Lennox and Everyday Electric have announced a partnership that will build grid-aware energy savings directly into Lennox smart thermostats. The integration, expected to begin rolling out in 2027, will let eligible homeowners cut heating and cooling bills with subtle, automated temperature adjustments during high-demand periods — while keeping full manual control.
What was announced
On October 14, 2026, Lennox (NYSE: LII) and Everyday Electric — the energy platform formerly known as Renew Home — announced a partnership that embeds Everyday Electric’s energy management tools directly into Lennox smart thermostats and the Lennox Home app.
Once the integration launches, eligible Lennox customers will be able to:
- Turn on automatic savings features that make subtle, personalized temperature adjustments when energy prices or grid demand are high, lowering heating and cooling costs without noticeable comfort changes.
- Earn utility rewards where available for participating in these programs, adding a direct financial incentive on top of the bill savings.
- Stay in control at all times by updating savings preferences or overriding the temperature on the thermostat itself or in the Lennox Home app — nothing runs without the homeowner’s consent, and opting out takes a tap.
Crucially, the features are planned for both new and existing owners: Lennox says it intends to bring the capabilities to an installed base of more than one million Lennox smart thermostats already in homes, not just future hardware.
The two companies
Lennox is one of the largest U.S. makers of residential heating, cooling, indoor air quality, and water heating systems. Its smart thermostat lineup — including the ENERGY STAR-certified M40 and L40 models — already supports automatic demand response as OpenADR 2.0b-compliant virtual end nodes, meaning these thermostats can connect to a utility’s demand-response server and adjust setpoints during grid events, with users able to activate or deactivate participation at any time.
Everyday Electric, rebranded from Renew Home, says it operates the largest residential virtual power plant (VPP) in the United States, with more than six million households already using its energy management tools and savings features. A virtual power plant aggregates thousands of homes’ flexible devices — thermostats, batteries, EV chargers — and coordinates tiny adjustments across them to shave peak demand, which utilities increasingly value as an alternative to firing up expensive peaker plants.
Why thermostats are the grid’s favorite device
Heating and cooling is typically the single largest energy load in a home, often accounting for roughly half of residential electricity use. That makes the thermostat the highest-leverage device on the grid: nudge a million thermostats by a degree or two during a summer afternoon peak, and the aggregate effect rivals a mid-sized power plant — with far less cost and no new construction.
Both companies framed the partnership against a backdrop of rising pressure on the grid. Energy demand is growing faster than forecasters predicted, and building new grid infrastructure is expensive — costs that ultimately flow into household bills. Partnerships like this one aim to attack the problem from the demand side: instead of only adding supply, make millions of existing thermostats behave like a coordinated, dispatchable resource.
The trend is bigger than one deal. Industry roundups of the October 12–18 week flagged energy programs moving deeper into HVAC controls as a theme to watch, with thermostat makers increasingly partnering with grid-service providers rather than leaving demand response as a utility-side afterthought.
What this means for homeowners
For the more than one million households with a Lennox smart thermostat, the practical takeaway is simple: no new hardware required. When the rollout begins in 2027, existing owners should be able to opt in through the Lennox Home app and start receiving personalized savings suggestions, bill-reducing automations, and utility rewards where their local utility offers them.
The “comfort-first” positioning matters. Traditional demand-response programs sometimes carried a reputation for blunt, utility-controlled thermostat setbacks. The Lennox–Everyday Electric pitch is the opposite: subtle adjustments, personalized to each household, with the user able to change preferences or take manual control at any moment. That design choice is what makes opt-in plausible at scale — and scale is what makes a virtual power plant work.
What to watch next
- Rollout timeline: The companies say features will begin arriving in 2027. Exact dates, supported thermostat models, and regional availability have not been detailed yet.
- Utility partnerships: Reward availability will depend on local utility programs, so the financial upside will vary by market.
- Personalization depth: How finely the system tunes adjustments — and how clearly it explains what it’s doing — will determine whether homeowners keep the feature on.
- Industry follow-on: With Lennox linking HVAC hardware directly to the country’s largest residential VPP, expect rival thermostat and HVAC brands to announce similar grid partnerships of their own.
The broader story is the thermostat’s evolution from a wall-mounted scheduler into a node on the power grid. Lennox and Everyday Electric are betting that homeowners will trade a barely noticeable degree of temperature flexibility for lower bills and a more reliable grid — and that the path there runs through software updates, not new hardware.