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Nest plans to offer its smart thermostat to Irish consumers for free when they sign up for a two-year contract with Electric Ireland. Nest chief executive Tony Fadell said at the Web Summit in Dublin that the deal could put his company’s thermostats in up to 1.6 million homes, according to CNET, and claimed that similar deals would be announced for other countries in the future.
[...] Google is infamous for its ability to offer consumers products which are paid for not by their users but by the ads those users see. Its products are among the best in their categories, and when it’s free to use them, there’s little reason for consumers to pay for another service. Now Google is just applying that same logic to the real world — and it will probably work out for it just as well.
Even I’ve grown sick of hearing this sentiment, but it’s more relevant now than ever: If you aren’t the one paying for a service, you are the product.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday November 06 2014, @09:49AM
Smart Thermostats are useful for three things mainly..
*) It allows the power company to scale back on power-usage if needed (heating has an awful high latency which makes it great to sacrifice in order to parry peak loads)
*) Most people don't like to program things (remember the humble VCR-clock) and just want something to plug in and forget.
*) Conflict resolution - you want a nice 20c, your s.o want a scorching 24c - a smart enough system would after a while notice what pattern that indicates that the s.o has left the house and the thermostat can be dialed down (even at irregular times)
But yeah, for people that enjoy optimizing things and doesn't mind programming things the smart therostat basically is just an overglorified motion detector.
(Score: 2) by strattitarius on Thursday November 06 2014, @07:12PM
1. If I want my heater on, I want my heater on. There are many electrical things I can wait until later to use, but the heater is not one of them. Also my heater is gas.
2. The VCR clock had no purpose. Everyone already had clocks. Most modern devices do not come with a clock. It was something to display on the display when there was nothing to display. On screen display obsoleted the clock. The thermostat has a purpose and from what I have seen people LOVE to play with the thermostat!
3. Maybe a good reason, but just not for me.
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(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday November 06 2014, @07:58PM
1) Since your heater is gas the notion of a smart thermostat is moot from the utility's point of view.
1b) Out of curiousity, just why would you want your heater on in the very moment your check on it? I mean, if you set it to maintain 22c (71.6f) would you really care that much if it occasionally dipped to 21.6c (70.88f)? (if your building has even passable insulation it will take quite some time for it to drop that much) This is the kind of "latecy" the utilities would fiddle with (imagine spreading it out over a couple of thousand households in a "rolling" pattern to handle a peak demand)
2) Mainly pointed it (VCR clock) out as an instance of something very simple to program that most people still didn't program (also it did have a function - preset time for recording). So far the only people I've seen that enjoy fiddling with their thermostats are people that reprogram their logic, other than that most people I've seen that adjust their thermostats does so grudgingly. (Also, the VCR clock had another function as well, as a clock to use when one didn't have the tv on - OSDs tend to have this nasty drawback of requiring a big display to be on)
(Score: 2) by strattitarius on Thursday November 06 2014, @10:14PM
For the VCR clock, I bet it was actually harder to program than most programmable thermostats. And I was being flip about changing the thermostat... seems like someone at work is always complaining and changing the thermostat. I am really surprised they haven't put the plastic lock box on it. Maybe work needs this ultra smart thermostat!
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(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday November 07 2014, @12:39AM
I agree that a "max allowed deviation" would be a good feature, maybe some of them have it.
And well, I wouldn't trust too many with a heater either, but in my case it is because it simply tells too much about how I live.
Most VCR-clock was - and still is - simply flipping the cover for the fron control panel down, hitting the buttom that said "clock" (or had a little clock-symbol) and then hit the chan up/down and tracking up/down (one was inc/dec, the other was change field, on some "enter/ok" or "play" was the "change field")..
Your workplace would benefit from a smart thermostat only in case people was prevented from adjusting it, a much better method would be to simply set it to something sane (say 70F) and then have an online-voting-system that is polled each hour (allow the workers to set a "prefered target" to allow automation of voting) if it should be increased a degreed, stay the same, or lowered a degree.. People in groups can not be controlled with altering anything that effects the whole group.
And I must ask, just how does one manage to freeze the pipes at 55F? (with an improper setup that allows for evaporative cooling I can see how, but with a proper setup?)
(Score: 2) by strattitarius on Friday November 07 2014, @05:55PM
Here is what I meant about 55F freezing pipes. I wouldn't have thought it could happen, but then I realized that I think it did actually happen to me once. http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4723&cid=113610 [soylentnews.org]
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