We have a Nest thermostat, we have now turned off every single smart feature and just use it for a schedule and turning it on/off remotely when away (we gave up with the automatic away detection). I should also point out we are in the UK. I’m completely unconvinced that “smart” thermostats achieve anything for the majority of homes in the UK, despite most energy suppliers pushing customers to purchase them for years.
For those unaware, the majority of homes in the UK have a gas boiler central heating system with TRVs on each radiator. This means that you end up with two competing temperature control systems in your home, which result in some rooms regularly being too cold/hot, it literally worse than have no central thermostat.
We now have the Nest set to about 5deg higher than we want, then have all the TRVs set to what we want each room to be.
In our last house we had the Tado system with “smart” electric TRVs, you would think that would solve the problems, but it was flaky, noisy and very expensive.
If I was doing it again I would get whatever the cheapest boiler controller with remote (internet) control I could find. But then I would probably not be putting in a gas boiler again, I'm hoping that by next time we need to overhaul a heating system heat pump systems have dropped in price in the UK.
I'm sure that in countries where people tend to have forced air HVAC systems these thermostats make a lot more sense. And I do love the industrial design, it is a "beautiful" thermostat.
When I moved into my current house we had painters working on one floor. They cranked the newly programmed Nest that was in learning mode to 90 degrees for one night to keep the paint warm while it dried. I, of course, had no idea they had done something that silly, but for weeks afterwards this smart thermostat will crank the heat to 90 and I have to manually turn it down. I'm convinced that it will not be able to unlearn and I'll have to delete the profile and recreate it. I should set it on a schedule as you mention.
Am I the only one who sees "learning" features for things like this as nothing more than overcomplicated ways to engineer in unexpected, unwanted behavior?
My heating/cooling desires are straightforward: unless I'm gone, stay in this range. I am not gone on a predictable schedule, any pattern it picks up will be incorrect.
The only thing the "ugly beige box" doesn't do that I want is remote access, and that would only have been handy a couple of times in the last 11 years I've been in this place. And that is not worth the surveillance or the freakishly buggy behavior some people report.
I'm increasingly convinced the major effect of "AI" will be to ensure that instead of bugs not being fixed because ultimately they aren't considered worth fixing, bugs will not be fixed because nobody understands them.
My homegrown solution is Home Assistant talking to the Lennox API for my system. If my phone moves more than a mile away from the house for more than 30 minutes, then it switches to Away Mode (62℉–82℉), and when I get back within a mile of the house it switches to Home Mode (70℉–78℉).
It works flawlessly. It's been months since I manually tweaked the thermostat. When I do need to override it, it keeps that override in place until the next leave/return event.
> I am not gone on a predictable schedule, any pattern it picks up will be incorrect.
Very much this. Either the pattern is predictable which makes it easy to program into a simple thermostat or it is not in which it'll always be wrong in any "smart" thermostat.
Nest and similar are great case studies on the ills of overcomplicating something that should be super simple and reliable.
My mid-90s thermostat is much more reliable. I programmed my schedule into it decades ago and it does its thing with zero confusion ever since then. When I need to override it's just a button press and it automatically resets back to the schedule next cycle. Nothing to go wrong.
I have an Ecobee. Agree with you that the killer feature definitely isn't the self learning stuff.
It's simply:
- Has WiFi (update from phone)
Then also:
- Being able to link with Alexa or similar to do things like turning off when you leave automatically
- Custom programming modes. So instead of setting a temperature at a single time during the day (home/away), you could do (morning/home/home2/afternoon/night/away)
- Can run my fan once an hour automatically for just 5 minutes
The remote functionality is nice, as is the auto-away part. Those alone make it worthwhile, but I agree that the "smart" functionality leaves much to be desired.
Ours, somehow, has gotten into a state where it thinks we like to bounce between 68 - 70 degrees all day, and doesn't "learn" when I try to adjust it back to the same temperature it was. The weekly schedule has over 70 different temperatures on it and there is no (obvious) way to reset it, so I haven't bothered to go clean it up. I think it could do better there.
You might enjoy some videos from HeatGeek on youtube. Something they cover that if you design the heating system correctly (with appropriate temperature compensation on the boiler) you only need TRVs or thermostats as limiting controls. Which sounds similar to what you are saying, aka set the thermostat to the maximum temperature you would ever want then just let the system run.
TRVs have barely been developed. They’ve existed for about 4 years so far and most Chinese sellers have already gone through 4 - 5 design iterations. Any TRV relying to auto adjust based on temperature of the thermals from the TRV head are wrong. It’s a stupid design and was never going to work.
The only way to reliably set temperature is by reading it elsewhere in the room. With radiators that’s really inconsistent because they’re slow to heat up and slow to cool down if you “over heat”.
Also the window detection feature on any TRV should be disabled. It’ll only cause you issues.
I simply have a “fully open” or “off” control from a Zigbee gateway per room. I’d consider adding sustained motion sensors to each room but to be honest just having a timer to turn them on in the morning, off at bed time and the ability to adjust and view what rooms are on manually from my desk or phone is more than enough.
There’s value in electric TRVs but not in the automating part beyond scheduling.
Thermostatic Radiator Valves for anyone wondering.
The "smart" feature in the UK seems to be add a temperature change every time you adjust the temperature, so your "smart" schedule is just the temperature yo-yoing throughout the day between 14 and 20C based on what you did in winter.
Then to edit it you have the worst possible UI and end up, like you said, turning all off the smart features.
I lived in a Georgian (so built somewhere in 19th century) flat in London with Nest, gas boiler and thermostats on radiators. My experience was similar.
In a while I realized that to make the experience smart would not be to add a different thermostat but to change the windows and have some proper insulation. To get that I had to ditch the whole country tho. It's just abysmal how much gas is fired to heat the streets.
Insulating an old house in the city is expensive but it had been there for 150ish years .. the breakeven from adding insulation would be what? 10 years? 20?
I find even here that the “smart” features basically come down to “I can bump the temperature from my couch” and not much more.
Ever since work from home the “away” hasn’t mattered much and the house has so much thermal mass that letting it cool down a bit when we are actually away doesn’t seem to do much at all.
I'm reading his book Build right now - it came out last week, so assuming that's why he's appearing all over all the feed). About 2/3rds of the way through currently.
My thoughts:
1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation.
2. Some advice goes heavily against current startup orthodoxy. He rejects fail-fast / figure it out later mentality, and argues for a lengthy product design process (for both atoms and bits!).
3. Lots of good details about how to think about managing people, managing and scaling team, and issues with scaling, etc, taken from his days building Nest.
Both (2) and (3) stand out to me as functions of his specific background. Building a company like Nest is obviously wildly (!) hard, but doing it after building the iPhone is a different game. I don't think his advice about lengthy design processes make a ton of sense for my startup [1], for example.
Generally, I always try and remind myself when I'm reading company-building advice books: this is probably good advice for someone in the same context as Tony Fadell (e.g. someone who is launching a second company after building... the iPhone). For me, it may or may not be relevant.
The good thing about failing fast is that you can use it at a strategy-level, aka fail fast _at_ failing fast, and switch to longer product cycles if you think that might work better. Starting with a long-product cycle doesn't give you much of a chance to try again if your first swing is a miss (which Mito's first attempt was...).
> My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation.
He's been doing a lot of history rewriting.
Don't get me wrong: Building and shipping Nest was a great accomplishment. However, he was a famously terrible leader in many regards and drove a number of great employees away.
When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring.
Nest didn't go on to revolutionize the space after Tony Fadell arrived with his hard-hitting management styles. Nest cameras haven't really evolved much and the Nest security system was abandoned.
I don't doubt that there are some lessons to be learned in his book, but in practice Tony Fadell hasn't been a great leader in the past decade. I'd take his book with a grain of salt.
> When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring.
I worked on a team that spent months designing an API, database tables, architecture, etc before implementing a single line of code. It was quite a different experience and we ended up with a far better product than we would have otherwise (faster too!). We also took three weeks working on planned work and then one week to work on “unplanned work” between iterations. “Unplanned” was basically anything goes. Fix a bug that annoyed you, refactor code because you wanted to be able to extend it later, etc.
We had a git repo that /only/ contained design docs and recorded decisions as PRs. Nothing was discussed “offline” so everything was recorded. In meetings we would make the final decision and actually merge the said PRs.
It was so different from working on any other project, and actually more fun.
Seriously give a team at your startup to try that route. I think you’d be surprised after a few months to a year. The quality of the work we output was light years beyond any other team at the company, IMHO.
There's many good gems here and his philosophy hits close to home.
I don't think you need to be of his fame to apply it. Many of these tips are applicable. I find lots of his product & marketing advice to be very useful for new PMs to tech too.
When I read the headline, I assumed that this was going to be a negative review from a user.
We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperature, otherwise it will disobey your commands and go to the configured energy saving temperature. There were 2 problems with this, one universal and one application-specific: first, if you live in anything other than a small apartment your thermostat may be in a different room from you. In our 2-story house, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're specifically in the living room. The 2 2nd-floor bedrooms, the 1st-floor bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, the dining room, and the 1st-floor office all don't count. In our house specifically the thermostat was installed behind a wall-mounted TV, which only makes things worse - even if you're in the living room, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're actively playing with it.
Trying to make the Nest ignore whether you're home and disable the eco mode is an exercise in futility. I found a setting to disable eco mode, but the house was still never the temperature we set it to. When I checked the thermostat I saw the green leaf icon, indicating that the Nest completely ignores the setting that disables eco mode. When I called Nest support, they couldn't figure out what was going on either. The only way I could get it to function semi-reasonably was to manually set the eco mode temperature to the temperature we actually wanted the house at, which means that you have to set the temperature twice to actually set the temperature.
The idea of a thermostat that tries to save power automatically is great, but it falls apart when you rely on a single motion sensor to determine if an entire house is occupied. This bad assumption was a letdown, but the fake setting to disable eco mode turned me off of Nest completely.
I know exactly what you’re talking about, as I’ve had a share of my own struggles against Nest which thinks it knows better. However, right now, I have it set like the following:
And it works just like a normal thermostat, which makes me happy. I’d never buy a smart thermostat now, I keep using Nest because previous owner of the house installed it, and after lobotomizing it, it works good enough.
Interesting. Someone had told me that the Nest figures out if you're home by recognizing the presence of your phone. I wonder if that information was wrong or only applied to a specific version of the Nest.
At one point, I had a cheap WiFi thermostat. No smart features, just allowed remote control via app or web page. At one point, I had reverse-engineered the web app API and wrote a script to implement "away" detection and shut the thermostat off if both phones were away.
The problem was two-fold. First, it detected the phones being away by simply pinging the phone's local IP address. If the phone was in a power saving mode that disabled WiFi, the script would detect the phone as away. Second, I ran into the problem the article author had: If everyone was away, it got cold in the winter, and an absolute oven in the summer, and my aging A/C unit couldn't get the temperature back down until the sun went down.
The ecobee3 solves this particular problem by having remote sensors. I'm absolutely in love with it since it takes an average of all the sensors as the temperature.
My nest once asked if I wanted it to "learn" my habits and adjust accordingly. I clicked Ok thinking it would create a nice schedule. Instead it set temperatures to 14C at random times and be all over the map with when to heat the house and when to leave it cooler.
I thought it also used the bluetooth aspect of the app to know if you're home? IOW, if the app can ping Nest over bluetooth, the Nest knows you're home.
But what if you leave your kids at home? How would it know their phones? I wouldn’t give my kid the power of the thermostat, the pranks would be endless…
Heads up for privacy minded people in the Apple ecosystem... if you buy a HomeKit thermostat (or generally any HomeKit compatible device), you can usually set it up without the vendors app, or making an account, or accepting the ToS or Privacy Policy. There are some well established boring HVAC thermostat makers that have HomeKit compatible devices, and they are available for under $100. If you are a renter, you may need to get a 100-240VAC -> 24 VAC power brick to supply adequate power if your HVAC is not wired up properly.
I love my honeywell thermostat. It has wifi, a touch screen, schedules, and that's it. I can control it from my phone, google home, and no smarts. It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year. The single pane to double pane window showed just how much energy I was saving. I wouldn't touch a "smart" thermostat with a stick, but this dumb wifi thing is incredible.
We have a Nest in which we turned off all smarts and scheduling, but it was still turning itself on and smoking us out of the house. We could not find any setting, any schedule, or anything that indicated why it was turning on. We ended up having to do a factory reset, and we never connected it back to the WiFi to get rid of these "smart" scheduling features. If anything, the Nest wastes money when using its smart features, as it's never on or off when it needs to be. The most stable room in the house is the basement controlled by a dumb, admittedly ugly thermostat.
The only nice thing about Nests is the overall look, but they're really poor devices. The OS on them constantly lags, causing dial inputs to suddenly "catch up". Each one of our Nests has its own personality: one lags, one turns on when it wants to (prior to factory reset, probably the third or fourth time we've had to do so), and the other one seems to actually just work.
This is the one I have. It came with my house that I bought so I didn't even pick it out so I'm not some shill. The app is kind of old and ugly but I honestly don't even care because it just works. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Home-Wi-Fi-Smart-Color...
"It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year."
I have 2x Nests in my house and I don't know if I'm missing something, but I only get a usage history for the past week. I feel like a "smart" thermostat should tell me a lot more about my usage and it should be pretty trivial to develop.
> Shipping the Nest thermostat with a screwdriver "turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight"
I must be in the minority then. I end up with a ton of these product-specific screwdrivers and get a little frustrated that I have to throw it away, contributing ever-so-slightly to the pile of consumer waste.
It'd be cool if you could select a "need tools" option sort of like how take out now has a "need utensils" option.
Just send it to your local goodwill. Some single mother just scraping by in a rotting-out apartment who suddenly needs to fix a sink or lighting fixture that duct tape just isn't working on any more will be delighted to find your nest brand screwdriver with a fifty cent sticker while looking for a pair of shoes her growing kid's feet might fit in.
And that's just here in the US. Our working poor are the world's one percent. If our definition of consumer waste is things no one would like to hold on to, then even what we consider the most banal tools are not consumer waste, and it will be a very long time until they are.
Check out the picture - it's not a product-specific screwdriver, it's just a screwdriver with standard Philips and flathead bits. Some of the products used outdoors have security bits, but even those are just Torx bits most of the time. I am delighted to not need additional tools, and feel no pressure to keep it since I have a good set of screwdrivers already. Plus, this makes a handy small one to keep in the kitchen for random uses.
The zinus bedframe I bought came with a mini ratcheting wrench instead of a flat wrench. The wrench is just the right size to fit hex shank screwdriver bits, and so I've used it many times when I couldn't find my screwdriver or I needed just a little bit more torque. I have even used it to repair my John Deere tractor since it's small enough to fit where a regular size ratcheting wrench couldn't.
The wrench definitely made the product feel higher quality, and I have a tool I will keep for a long time, if I don't wear it out.
For me it's kind of a wash. For years I avoided buying any imperial allen keys because I had a pile of free ones that were good when I infrequently needed them. I also got this combination 2.5mm hex / Phillips screwdriver which is actually quite convenient as those are the sizes of screwdriver I need most frequently.
The rest go into the landfill unfortunately, and I agree the waste isn't really worth the 3 random sizes of allen key I once needed.
I'm a little wary of those cheap hex keys -- I've been burned a few times by them stripping out a hex head when the key was just a little loose. I know I should invest in some quality hex keys, but you are right -- it's hard to justify the purchase when I already have so many lying around.
Yeah. I think part of the problem there is also low-quality fasteners, but good hex wrenches do prevent a lot of problems.
As I go through my stash of direct-from-the-Shenzhen-market-at-10x-the-price fasteners from Amazon I'm replacing them with equivalents from McMaster. I have to say the increase in quality is noticeable. I half expect to break an Amazon screw and find that it's hollow inside to save a few cents.
His new book Build was an excellent read. Highly recommend it, really picks up after Chapter 2 with lots of good advice and anecdotes. It also contextualized where our startup is for me and helped me visualize what to anticipate in the future really well.
So I had a Nest for a year before it just stopped working and Nest told me it wasn't compatible with my system, after previously telling me it was (not sure how it worked more or less perfectly for that first year but whatever). I moved to an EcoBee and I'm happy with it but for all their "smarts" these things are still dumb as rock in my opinion.
I work from home so turning up/down the temp when I'm away is rarely worth it other than when I'm on vacation for a week or a long weekend. I'm happy enough to be able to control it from an app and not have to get up and go to the other side of the house but there is one big thing that is missing for me: it being smart about the outside temp.
Let me elaborate. I want my house to be 65 during the day and 60 at night but there isn't a good way to accomplish that without micromanaging it when the seasons change (or freak weather which happens more and more often).
Depending on the outside temp (and humidity) I have to manually tweak the temp ranges. It would be nice if I could set heat to 65 and cool to 65 but that would kill my HVAC system flipping between the two modes (if the apps even let you do that), I just want it to be a little smarter. Something like "If it's >60 outside then set the cool to 65 and heat to 55" and "If it's <60 outside then set the heat to 65 and cool to 75" (though humidity, inside and out, probably need to be taken into account as well).
I'll probably attempt to tackle this using Home Assistant at some point but it's frustrating that these devices are in some ways stuck in the past of "Set a cool or heat or cool+heat settings", how about a little more intelligence? I want the inside of my house to always "feel like" 65F.
All of the "smart" thermostats are really just the same as before with a way to remotely change the settings (which is an improvement) but I'd never call them smart.
You can't set a temperature range, like "keep my house between 65 and 70"? So when it's cold it would heat to 65, when it's hot it would cool to 70, and between 65-70 it would do nothing? That's not very smart..seems like the most basic thing they should be able to handle.
I can set a range but it's been my experience that in the "summer" I need to set it to 65 cool-only. and the in "winter" I need to set it to 65 heat-only. Fall and spring are hell and I have to check the temp to know where to set it. Ranges suck and are a carryover from the old tech, I want my house to be 65, this should be possible.
I think humidity is playing a part in it but I don't want my house to get up to 70 so setting 60-70 isn't going to work and likewise, no matter the season, I don't want it to get down to 60 unless it's at night.
Yes, and it's bad in the spring/fall when one day might be in the 40's and the next in the 80's, I have to micro-manage the thermostat or deal with the house fluctuating between 60-70 which I dislike. It's subtle but I'll either constantly feel a little too warm or I'll be too chilly.
I've dialed it in so I know I love 65F, that's what I want my "smart" thermostat to facilitate.
One of my biggest annoyances is that, for whatever reason, Nest and ecobee haven't continued to expand their thermostats to support more sophisticated HVAC setups. I recently updated to a variable speed furnace (just the furnace, not the AC) and the Trane thermostat is complete shit, exactly what you'd think a "smart" thermostat made by an HVAC company would be. But I can't replace it because the third-party thermostats don't support variable speed furnaces, humidity systems, or electronic air filters. Why?
She had issues with these two particular tenants who seemed to have an obsession with fighting over the temperature dial.
It cost her a whole ton in either heating or A/C every month, and would leave the whole place either ridiculously freezing or way too hot all the time.
(She lives in the basement herself, so this affected her as well.)
She bought a Nest, put a password on it, left it there, and has likely already saved around what the Nest cost within a year or so just from stopping these idiots and future potential idiots from constantly messing with the thing.
She’s never had an issue with it.
Essentially - it really depends on what you want a product for, and how you intend to use it.
I’m aware there are other, cheaper; less convenient solutions such as a lockbox, but honestly the Nest has been a wonderful solution for her.
"Every time my wife and I drove up to our Lake Tahoe ski cabin on Friday nights after work, we’d have to keep our snow jackets on until the next day. The house took all night to heat up."
That is first world problems hall of fame material right there!
In the early 1990s, my roommate and I used to visit his family's tiny cabin in northern Wisconsin. The place was very rustic but did have electric heat. It was very cold and snowy during the winter. He could call the cabin's phone number and press * 2-3 times and it would tell the heat system to turn on or off. The system would respond somehow with a beep or two to tell him whether it was turning on or off. Seems like Mr. Fadell could have warmed his cabin up before arriving without building the Nest.
That said, I like the Nest, though I'm partial to the Ecobee because of the remote sensor it includes.
My brother does it with his Maine house. But TBH you can only turn the temperature down so far when you're not there in winter because of the pipes. (I admittedly keep my house pretty cool in the winter even when I'm there so there's not a huge difference between my away temperature and my in house during the day temperature.)
It's not just a problem for rich people. It's also nice to have if you are coming back home (to your normal home where you live) from a trip and the weather has been very cold or hot while you were gone.
Similar example: came back home from a long trip to stale air. Maybe there's another problem or maybe that's just me, but next time we start the air from the airport and the air is pretty normal by the time we get in.
That's just a simple example. When the Nest came out, it felt like an amazing no brainer product to me:
1) The thermostat drives most home energy usage. It's probably above $1000/yr for most households.
2) The existing programmable thermostats were awful and no one used them effectively. There's a ton of waste as a result.
3) The smart thermostat can easily pay for itself in a year or two just by having a better UX that you'll actually use. That's an amazing value proposition.
I use the programmable UX on my existing $40 dollar thermostat. It works fine and it's not that hard to use. It only ever requires adjusting when we leave for/return from vacation, and takes ~1 minute to get back into the right state each time.
I bought my Nest thermostat practically as soon as I moved in to a new build, for two primary reasons:
- it didn't look crap;
- I could figure out how to work it
I'm not so bothered about it being smart, least of all for it's 'learning', it just looks so much better on the wall (visually prominent when you walk in) than the white plastic sharp cornered box the developers put up.
If I spent more time/energy on it I'd do away with a wall-mounted thermostat entirely, and just have a HomeAssistant-connected relay right at the boiler.
Ours is helpful for turning the air up or down when we leave/come home or turning it up in the morning (we cool the house off at night so it holds it longer in the day before needing to fire up).
Granted our thermostat isn't really "smart" it just has an API exposed that integrates into Home Assistant.
I wouldn't put in one of those cloud based ones like Nest or Ecobee
I want a thermostat that factors in humidity. Warmer temperatures are okay if it isn't as humid. I may only need to run the AC to knock out some of the humidity to make it comfortable. Does anyone know of a thermostat that does this?
I was just complaining about this in my comment. All of these "smart" thermostats are super dumb IMHO. I want one that takes into account outside temp/humidity as well as indoor. I want my house to always feel like 65F (and ideally 60F at night). That's it. No smarts, no "away" detection, no eco mode, none of that. It's bonkers to me that all these newer thermostats accomplished was adding the ability to remotely control the same old stupid tech (and wasting everyone's time figuring out how to turn off eco mode).
Newer AC systems can do this. I believe my "dumb" honeywell looks at humidity factors as well because on occasion I have caught it running the AC even though it's colder than what I have it set to because the humidity was high. Perks of living in Houston I guess.
The first iPhone made connectors and electronic components easier to get to?
Sure, it indirectly helped, as any other new, recent electronic device did. But please don't try to rewrite history.
He couldn't make things work over the phone, although he invested large sums of money and dedicated hardware? Come on, I rigged an old analog (rotary) phone to do that using a relay when I was 14 or 15 years old. After all, in that case all he needed to do was to switch on the heating and nothing more.
The whole thing just reads like a marketing fluff piece.
Reading this brought back memories of my own family's cabin in the Sierra Nevada. My grandfather always left a fire laid when leaving so with one match, you could light it on arrival and start heating the place up instantly. An old school, kinder and simpler solution.
I'm happy for Tony. But I also miss my grandfather and his kind of engineering.
For those unaware, the majority of homes in the UK have a gas boiler central heating system with TRVs on each radiator. This means that you end up with two competing temperature control systems in your home, which result in some rooms regularly being too cold/hot, it literally worse than have no central thermostat.
We now have the Nest set to about 5deg higher than we want, then have all the TRVs set to what we want each room to be.
In our last house we had the Tado system with “smart” electric TRVs, you would think that would solve the problems, but it was flaky, noisy and very expensive.
If I was doing it again I would get whatever the cheapest boiler controller with remote (internet) control I could find. But then I would probably not be putting in a gas boiler again, I'm hoping that by next time we need to overhaul a heating system heat pump systems have dropped in price in the UK.
I'm sure that in countries where people tend to have forced air HVAC systems these thermostats make a lot more sense. And I do love the industrial design, it is a "beautiful" thermostat.