I've had this unit for about 1.5 months. Summary: The unit looks great and works very well, but it is not very convenient to program. Programming the unit is not hard per say, BUT it is VERY VERY tedious. It has all the features you could want, but they aren't intuitive to program, and the manual is a little difficult to understand. Installing the unit was a breeze, no issues there. Programming the unit wasn't difficult either, although the process was not as streamlined as it could have been. Once you've set your schedule for one day, you can copy it to the next, and the next, and so on. So if every day has the same schedule, you're golden. However, if you want to set the same schedule for say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you'll have to set each one individually. Also, there is no way to see the schedules in aggregate form. You have to go into the schedule process for each day and click through "next/yes" for each setting in the schedule for each day; all this to simply see the settings for a given day. You cannot jump right to a day in the middle of the week, you have to start from monday and work your way through all the different schedules/settings. Example: Monday: 1) set wake/morning start TIME, press "yes/next" (the difference between "next" and "yes", is that if changes were made to the current setting time/temp, "yes" saves and moves to the next field, while "next" resets the change, and moves to the next field) 2) set wake/morning desired TEMP, press "yes/next" 3) set leave/day start TIME, "yes/next" 4) set leave/day desired TEMP, press "yes/next" 5) set return/evening start TIME, press "yes/next" 6) set return/evening desired TEMP, press "yes/next" 7) set sleep/night start TIME, press "yes/next" 8) set sleep/night desired TEMP, press "yes/next" Now you get moved on to Tuesday, where you repeat the process. So scrolling through the days can be a bit painful (~8 presses per day). You also have to go through this process separately for heat AND cooling. You have the option of hitting "copy" if you know you want to copy the previous day's schedule to the current day (this seems somewhat backwards and unintuitive). You can hit "exit" in the middle of all this, and my assumption is that only the values that have been changed will remain changed. I'm not interested enough to play with this specifically to find out. So if you don't intend to modify or look at your various schedules and settings, often, it will be fine. If you want to change the schedule often, or even just want to check it, periodically, it's probably going to feel like a hassle. Also it only has 1 field for displaying temperature, so you can't see the current temperature and the "Set At" temperature at the same time. It displays the current/actual temperature by default, if you want to see the "set at" temperature, press the temperature field once; it will flash, show the "set at" temperature, and eventually go back to displaying the current/actual temperature. Final gripe/comment, and I realize it's kind of a picky one. I'm a night owl, and am usually up well after midnight. I wanted to program the unit to start the night/lower/sleep temperature at 2am (ie roughly the time I go to sleep). I couldn't do this because each "day" ends at midnight. While this makes perfect sense, it's something I had not thought of until I tried to program the unit. I would suspect most programmable units also suffer from this issue. So I can't hold it against the Lux either, but I figured I would mention it for the other night owls out there. Sooooooooo.... Pros: - Easy setup and installation - Very nice looking display - Works exactly as their manual describes (meaning controls, AND the accurateness of the start-stop for scheduling) - Energy Usage timer (shows how long it has had heat/cooling "on") w/ reset - Temperature calibration feature - Customizable "swing" value up to 2.25 deg - Controls lock (prevent unauthorized changes) - Smart Recovery feature (where the unit can turn on "early" so that at the start of the "wake/morning" and "return/evening" settings, the temperature is already at the desired level; this feature is off by default) Cons: - Schedule/day programming is not geared toward allowing you to make changes without going through schedules for all days - No way to reset values for your current schedule once you've changed them, without exiting and starting all over - Terminology used in display can be unclear terms like "day, morn, eve, night" instead of "wake, leave, sleep"; "next/yes" instead of "cancel/ok" - Can't see "set at" temperature and current temperature at the same time When I started writing this review (as a result of a prompting email from amazon), I had no intentions of replacing the unit; however, after going through all the pros and cons, I just realized I really dislike the inconvenient programming. So now I will be getting the Honeywell RTH8500D 7-Day Touchscreen Programmable Thermostat. I've looked at the manual for the Honeywell (found it online here: f) and it appears much, much easier to program. It allows you to program multiple days at once, switch back and fourth between the 4 periods of the schedule (wake,leave,return,sleep) let's you make several changes to the currently selected day(s), set schedule temperatures for both heating and cooling from the same screen then save or cancel the changes all at once. (one slight downside, is that it appears the time settings for heating and cooling have to be the same) A second alternative, closer in price to this Lux unit is the Honeywell RTH7600D Touchscreen 7-Day Programmable Thermostat (manual here: ), it's not quite as convenient to program as the 8500, but still looks much easier to program than the Lux. Hope someone finds this helpful! :-)