Where to start with HVAC?

Agreed.  I don't know enough about HVAC to be any kind of expert, but I've heard the same kind of comments elsewhere.  The real trick is finding out whether your HVAC folks really understand a wide enough range of solutions to make it work given your setup.  
 
What I came to realize is that if you have a lot of thermostats (15 in the scenario that I'd like to achieve), you want a way to very simply coordinate and manage their setpoints, probably through some kind of home automation.  Manually setting one or two thermostats isn't that big a deal, but In the case of 15 thermostats, it would be a lot more burdensome  to run around setting them manually all the time.
 
Anyhow, our solution to the ugly thermostat problem--more a compromise than a solution really--was to position the thermostat wires so that the thermostats would be at normal height but above the light switches.  Our theory was that the wall was, in some sense, already interrupted by the light switches.  It does beg the question  as to whether the thermostats are optimally placed though, and for those cases where it would prove suboptimal, the deployment of a corresponding wireless remote (as described above) was going to be our intended way of correcting for that.  If all the thermostats are z-wave, then you could also (though not quite as  as easily) deploy wireless oregon scientific temperature/humidity sensors and control the thermostat setpoints using home automation to deliver the desired temperature to wherever you happened to position the wireless OS sensor in the zone.  At least that was our attempt at a future-proofing plan in 2009.  Maybe there are better ways of doing it now.  
 
There's some historical irony in all this.  Trane actually offered a variable speed residential system in the 1970's, but it was ahead of it's time.  The people who had it really liked it, but it was complex and expensive and there wasn't enough demand, so Trane stopped offering it.  Those who had them could get them maintained, but if you didn't already own it you couldn't have one.  Not sure if the same will happen again.  It might be different this time because of the greater emphasis now on saving power and the SEER number wars, and the technology is probably better this time around.  Just in case history repeats,  though, I'm positively inclined to give it a hard look and possibly upgrade sometime soon while it's available.  My existing R-22 HVAC is 15 years old.  I'm not sure what the expected lifespan of AC in Texas is, but I've heard 15-20 years is common.  If so, it's probably close enough to EOL that a full replacement upgrade might actually be rational.
 
A discussion of 15 thermostats might merit it's own thread!

I've got just four thermostats and my most recent trip makes me want to have a better way to coordinate setting them all up for vacation mode!  It's very nice that they each support starting and ending timestamps and set-back temp. This does make it easy to set them up ahead of time. It was a little tedious having to go to each of them to configure it, but at least I didn't have to do it right before leaving!  I didn't see a simple way to propagate that across multiple units.  That and I don't want to propagate any other settings, as they each have different intervals and temps.
 
They do sell a stick remote for this system.  It has Home, Away and Vacation buttons.  I'm curious as to what values those trigger, as the remotes don't really appear to have a way to set them in that manner.  I'm going to pick one up to see.
 
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