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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, @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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