Stabilized Wilson fermions are a reformulation of Wilson clover fermions that incorporates several numerical stabilizing techniques, but also a local change of the fermion action – the original clover term being replaced with an exponentiated version of it. We intend to apply the stabilized Wilson fermions toolbox to the thermodynamics of QCD, starting on the $N_f = 3$ symmetric line on the Columbia plot, and to compare the results with those obtained with other fermion discretizations.