldn’t. Sitting out on the western edge of the valley, it catches afternoon sun with nothing to slow it down, and summer temperatures that would be considered extreme almost anywhere else are just a regular Tuesday here. AC systems in Goodyear run hard. They run long. Making many homeowners consider switching to smart thermostats. And in a lot of homes, they run that way regardless of whether anyone is actually home, whether the back bedrooms are occupied, or whether the thermostat setting made sense when it was programmed three years ago and nobody touched it since.
That’s the inefficiency most people are living with and not thinking about. Not a failing system, not a refrigerant problem — just a dumb thermostat running a smart system on a schedule that doesn’t reflect how anyone actually uses the house.
Zoning
A standard single-thermostat setup treats the whole house as one zone. The living room hits temperature and the system shuts off, even if the master bedroom facing west is still climbing. Or the system runs trying to cool a bedroom wing that’s been empty since 8am because the thermostat is in the hallway and doesn’t know that. Zoning fixes this by dividing the home into sections that can be controlled independently — the kitchen and common areas during the day, the bedrooms in the evening, the home office when someone’s working from home and nowhere else.
In a larger Goodyear home this isn’t a luxury, it’s just logic. A 2,500 square foot house with a single thermostat is a guessing game. The system is either overcooling parts of the house or undercooling others, and usually both at different times of day. Smart thermostats with zoning capability — paired with dampers in the ductwork — let the system direct cooling where it’s actually needed rather than treating every room the same regardless of occupancy, orientation, or time of day.
Scheduling a Smart Thermostat
Most people set a schedule when they install a thermostat and never revisit it. Smart thermostats learn. They track when the house is occupied, when people wake up and leave, when they come back — and they adjust without being told. That sounds like a small thing until you think about what a Goodyear summer actually looks like: the house needs to be pre-cooled before the afternoon heat peak, not catching up to it. A system that starts pulling the temperature down at noon before the 4pm heat hits is doing fundamentally different work than one reacting after the fact.
Scheduling also accounts for rate structures. APS and SRP both run time-of-use pricing in this area, meaning electricity costs more during peak demand hours — typically mid-afternoon through early evening in summer. A smart thermostat that knows your rate schedule will pre-cool the house before peak pricing kicks in and ease off during the expensive window. That’s not a setting most people would manage manually. It happens automatically, in the background, every day.
Energy Savings Data for Smart Thermostats
The numbers are real but they vary enough that blanket claims aren’t worth much. What the data consistently shows is that homes making the switch from a basic programmable thermostat to a smart thermostat see somewhere between 10 and 15 percent reduction in cooling costs — higher in homes where the old thermostat was poorly programmed or running a fixed schedule that didn’t match actual occupancy. In a Goodyear home running the AC hard from May through October, that range translates to a meaningful dollar figure over a full season.
The more useful data is what a smart thermostat shows you about your own system. Runtime hours, how long it takes to hit setpoint, whether certain times of day the system is struggling to keep up. A system that’s taking twice as long to cool the house as it did last summer isn’t just inefficient — it’s telling you something is wrong, and having that data visible makes it easier to catch early. Refrigerant issues, dirty coils, a duct leak — all of them show up in runtime data before they show up as a breakdown. Most homeowners don’t have that visibility with a standard thermostat. With a smart one, it’s just there on the app every morning.
If the thermostat on your wall is more than five years old and hasn’t been reprogrammed since it was installed, it’s probably the cheapest high-impact upgrade left in the house.