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Preface: please don't tell us why we shouldn't use a smart thermostat.
I'll probably need to go on a video rant about this, but smart thermostats are rapidly getting dumber.
My folks got a new heat pump system in the spring. It needed a new two-stage thermostat and the company offered an Ecobee.
"Great!" I thought. People kept telling me Ecobee is better than Nest, and I've had major frustrations with the new Nest thermostat.
Folks. It's just bad in different but equally maddening ways.
The ONE THING Ecobee did better was holding. Y'know, the feature every programmable thermostat has had forever.
Well, in November I went on a trip with them and needed to figure out how to get the thermostat to be dumb for their house/dogsitter.
Where did the hold feature go? It appeared to be gone.
Oh? Now you have to go into the settings and tell it *how long* you want it to hold a temporary change, and one of the options is "indefinitely"
WHO THOUGHT THAT MADE ANY SENSE
Meanwhile, Nest no longer (at least with the basic ones) lets you set different schedules for heating and cooling modes.
Call me crazy, but I actually like my HVAC system to run different schedules in the heating vs. cooling season (and I NEVER let it run on "auto" mode).
You used to be able to do this! The old Nest app supported it and it made perfect sense. The Google Home app doesn't, and the new cheap Nests don't talk to the old app and IT'S ALL SO STUPID
Literally all anybody is asking for is a thermostat which can do scheduling, can be remotely controlled/monitored, and change setpoints based on occupancy.
It needs to be an easier-to-program thermostat with a few smarts on top and THAT'S IT.
Right now, they're all sliding backwards in the name of "comfort presets" or some BS and the experience of using them is much worse than a simple programmable unit.
I cannot fathom who is making these design decisions and why. It's just awful.
Okay, ya got me: my last post was kind of harsh.
Please feel free to be helpful here, but also:
Check your holier-than-thou attitudes at the door. Read your post and wonder if someone else might view it as judgmental - I sense a lot of thinly veiled criticisms towards people who dare to use commercial smart thermostats.
@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
@lampsofgold @TechConnectify given these are "smart" Internet connected stuff I'd be surprised if rent-seeking isn't there too.
Find a popular, but not fundamental, feature. Remove it. Then add it behind a subscription (or a higher tier subscription.) YouTube did this with being able to play videos with the browser/app in the background and/or phone screen off.
@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.
@groxx and it's easy to forget that the skills that you have learned are not common at all.
I do this myself, but as a communicator primarily I need to recognize when I'm doing this. I'm usually pretty good, but there have been failures.
@TechConnectify not common and often extremely expensive to acquire from scratch, yeah. Being raised around it is something few can choose.
I imagine the communicatory-ness is especially hard with YouTube-popularity bringing an endlessly changing swarm of people, but tbh I think you're doing pretty good. I run into a lot of random people who enjoy your stuff. I'd offer constructive feedback if I had any, but mostly I think just keep doing your thing, keep experimenting, and I'll enjoy the ride.
@groxx @TechConnectify While I'm not entirely sure if I've completely fallen into this trap before, I recently tried to explain to a friend a cool piece of technology I've been learning and using (Kubernetes in this case) and completely forgot about the, as you put it, mountain of building block technologies that make that piece of tech so interesting.
The amount of "Okay, so X technology is ..." to try and explain it was much higher that I had originally anticipated. It really made me think about the mass accumulation of underlying knowledge I had inadvertently assumed as a universal understanding, lol.
@TechConnectify I spent a lot of time finding my current thermostat in my apartment - a Venstar one, forget the exact model. Its got the sorta smarts you're complaining about, but it is also controllable over the local network via a REST API. Good for for my techie brain, and hopefully can fit into some smarthome apps more easily because of that.
@TechConnectify I didn’t hate my Tado TRVs and central boiler control until yesterday afternoon where it’s off during the day but didn’t turn on at night when the internet was out and I had to run around the house manually fiddling all the now dumb TRVs because scheduling doesn’t work when BT goes down.
@TechConnectify we got a Trane branded Honeywell with our new system last year and are happy with it. It does schedules, but honestly we do t use them. We are heathens that leave it on auto
@TechConnectify yeah, the thing you're paying for is literally getting worse. It's ridiculous
@TechConnectify Remember when tech was designed to improve things and not the opposite?
Yeah... I barely do
@TechConnectify Heh. This totally has been coming up on @atpfm because Marco has moved houses.
I also don't understand who's making design decisions on a lot of this IoT stuff :/
@TechConnectify I abandoned my Ecobee after they did something I didn’t sign up for and did not approve. I’ve basically sworn off all cloud “smart” thermostats.
I have a Honeywell connected thermostat. It operates like a “dumb” thermostat for the most part. And it can cover some pretty complex setups (mine’s super simple). Plus, Honeywell has been doing this for quite a while.
It doesn’t claim smarts. Just connected.
I’m tired of the enshitification of our home devices.
@TechConnectify
What I'd like is a thermostat that serves a webpage without connecting to the internet.
What I'd settle for is a programmable thermostat that automatically switches between heating and cooling.
@TechConnectify I just lament that there aren’t a privacy focused option. I think a focus on privacy rather than data mining would result in a far far better user experience.
Even better if it was so open that you could build your own algorithms and connect it to sensors.
I don’t think “smart” homes have gotten even remotely smart yet. There’s a lot more cool stuff that could be done.
@TechConnectify It ain’t perfect, and it only matters if you have a Lennox HVAC system, but their “iComfort” thermostat allows for “seasonal” setting. Fully configurable by season. Could have summer do only heating if you wanted.
Per season you can set mode (heat only, cool only, heat-or-cool-as-needed;) and set day and time of day ranges.
Here’s my “Fall M-F” schedule to account for when my power is cheap vs expensive.
@TechConnectify I have been using Nest since it first came out. I have slowly turned off almost all of the “smart” features over the years. I have refused to upgrade my Nest account to the Google account. If they force my hand on that one, I will get a different thermostat.
I’m still happy with my Nest smoke alarms, but check in with me when they all expire next year.