What does having a Nest thermostat get you? I'm a tech dude, I build modern software, but I live in a dumb, old fashioned house. My programmable Honeywell thermostat, which has no internet connection, does a perfectly fine job of keeping my home the right temperature. My door locks use a key, and keys have great battery life, and my smoke detectors beep instead of speaking to me. What am I missing by not having internet connected stuff?
I loved my Nest thermostat when I first bought it. I could change the set point with my phone without getting out of bed, or set the house to the right temperature before I got home. It would automatically go into energy-saving mode if nobody was home. I could track my long-term energy usage with an app on my phone.
That was all very nice, but then Nest blew it. They kept forcing firmware updates to the thermostat that I had no control over. Some of them bricked the device for a period of time; some merely changed the UI so that options on the thermostat moved around or literally disappeared. I finally got fed up and reset the thing and refused to give it my wifi password. Then Google bought Nest which made me doubly sure I'll never connect the thing again.
Now it just works as an ordinary dumb thermostat. A rather expensive dumb thermostat, but it does the job. The extra features that came from connectivity are not worth the company's disrespect for my right to control the devices in my home.
I replaced my Nest with a Sensi once Google took over. In doing so, I extensively researched the available options searching for an acceptable one that could be used without a cloud server somewhere, but those just don’t exist in any decent-looking package. Choosing the Sensi was a compromise on settling for a company not likely to go out of business or discontinue the device within the near future and whose core business doesn’t conflict with keeping any data private.
From the Sensi website: "As existing features are enhanced and new features are released, your thermostat software is kept up-to-date automatically."
No thanks. Been there, done that. With a simple device like a thermostat, I don't want the thing changing all the time. Security updates are fine but every update needs to be under my control and the device should be designed with a mechanical switch that restores the previous version of the firmware.
And really even security updates should be unnecessary if the code is written in a type-safe language with good security practices.
I don’t want my complex devices changing all the time either. Just updated my desktop to last year's macOS and it caused a cascade of changes from dependencies I wasn’t ready for. Same with the latest version of Xcode, and the auto-updated text editor that went to subscription for the features I had paid for already.
I got Sensis too. Best compromise I could find, avoided connecting to the internet until I couldn’t find another way to program them. Suppose I could disconnect them now.
A programmable keypad is nice. I have a Z-wave one which can notify my Smarthings hub which notifies me when it's locked or unlocked.
The Nest thermostat allows me to control the heat remotely.
These two things are great for rental properties. Guests often forget to lock the door, I have records of when guests or maintenance people are coming or going, I can adjust the heat to 55 when nobody is there which saves a lot of money and more importantly I can ensure the heat is not turned off (which could cause frozen pipes) which some guests do for some reason.
Outside of a rental, these things aren't as useful. But I'd still get a programmable keypad (I've been running the Yale touchscreen ones in the mountains for years). It's very handy for friends or maintenance and with a Smartthings hub you can unlock the door remotely and give no code. Or give a code and change it later. I got the one with a key backup just in case but I haven't had the touchscreen fail yet.
I do run the Nest cameras outside and they've been nice to check snow levels, bust the spa maintenance guy for not even showing up, expose a neighbor for stealing firewood and rocks, expose guests who brought an actual bus full of people, expose another guest for filming a movie, and plenty of other things that have been helpful documentation.
It's kind of crazy how far the Nest cams pick up audio and how clear it is. So be cautious of these things because they are constantly recording and it makes it easy to scrub for footage (detects and quick links to voices, dogs barking, people, etc). I only listen to the audio when it's applicable (guests are doing something they shouldn't) but I'd imagine that some homeowners are watching and listening for fun.
It sounds like you have short-term rental properties, aka unregulated hotels, or more accurately regulation-skirting residential businesses. In normal rentals, guests are called tenants, and in most places tenants have all the same privacy rights as property owners. Therefore, a landlord having access to or retaining any information about door usage or audio-video of the property would likely be illegal. Perhaps a camera pointed at the driveway and public street for security purposes, but even then only with full disclosure to the tenant. Frankly, I wouldn't rent anywhere the owner had installed his/her own cameras--if necessary for security, I'd install my own.
Of course, the same privacy rights also likely apply to short-term guests as well, but while everyone is skirting regulations, what's a bit of surveillance in addition. I mean you've basically admitted (why people can't just shut up when they break the law) that you record your guests in outside areas where they can expect privacy (sounds like the hot tub). That people make movies in places they expect privacy (shocking), and of course you don't look at any of those skinny-dipping videos wink wink. Funny how unregulated businesses attracting unregulated activities still like to have some way to regulate their guests--and do so likely illegally.
Yeah, I know, some airbnb guests can be jerks, abuse the crap out of your investment, I mean second-home you couldn't afford without hotel-income. But you don't deal with the bad apples by violating the rights of everyone else, at least unless you want to invite scrutiny and regulation into your activities.
>That people make movies in places they expect privacy
If they're doing unpermitted guerilla filmmaking on someone else's property, they're just as guilty of violating someone's privacy and doing unregulated business activity.
FWIW, when I lived in a house where the landlord installed security cameras there wasn't much we could do about it. The law was on their side for outside cameras and cameras in common areas (like a laundry room)
It's sounds like you have little experience living anywhere except highly regulated, highly populated enclaves. Many places don't have regulations against things like Airbnb.
> It sounds like you have short-term rental properties, aka unregulated hotels, or more accurately regulation-skirting residential businesses.
This is not correct. I pay transient occupancy tax just like the hotels (11% at one, 7% for another) and also have local authorities come out periodically for certifications to make sure everything is up to their standards (fire alarms, extinguishers, lighting, safety rails, notices posted outside, etc).
If I was in a city that didn't have regulations for short term rentals, then it wouldn't be a regulation-skirting business anyway. It's only skirting if the area has TOT and regulations in place and you don't abide. How did you get to this conclusion based on my post?
> I mean you've basically admitted... that you record your guests in outside areas where they can expect privacy
No I didn't. And my listings clearly state that I have cameras outside.
> That people make movies in places they expect privacy (shocking)
Why is this shocking? They were making a low budget horror film. You need a license to film a movie on someone else's property and the city has regulations and procedures for filming. Not to mention they started a large fire in the desert and I could see the fire department come out and have a conversation with them. The guest also lied to me saying they were having a little couples getaway and we even gave them a discount because we were told it would just be 2 of them.
> and of course you don't look at any of those skinny-dipping videos wink wink. Funny how unregulated businesses attracting unregulated activities still like to have some way to regulate their guests--and do so likely illegally.
I have a pool at one property but there are no video cameras overlooking the pool. Or even the back yard for that matter.
You've made a lot of assumptions.
If you don't like short term rentals because some people don't comply then that's fine but hotels have bad actors too. Plenty of hotel owners not paying their share of TOT taxes, peep holes in bathrooms, stealing property when cleaning. Ever see those service spaces between 2 rooms? Bad actors would use those for peep holes and watch guests in person.
> I mean second-home you couldn't afford without hotel-income
Actually I can afford both without hotel-income. Even if I couldn't - the cities approve of it and get income and jobs.
> But you don't deal with the bad apples by violating the rights of everyone else, at least unless you want to invite scrutiny and regulation into your activities.
I comply with regulations and also create a lot of income for people in cleaning, maintenance, upgrades. We pay a living wage to all service providers.
Honestly all this monitoring and "busting" and "exposing" people for minor infractions sounds exhausting. Personally I have other things to spend my time on than surveilling people. Frankly it's kind of bleak to imagine you sitting around keeping an eye on your surveillance cameras and graphs to make sure no one is stepping out of line.
It's only when I get reports from neighbors, my turnover crew or they make a false claim on AirBnB. The tech in the Nest cams make it so you don't have to wade through footage. It short links to events and has great detection as I mentioned.
None of what I wrote was minor either. If a vendor is charging me and not showing up, that's fraud. Bus full of people - over my approved capacity and I can get fined. Filming - I can get fined. Fire in the desert - big liability. Stealing firewood - theft and now my guests won't have any.
Not sure why you are fabricating a story that isn't there.
The homes serve a lot of guests and 95% of them are respectful. How does reviewing footage when they make false claims or I get a report from a neighbor make me a voyeur?
The comment specifically says: "I can adjust the heat to 55 when nobody is there which saves a lot of money and more importantly I can ensure the heat is not turned off (which could cause frozen pipes) which some guests do for some reason."
I have kids. They forget to turn off lights, mess with my thermostat, leave doors unlocked. The peace of mind of being able to remotely check/access/control all of this is great.
How did you infer how they were raising their kids or how much time they spend with their kids from that comment? To me, it sounds more like you just want to attack them.
I'm an adult, I know I forget to turn things off sometimes and it is really nice to be able to remotely check on things like if a light is on or off or something similarly as trivial.
You obviously have very little experience with children if you think spending enough time with them will cause them to not to forget to turn out the lights.
I value privacy, my nest thermostat is the only IoT device in my house that talks to the internet or can be accessed remotely without a VPN. What I find most valuable is it programs itself. Am I cold? Turn it up a bit, hot? Turn it down a bit. Suddenly I have stopped having to adjust it at all. Even as life has changed. It has some nice other features, such as preheating/cooling, telling me how long it will take to get to temp, energy savings by allowing the electrical company to shift my cooling earlier before the afternoon rush.
I bought my Nest before Google bought the company, and I will switch brands instead of buying one of the Google built devices, again over privacy considerations. Hilariously enough, we entered the name of the thermostat as HAL.
Ok, but what on this list actually requires an internet connection? I guess the integration with your power company. But aside from that?
You could put a local AI model into the Nest, and it shouldn't need to talk to the internet at all. It can keep the data locally, and be programmed to draw inferences without help from the mothership.
For some reason we've decided it's ok to gratuitously connect everything to the internet "just cause". Sort of like how data maximization has become a thing because the costs are low, so why not?
Posted elsewhere, but my A/C had a small leak and was slowly loosing efficiency. At peak heat it could not keep up, but I had no way of knowing that at work. My $99 Emerson Sensi messaged me that the cooling was not keeping up and there was a problem. I could turn off the unit remotely to prevent stress on the compressor and fixed the small leak well before I would have known without a internet enabled thermostat.
I did A/C repair in college, fixing it early more than paid for the maybe 50 extra bucks wifi cost. The thermostat itself is on an isolated wifi network,
Messaging you requires at best only enough Internet access to send a message. It doesn't require all other functionality to be Internet dependent.
Frankly, the way these IoT devices are designed to be just dumb terminals to some cloud on the other side of the world, it's just bad engineering, in service of anticonsumer business.
Perfect IoT device would include an internal scripting language (ideally standardized and easy to grasp, embedded python/js/lua etc) and API exposing all of gadgets hardware. This way user/owner/external service providers could supply their own script snippets implementing desired functionality. Aka general computing.
Imaging buying "smart light" thats actually smart enough to do what you want it to do.
How else did you expect it to message him? Or let him turn it off remotely? Sure, could put a SIM in it and do an SMS that way, but then you have to pay for service for your thermostat, rather than just using the WIFI you already have.
Good point. In my experience an air conditioner is something that you use when you're home, so turning it off remotely doesn't make any sense, but I suppose other people might AC their house while they're gone all day?
>Ok, but what on this list actually requires an internet connection
I have a somewhat irregular work schedule, and on hot days was lifechanging to be able to turn the A/C on before I got home. Similarly, if you're on vacation and go "oh shit I forgot to turn the A/C off" it's nice to be able to do that remotely. The Nest has a motion detector but it's not 100% accurate. Maybe some non internet connected thermostats also detect presence, but it's nice to be able to confirm the state of the A/C remotely. I also like being able to graph the temperature/humidity of my place over time.
That said, my next thermostat will probably be an Ecobee because I'm pissed off about a number of decisions Nest has made lately (e.g. removing access to their API)
You can control it from anywhere so if you're coming home earlier than normal or know you need to pre-cool the house because you're having a party later you can do it from your phone. Or just being able to control it from anywhere in the house, this can be done with X10 or something but that requires additional hardware to bridge between the X10 network and the internet. Most IoT devices are similar and use wifi and a central server because it's the most convenient option for configuration, with both sides hitting a central API you don't have to worry about ensuring clients discover all the devices on the home network and it's then trivial to allow control from outside the home.
How much would a localized AI cost to implement, and would you pay it for a thermostat? As a result, you're lowering your one-time capital cost by connecting to the internet instead, perhaps?
I like that I can check on the house from my phone if one travels for multiple weeks at a time. I also like warming up the house before I get home late in the evening. Granted, I've now got a VPN / firewall setup that would do this without an internet connection, but I'd still need some form of wireless connectivity to execute the changes from my mobile device.
Not much, because you're probably doing regression and I doubt this tasks needs neural nets. Well, it is definitely solvable without NNs at the very least.
No. You could do this with any model that has feedback built in. I don't think you'd even need something as complicated as Q-learning but any type of reinforcement "learning" method would work. You're basically teaching a PID that has a clock.
Just taking a guess...besides integration with the power company, an internet connection can be useful for plenty of things. Weather forecasts and aggregating local user behavior to improve predictions of how to adjust settings more accurately over time. Talk to your mobile device to know when you're getting near home to pop out of an eco mode. A heartbeat to the cloud so it can notify you when the power is out. Lots of possibilities you wouldn't get with a local-only mode.
To be fair, most of that doesn't require the internet— it would be perfectly possible to build a simple learning thermostat that was offline, or perhaps was only periodically online (eg, dumping a compact data log while it's connected to your laptop for its yearly firmware update).
I feel the same way about voice assistants. Recognition can be done locally— playing your playlists or turning the lights on and off should require no internet connection. Updating a todo list or calendar, maybe, but then it should be an API call to that service provider, indistinguishable from an action originating in any other third-party app.
My limited interaction with those was that they were pretty universally terrible and would not be acceptable today (and were bad enough to be annoying then even).
Sure, they were. But it was a Symbian, with memory measured in KB, not in GB, CPU in low MHz range, not GHz. I only wanted to point it out that even though it was bad, it was possible, and with phones today, it's not only still possible, but maybe even possible and reasonably good. All that offline, of course.
>What I find most valuable is it programs itself. Am I cold? Turn it up a bit, hot? Turn it down a bit. Suddenly I have stopped having to adjust it at all.
Is that a problem most people have? I bought my house a few years ago and haven't touched my thermostat since I originally set it up years ago
Do you live alone? And are you or do live with a girl? Because when I was single, I never touched the thermostat. Now that I am, it has to be constantly adjusted.
I have an Ecobee rather than a Nest, but I had the Nest before I moved and the one thing I note is that it having access to temperatures and weather outside the house means it can choose just to run fans to circulate the air from outside to regulate the temperature inside instead of running the heating or AC. If it knows the outside temperature is the temperature you want inside, it can just shut everything off. A dumb thermostat only knows what the inside temperature is... or more specifically, when the little coil bends to connect the electrodes, it trips the heating on until the coil bends the other way and disconnects them. If the external temperature was sufficient, your thermostat could've chosen to circulate external air into the house instead of running the heating.
Also, it knows when you're not home, so it can then just shut down everything until temperatures would cause other problems such as frozen pipes.
Additionally, you just dial it to where you're comfortable and if you get too hot or cold, adjust it again. It learns what temperature you like it at at certain times of day, it takes a week or two to really get to know you, but once it does, it just keeps the temperature comfortable and you rarely have to touch it or even look at it after that without you needing to go through a complex programming process like you do with most other thermostats.
That's pretty much what a smart thermostat gets you.
Whether or not you consider that useful or a good use case for your needs is really down to your own evaluation.
I like that my thermostat is smart enough to be able to regulate the temperature in my house without needing to kick on the AC or heating, which reduces my power consumption somewhat and is somewhat better for the environment, but is also better for my wallet.
The system in my house just has an exterior temperature sensor. You don't need an Internet connection to know the temperature outside your house, and the "outside temperature" it's getting from the Internet may be quite different than the temperature of the air outside your house anyway.
Knowing when you're home can also be done quite well without any Internet access - just see if your mobile device recently associated to the wifi.
These things can trivially be built without the privacy concerns. The business model might be a bit harder if you can't collect the data, though...
Of course, I'm not discounting these things, nor am I suggesting it can't be done other ways. I'm just saying that this is what you get with a smart thermostat that you don't get with most non-smart thermostats.
The thing I really liked about the Nest is that I just turned the dial to where I felt comfortable and it just took care of everything else for me without me needing to do anything. As long as you're brave enough to put screws in a wall and hook up a handful of wires to connectors, it took about 15 minutes of me getting it out of the box to it being installed and configured. I can't say the same about any other programmable thermostat I ever had. Seriously it wasn't an awful lot more complicated than the mercury switch thermostats I've installed.
The handful of Honeywell programmable thermostats I've installed had a disastrously bad user experience. In fact, I installed the Ecobee in my current house because I got so pissed off going through the programming cycle of the Honeywell I gave up before I got to Wednesday :'D
Nothing, in my opinion, but I do have a sort of funny story about IoT thermostats.
My SO's dad is a gadgets guy, and he travels constantly for work. He is also incredibly vigilant about bills. They're the kind of family that can't touch the thermostat until a certain time of year, weighs insurance costs into every decision they make, etc.
Anyways, when he was traveling—even in cold months—he would see the thermostat going up on his phone and panic, turning it down. His kids, who were freezing in the house, would turn it up again because winter, and several hours later the cycle would repeat. They were basically locked in a constant battle to warm their house against their miserly dad and the cloud.
Classic story I heard was of a landlord who locked the thermostat in a plastic air-flow case. The college roommates who lived at the residence learned to strap an ice pack to it. Hilarity ensued when the landlord would come by to check on the heating system.
(He’s the “PC guy” from the Apple commercials, among many other performances, and he has a podcast where he acts as a more cerebral and empathetic Judge Wapner, hearing “cases” and making rulings. The show has quite the internal lore, complete with local court rules, standing, and binding precedent.)
Im in the same boat, I find the concepts very fascinating but almost all of it is trying to solve problems that don't even exist for me.
The only thing my friends with IoT devices do are party tricks on voice command with their smart lights. Other than that, I find the so called 'problems' these devices solving are extraordinarily trivial.
My favorite part of my IoT loving friends' party tricks is that they only even seem to work about 40% of the time. Most of the gimmicks might be worth having if they worked 99.9% of the time and I didn't have to sell my soul to get them, but as is they're a half-baked solution to problems that I don't actually have.
Thank you for this information 'JCBarry. I was legitimately alarmed and confused. I searched for the word “thermostat” in the article, and I didn’t find it, but I could easily be out of date with respect to Google’s Nest and IoT branding.
It's nice that it knows when I leave and adjusts accordingly automatically. If I need to come home at a non-routine time, I can adjust from my phone so that it's comfortable when I get home. I don't see the need for most smart devices, but the Nest thermostat has actually been really useful for me.
Why does a thermostat integrate with cameras and microphones anyway? Do they have any internal one?
Anyway, I do really want a smart home lock. Just changing the shape of the keys so that they would stop puncturing my pockets when I walk would be enough of a gain. I also want a programmable bedroom light that can slowly dim on at morning.
I don't have those because the costs are much higher than the benefits. I'm sure a smart lock will lock me out of home at some point, with no way in. A smart light will also fail at the worst possible way, and I don't want to deal with it.
> also want a programmable bedroom light that can slowly dim on at morning
Oh you absolutely do, this has been by far the best (arguably only) benefit I've seen from home automation. Sunrise is now whenever is convenient. The lights slowly come on over 30 minutes and it feels like I'll wake up at some convenient time for my body during that period, rather than having my sleep interrupted by an infuriating alarm.
> A smart light will also fail at the worst possible way, and I don't want to deal with it.
I haven't had any problems with mine (v1 hues), they default to working like normal bulbs so the worst case scenario is you toggle the switch off and on and you get an illuminated lightbulb every time. Also (true of any LED light) they will continue to work even after you've shattered the glass by accident.
> changing the shape of the keys so that they would stop puncturing my pockets when I walk
Have you considered alternate solutions such as less-tight pants? ;P
> I also want a programmable bedroom light that can slowly dim on at morning.
FWIW, a lot of cheap CFL bulbs do this on their own. It's one of the reasons I hate CFLs for most uses, but I've come to appreciate that the light in my kids' room starts at about half (perceived) brightness and takes a minute or two to warm up.
I think the key part is that the bulbs come on automatically, not necessarily the ramping up of brightness.
I don't really care about brightness ramping, I just have my bedroom Hue bulbs come on at max brightness at 6500K at 5:00 every morning, switch to 2700K at noon, and 2000K (and dimmer) at 20:00.
Shameless plug: we - at Crownstone - have an open source plug or built-in switch with with wake-up functionality. I don't know if it's too smart, but if it is, I'm fine with you flashing adjusted firmware to make it dumber. :-)
I have a cheaper thermostat with wifi, a few months ago it alerted me that the temperature had been more than 5 degrees over setpoint for half an hour and something was probably broken. I was able to remotely shut off the unit and after I came home from work, sure enough the coils had iced over due to a refrigerant leak.
It was only hot enough for this to happen at the peak of the heat when I was at work. I was able to catch the problem early and fix it cheaply all for the cost of a thermostat (Emerson Sensi) about $40 more than a non wifi model.
Is there any advantage in involving you in the loop, though? Couldn't it just shutdown upon detecting the problem and turn on a warning light for you to see when you got home?
Don't forget they also have a smoke/CO2 monitor. I use that because it would be really handy to know about those being issues prior to coming home.
Of course, the next question is always "How do I confirm this?" but if it means I can catch those problems sooner, regardless of whether I'm home, I'd rather do that.
And yet, this article has me re-thinking it. Maybe removing the Nest alarm and getting Simplisafe's detector is the better move (but I need to look into theirs first).
I run OpenHAB at home (and have tried HA), but setting all this up is not in the wheelhouse of the majority of people. Doing the in-home setup is difficult enough, but safely exposing it to the internet is not something I'd ever ask a non-technical person to do.
Meanwhile, you just swap your old thermostat with the Nest, tell it how to get to your wifi, install an app on your phone, and you're done.
Yeah that's what a lot of the responses in this thread don't get or dismiss. These things could be run in a much more privacy protecting way but that comes with all sorts of configuration and setup headaches that most people don't want to deal with. And being able to access the devices from anywhere is a feature most people want even if it's only useful occasionally and a central API running all interactions means if it works while you're home it will work anywhere rather than it working while you're home then not working because something something DynDNS/NAT.
And youre over estimating the technical literacy of the average person. This is the first time I've heard of nabu casa, I just checked out their website and they're immediately talking about yaml, I've browsed every page I can see and I can't see anything about setting it up. Another labe mentionrd docker and JWT as troubleshooting steps - that's too much for 99.99999% of people to ever use.
I'm under no delusion that the average person can, or is willing, to setup something like Home Assistant.
I was answering a question posted on HN, where the assumption that the average HN user is capable of fiddling with hardware and software is usually valid.
I do have some WeMo switches on some lamps in our living room. I got them instead of fiddly-dip-switch timers before a vacation several years ago, and it turns out I like having them come on an X time automatically, and turn off at 10, when we typically go to bed. We never interact with them; it's great.
But the thermostat is dumb (but programmable). The locks are all regular locks. We have no smart speaker (dear god WHY?). The TV is dumb.
Why? Because I've spent 30 years in software, and my watchword is "don't put firmware in shit that doesn't fucking need firmware."
> What am I missing by not having internet connected stuff?
I'd say that's a question that can be asked of anything that's Internet-connected. Phones, watches, TVs, cars, etc. They probably all create a level of convenience, typically at some cost Like all costs it's up to each person to make a decision whether that cost is too great - usually these questions are really veiled value judgments on others' cost/benefit analyses.
I live in an area where I can go from heat to cool needs in a single day, and I have pets with sensitive temperature needs. So I have a thermostat I can control via the Internet.
However, it is not a Nest, and only I can control it. It's not connected to any account or cloud service. It doesn't have direct IP connectivity at all, so it can't be turned into a part of a botnet. And it works just fine without the Internet.
These kinds of devices are just slightly better than the old ones, because it's possible to programmatically control them. They would be an interesting idea, because they offer slightly better convenience than the previous devices, but they are such a huge privacy violation that they aren't worth it. Take out the privacy violating parts and they could be interesting products.
It gets you troubles. Just bought a house that had some installed. Had weird "lost connection" failures, and the "smartness" trying to learn what's the right temperature for you doesn't work. After two months, I still have to wake up in the middle of the night to manually reset the temperature to something reasonable.
If you have a predictable schedule, there are plenty of offline thermostats that let you set target temperatures for different times of day. If you don't, I can see how being able to control it remotely would be nice. (But an embedded microphone is still creepy and unnecessary.)
