No mobile phones, no widespread use of the internet and a hobbyist can make a thermostat you can control when out of the house? Would love to know how?
As an argument against connecting one’s thermostat to the internet, I’ll point to this article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-energy-companies-remot...
I don't use a smart thermostat, but what's told to me is this.
With a "timer" thermostat, you tell the system when to start heating; but what you really want to tell the system is when you want it warm. For example, we regularly give my son a bath between 7 and 7:30, so I want to make sure the bathroom "zone" of my house is reasonably warm at that time; and that his room is a comfortable "sleeping with a blanket on" temperature, ready for him to go to bed at 7:30. (Just about every room in our house has a separate thermostat.)
But if I set my thermostat to 19C at 7pm, then it won't be 19C at 7pm -- it will start heating at 7pm, and reach 19C at some indeterminate point in the future. So I manually add my own "static fudge-factor" in, and set the thermostat to 19C at 6:30pm.
However, this "static fudge factor" is almost certainly to be ineffective or inefficient: It may hit 19C at 6:40, in which case I'm paying for 20 minutes of unnecessary heating (inefficient); or it may hit 19C at 7:10, in which case the room will be cooler than I want it to be at 7:00 (ineffective).
The claim of the "smart thermostats" I've heard is that you can tell it, "I want it to be 19C at 7pm", and it will figure out how long your particular room will take to heat (possibly factoring in the current temperature), and start the heating at exactly the right time so that it hits 19C right at 7pm.
Is that something worth having? I think so. Is that worth the extra cost and risk? I don't really think so, which is why I haven't installed one; but I can see why someone else would like it.
There's remote control, which is one thing. My Honeywell system can do that, but even if I don't connect it to the WiFi (and earlier versions required extra hardware) it'll still do smart local control. I lose weather compensation in that case, though, as it uses a remote forecast to predict future demand and not bother turning the heating on if it's not actually going to be needed.
The more important aspect of "smart" heating is proportional control and predictive heating. As you say, regular thermostats will turn the heating on when the temperature is below the set point, then off when it's above, with some hysteresis to avoid flapping. And one function of the smart system is to predict how early it needs to turn the heating on to get up to temperature in time. The Honeywell will also switch the heating off early if it's confident the temperature will drop by less than 0.5°C before the end of the set time.
Beyond that, though, the controller will modulate the boiler to maintain the set point -- heating systems term this "TPI", I assume it's not a PID controller because it lacks the derivative component. Time Proportional and Integral either (in my old house) controls the boiler modulation directly or (in my new house) turns it on for a few minutes in every time slice in an attempt to get the right amount of heat into the system to maintain the set point.
Where a system like the Honeywell really shines though is that I'm not turning the whole house on or off -- I've smart TRVs on each radiator, so I can have heat in my office during the day and in the lounge in the evening and not have to keep rooms warm when I'm not using them. Having recently moved house and consequently had a few weeks without the smart system I can attest that it really does make a big difference.
The term for this control theory operation is called "Bang bang". The basic logic is "Turn on if under set point, and turn off if at or above set point". Ovens and cheaper HVAC heating controllers use this extensively.
You do see a bit of hysteresis, since it's goal is not to be under the point, but overshoots are definitely a thing. And since it's a simple instantaneous decision (unlike PID), it's also pretty simple to make very cheaply.
The Honeywell system I have seems to have gained extra derivative-based functionality recently too, which is nice :).
One thing I don't understand about Nest et al is - virtually no houses have actual zone cooling or heating. So when we say "make bathroom 21c at 8pm" we are actually saying "heat up entire house until bathroom is 21c at 8pm". Turning on electric heater in bathroom for 30seconds seems incredibly more convenient and efficient.
Bathroom heaters don't heat instantaneously; so you either have to remember to turn it on manually (introducing your own fudge factor, as described above), or start your bathing process with a colder-than-you-want room.
> One thing I don't understand about Nest et al is - virtually no houses have actual zone cooling or heating.
UK regulations require individual rooms' temperatures to be able to be set individually. For most people, this can be done with a valve on the radiator; these valves can be "smart" and integrated into the whole "smart heating" system. For underfloor heating, this typically requires an actual wall thermostat in every room -- which is what I've got. :-)
(Hence why I also want to let the temperature in my son's room drop during the day when he's not there, but come up to 17C in the evening so he's reasonably warm under a blanket.)
I'm not sure how, but our smart thermostat intuits this to adjust to our comfort, not just a temperature.
Because of our climate, it's also convenient to program our fans to run at certain intervals, control for a set point for humidity, or to base behaviors off of other sensors (air quality, etc). Conditioning air isn't just for maintaining a temperature, and most traditional thermostats, while not ineffective, are completely unable to account for these things.
The best argument would be the hypothetical remote control by a bad actor without any consent.
[1] what's curious about this particular story is how "intentional" this was; the report is vague and hints that some people were unaware exactly what they were opting into.
???
I think you immediately followed that up with more than one answer to that?
In my case though I'm using Home Assistant on a local server and Tailscale for remote access, so nothing is connected to some company's online service and the actual devices are all offline only.
If you decide to have a lazy day and sleep in, you can turn it on when you wake up instead of potentially 2+ hours early.
If you have an unexpected overnight stop over somewhere (e.g. after a night out drinking), you can turn it off until when you're home again. Also works if you're taken to hospital.
There are many valid uses for it.
The people in that article you posted specifically signed up to an 'energy savers' scheme that explicitly allowed the energy companies to change their smart thermostat temperature. They agreed to it. There's no reason to think that energy companies would normally be able to take over your thermostat.
“Customers said they had unknowingly agreed to let companies raise the temperature to save energy.”
If your position is that you could never mistakenly click the wrong button or check the wrong box, how is it possible that you could ever be so careless as to not accurately predict your temperature needs?
That, and it sensing if you're home or not, are what makes it useful.
I keep thinking turning on lights with a switch takes even less time than interacting with Alexa.
1. I can't see from the position of the switch the state of the light, so I still after 5 years press the wrong switch sometimes.
2. Sometimes, maybe 5% of the time, the light doesn't change instantly, but up to 2 seconds after I pressed the button.
3. About 5% of the time, the light doesn't change at all. Then I either think I've pressed the wrong switch (see 1), or I have to turn around, walk back and try again.
I think the benefit is for the company who built the apartment, since they saved a few crowns not needing to run wires near the doorways. There is no benefit to the occupant, only problems.
At least the batteries in the switches are still fine.
I absolutely love it. It's never been anything other than instantly responsive, works without the internet and I can turn all the house's lights off from my bed. Additionally, the utility rooms, hallways and bathroom lights are just fully automated so you never think about it. The regular switches are still there if you need them, but in over a year since installing it, I've not touched any of the traditional light switches.
My only issue is that the Hue Bridge has a maximum limit for the number of lights and accessories you can run, which I'm starting to get close to. The lights are also expensive, especially the low voltage outdoor lighting, so for that I just use a standalone ZigBee dimmer switch which integrates with the Hue system.
Did you remove the actual switch?
It is a little bit bulky due to the nature of it but that's not something that bothers me. If you're particular about your interior design, you may need to look elsewhere: there are also complete light switch replacement products that are thinner and look a bit sleeker, but I haven't felt the need to move to those.
Another thing I like about the Hue system is I had so much difficulty finding reliable combinations of non-smart dimmer switch and LED light. Despite spending a lot of money to get supposedly high quality LED compatible dimmers, one would break every few months and occasionally they seemed to cause my LED lamps to burn out or have other weird issues like not completely turning off. All dimmer switches I tried had a subtle buzzing at certain light levels too.
It's possible there is some combination of lights and dimmers that works great, but since switching to Hue, it's the first time in my life where my lighting system has required zero maintenance in over a year. Other than when a squirrel bit through my garden string lights...
You leave the toggle switch in the On position and mount this on top of it. Very clever.
https://tweakers.net/productreview/292224/philips-hue-dimmer...
The downside was that the light switch was now behind the door, and because I didn't want to re-route the cables for for the light switch I used a wireless switch, which seemed like a good solution. It was, but I also had all of the exact same problems you have.
For "just a guy" like me it's still an okay-ish solution as routing cables through the wall is a lot of work (or fairly expensive if you have a professional do it), but I don't think anyone who has ever lived with these things actually likes them.
I apologize to whomever is living there now. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even realize it's wireless and were confused why it's such a shitty switch, and when the battery eventually ran out.
It's odd to me that it's the norm for the seller/buyer of the house to never meet. I bought a 1970s house awhile ago, and have slowly learned it's eccentricities as well as adding some myself. I think it'd be immensely helpful if it was the norm for everyone to walk through the house together and cover things like "oh this is a weird miscellaneous circuit that covers things in 3 different rooms", "this is this way because..."
Watching his videos on this subject I do not get the impression that he falls into this category.
I think the one that shows the most glaring issues is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkAiXzKOTNY about his smart lights.
Basically, anything that doesn't require a specialized app to work, but rather a standardized protocol through a hub - and if the hub fails or sucks, you can replace it.
Fortunately, it seems like the vendors are finally standardizing.
Zigbee's fine, but it's dated.
If we get another 20 years out of Thread/Matter, that's a pretty good outcome.
I do also use some smart bulbs (also ZigBee/Zwave) and when paired with a smart switch, they can work in absense of the controller still, allowing you to still control the lights as long as the radios in both devices can reach eachother.
To me this is the common-sense answer. The design works in absense of any central controllers and definitely does not (ever) depend on any internet services, and yet you can still do anything you'd normally do (including integration into something like Google Home if you really want. Though, I don't care about "voice assistants" or anything, so it's not really that useful to me.)
... until you hit that bug that tells all the lights in the school to turn off about 100 times a second.
It's inexpensive and easy to install. The most important feature is its REST API, so you can control it any way you like if you don't like the official app.
Almost makes you wonder whether the school would be better off with a consumer grade system.
And a server owned by Jesus McJesusFace in WhereTheHellistan propped up by shitnickles funds.
Just no. A simple physical switch works every single damn time without external dependencies. Perfection is simplicity, not complexity.
Oh, and as an extra: That simple switch still works.
No you don't. Just use Home Assistant or openHAB — fully local control by default. I've been using the former for a while now, and it's been working great.
To be fair to Nest, newer versions are able to do this but many heating and cooling systems don't expose those functions on a standards compliant open way. As a result, a vast number of heating and cooling systems runs about 10% less efficiently than they should but there's really no way for end customers to know that since they don't have a reliable benchmark to compare against.
Much better to just turn the lights off when you leave a room, or turn the heating down and wear another layer.
We have Nest to control our heating, we have turned off all the "intelligent" features, they don't work. Now it's just a heating scheduler and thermostat that we can control when out of the house, which frankly is all we want.
But on this case specifically, I assume they had "smart" lighting control panels in each room, and these have failed. The idea of not having some sort of manual override in each room is nuts.