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@TechConnectify I have had a Nest for a decade-ish, and I have been somewhat disappointed in how it's gotten stupider over time. Not enough to replace with a different stupid smart thermostat but enough to be annoying.

@TechConnectify My favourite smart thermostat experience was trying to marry a Nest for our central heating with a Midea air conditioner

Google's "Home" app treated them as two separate devices and would kick on the furnace to *fight* the air conditioner in summer

@TechConnectify@mas.to wait it doesn't? that makes it worse than a $20 amazon thermometer. how lame.

@TechConnectify Between vendor lock downs, DMCA shakedowns and enshittification of smart devices, there is half of me that is glad that I don't have to worry about that living in an apartment... but, the other half rages at how bad smart/IoT devices have gotten.

@TechConnectify You may want to try Home Assistant; it’s a FOSS smarthome daemon that offers a lot of customization. The only pitfalls I’ve experienced are that you have to install it yourself on some old laptop or something [that runs all the time], and the fact that the UX isn’t intuitive at times.

@TechConnectify the best answer is probably home assistant but I refuse to have one more thing to manage.

@TechConnectify This is why I just have a brainless mini-split and an IR blaster in my room.

I can have it take into account the outdoor temp vs the indoor temp and have it turn on the moment I finish closing the windows without me having to push a button.

Homeassistant is fun

@TechConnectify I mean, the stereotype would be that they're sitting in California...

@TechConnectify honestly anything that requires The Cloud or an App to function is to be avoided at this point. I've seen board games that require apps and like...it will eventually stop working because app stores will not update indefinitely and servers will shut down eventually.

@TechConnectify imagine you're one of several hundred employees of a venture capital-backed thermostat company whose future rests on it being considered "tech", and your job in particular depends on you justifying your existence by creating a continuous stream of sub-par design choices so it looks like you're constantly innovating. What you describe is exactly what that results in.

@TechConnectify Honestly, it's for all these reasons I've been moving all my "smart" appliances off their "smart apps" and into a single open-source control software thingy. I'm still programming it (because of course I am, these things aren't simple), but the goal is to recreate the "smart" thermostats of the 1980s... In the exact way you're describing.

I shouldn't need to add MORE hardware to get "less" features. FFS.

@TechConnectify My HVAC installer installed a few Honeywell Wi-Fi Thermostats with their "Total Connect" that are probably what you're hoping for.

Here is the basic "Scheduling" page (I haven't customized this at all). I'm pretty sure even that all the data is stored first on the Thermostat and not in the cloud, though I haven't MITM'd and sniffed the traffic for these yet.

@TechConnectify I swear tech management has brainworms. (or maybe just Google does)

Semi-related Rant:
In Chrome devtools they have options to simulate restricted networks. This comes with some handy presets. They *used* to be actual network technologies (2G, slow 3G, fast 3G, etc) so it was really easy to simulate most common browsing scenarios.

These were removed in the name of "simplicity" and "clarity" replaced with "Mid-tier mobile," "Low end mobile" or nothing. What do those mean?

@TechConnectify this is why I went with HomeAssistant and some smart zigbee 230V relays

@SuitedUpDev @cichy1173 sure, ask away!

@TechConnectify prepare to be bombarded with: "you should try Home Assistant". They might not be wrong, though. In my case, I'm content with my German Fritz! internet modem which is a basic smart home hub on DECT, with simple scheduling of target temperatures.

@TechConnectify ah, yes, people are very... passionate here on a few topics. I've seen that on government Toots where it took some calibrating to how people respond here as well. It's a different kind of criticism compared to Twitter.
Luckily I'm mostly an open source, open standards almost-vegan libtard with no car, so I'm nailing it here.

TBH when I was thinking Home Assistant, I wasn't thinking "instead of cloud". You can make cloud-devices smarterer with HA as well.

@TechConnectify Here's what I would want from a smart thermostat (or anything smart):

Open-source specs

It has a few core properties that the are sent via the protocol. For thermostats that would be:
- Temp
- Fan speed

for lights it'd be:
- Brightness
- Temperature
- Color (for colored lights)

EVERYTHING ELSE IS HANDLED VIA THE APP,

EVERYTHING ELSE! NOTHING ELSE IS IN THE PROTOCOL OR THE DEVICE!

That way, you don't have any of this bullshit where you can't make presets or some crap.

@TechConnectify that is exactly why I bought thermostat from ... a thermostat company, not a tech company. They might not be fancy or connected to everything, but they do their thermostat's job and can be easily controlled/programmed remotely.

@TechConnectify From what you've described it sounds like the microwave oven UI people have moved over to the thermostat world.

@TechConnectify Sorry, if it was me you meant, I was just venting myself.

@TechConnectify Not to mention that they don’t often work with stages>2 heat pumps! We got a 5-stage heat pump recently and the only option was the thermostat from the manufacturer. There’s been a huge stagnation in this field.

@TechConnectify
Not advice but I know a few things about the design thought process. Some design research spends way too much time asking customers what they want but not designing what they need. When you ask people what they want they get all aspirational. In reality, planning ahead and fiddling with things to find an optimal setting is just not realistic. But many designers don’t know how to frame their research in reality.

@TechConnectify I’ve got one you can only schedule (the Hive) and thought I was missing out. Turns out I might have accidentally lucked out into a better system - by the sounds of this

@TechConnectify Agreed! One more thing I’d love: don’t require/use the Internet when my device is in the house on the same network.

@TechConnectify thermostats are so bad

I put it down to the same (unknown but similarly idiotic) pressures that keep worsening other appliances and vehicles. We've lost a lot from the days of "turn the dial and it does that".

@TechConnectify I feel the pain, the "smart ready" thermostat I had installed was programmable, but instead of having two temperatures it had on or off. I couldn't configure it to have just lower temperature at nigh, if the schedule was off the heating was too! From the research I made the module to get it smart was only allowing remote control on this terrible dumb way of working.

@TechConnectify the devolution of smart thermostats sounds a lot like the devolution of microwaves tbh, they kind of figured it out and now that there’s nowhere to squeeze more innovation out it’s all about maximizing profit, so features go away/are less thought out

@TechConnectify I've had the ecobee for 8 years going now, missing features aside, it's been rock solid reliability-wise

@TechConnectify yeah... Maker-adjacent and Linux-adjacent communities have a lot of this unfortunately.

I get that (they think that) it's better over there. I largely agree. But that's mostly because they've forgotten (or blocked out) the MOUNTAINS of nonsense they have already suffered through, much of which they are still putting up with.