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Who is buying these things? Even the "high-end" (nest) is buggy, expensive, and hostile to ownership. What is the appeal? Can anyone explain? My thermostat has

by duaneb 11y ago

Who is buying these things? Even the "high-end" (nest) is buggy, expensive, and hostile to ownership. What is the appeal? Can anyone explain? My thermostat has no physical ability to lock me out or brick itself. That this is even on the table is terrifying.

compumike 11y ago
(1) Looks cool: it looks modern and attractive. (2) ROI-positive: many owners report that the device pays for itself with reduced energy consumption within a year or two. (Maybe not in California with fairly moderate HVAC energy consumption, but lots of other climates spend a lot more.) Not many products can claim to be ROI-positive to the consumer. When the payback period is short enough, that's pretty exciting for the analytical part of consumer thinking. Paired with the "looks good on my wall" and the "burns less fossil fuels" triggers on the emotional side, that's pretty appealing to a bunch of people. (Same basic feelings but much cheaper than buying a Tesla.) No excuse for being buggy though.
- alextgordon 11y ago
  Maybe it is a failure of imagination, but I don't get how nest can be more efficient than manual control. Cold? Switch the heating on. Hot? Switching the heating off. Why'd you need a learning algorithm for that? The website says stuff like > The babysitter calls to say she picked up the kids from soccer and they’re heading home. You adjust the temperature from your phone so they’ll be cozy. ..which is a first-world problem if I've ever heard one. Just wear an extra layer for 10 minutes while the heating warms up. Jeez.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Well, to be honest, a lot of things we can't live without now (like having clean and hot water in the tap) were "first-world" problems only few decades ago. The progress of civilization is measured in the amount of things we don't have to care about anymore.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    The point is to spend very little energy while no one is home, but converge the house back to a comfortable temperature by the time someone gets home. You are not present to actuate manual controls when you're not home. Programmable thermostats have been doing this with schedules for decades, but they tend to have shitty UIs and not every household runs on a regular schedule. >for 10 minutes Whenever we'd come back from vacation, it would take my house at least 3-4 hours to move from ~40 to ~70. Our house was actually pretty small for the neighborhood. Being able to kick the heating back on from a few hours away in the car would have been amazing. I think you have a hilariously overpowered furnace, a tiny space relative to Midwestern suburbia, or an exceptionally temperate climate.
    - duaneb 11y ago
      This is a highly unusual situation (not to mention dangerous in the winter) to turn off your heat. Certainly not something you would worry about when trying to make a babysitter cozy.
      - superuser2 11y ago
        Not all the way off, but there is a wide margin between comfortable and safe where it is generally cost-effective to let the temperature rest when you are not home.
glitcher 11y ago
The way I see it, the appeal is to our love of gadgets and our desire for technology to make our lives better. Clever marketing of these products can also go a long way towards convincing us of their potential, while in practice we're now seeing a lot of problems people may have not considered when first purchasing these products. Personally, I do have interest in a thermostat that can learn how to be more energy efficient for the sake of saving me money. But I don't think that requires Internet connectivity at all. And it is beyond me why anyone would want or need an Internet connected toaster or coffee maker as well.
- greglindahl 11y ago
  There are a couple of ways that connectivity can save everyone money: 1) Peak shaving. The utility pays homeowners to be able to change the temperature slightly during peak electrical load. 2) Short term adjustment. One challenge of integrating large amounts of wind and solar into a grid is that sometimes you get short-term fluctuations in power generation. Smoothing these fluctuations out by turning off a bunch of residential AC units can be very cost effective. Utilities are willing to pay consumers in both of these situations. And both of these work better with 2-way connectivity. Looking forward, if electric cars become more popular, it's likely that they'll have smart chargers which will optimize when overnight or at-work charging takes place.
increment_i 11y ago
One possible explanation is the peacock feathers effect. People come into your home and go "Oooh, what's that?". The homeowner now has a chance to stand out from her peers. Interestingly, most of the scrutiny of these early entrants into consumer IoT come from software developers themselves, who are already well aware that "all software is shit." (In the tongue-in-cheek sense of course)
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Interestingly, most of the scrutiny of these early entrants into consumer IoT come from software developers themselves, who are already well aware that "all software is shit." (In the tongue-in-cheek sense of course) That's one angle. Another one is that people who have enough understanding of how "smart devices" exactly work can see that cloud-dependence is ridiculous engineering, if you look at the product as something designed to provide value to users. The question becomes, whether or not it bothers you that the companies building this stuff are actually user-hostile. Personally, it does bother me - that's why I steer clear of them and warn people about this.
  - increment_i 11y ago
    Again, something software devs catch right away, that the layman often doesn't.

by duaneb 11y ago

compumike 11y ago

(1) Looks cool: it looks modern and attractive. (2) ROI-positive: many owners report that the device pays for itself with reduced energy consumption within a year or two. (Maybe not in California with fairly moderate HVAC energy consumption, but lots of other climates spend a lot more.) Not many products can claim to be ROI-positive to the consumer. When the payback period is short enough, that's pretty exciting for the analytical part of consumer thinking. Paired with the "looks good on my wall" and the "burns less fossil fuels" triggers on the emotional side, that's pretty appealing to a bunch of people. (Same basic feelings but much cheaper than buying a Tesla.) No excuse for being buggy though.

alextgordon 11y ago
Maybe it is a failure of imagination, but I don't get how nest can be more efficient than manual control. Cold? Switch the heating on. Hot? Switching the heating off. Why'd you need a learning algorithm for that? The website says stuff like > The babysitter calls to say she picked up the kids from soccer and they’re heading home. You adjust the temperature from your phone so they’ll be cozy. ..which is a first-world problem if I've ever heard one. Just wear an extra layer for 10 minutes while the heating warms up. Jeez.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Well, to be honest, a lot of things we can't live without now (like having clean and hot water in the tap) were "first-world" problems only few decades ago. The progress of civilization is measured in the amount of things we don't have to care about anymore.
- superuser2 11y ago
  The point is to spend very little energy while no one is home, but converge the house back to a comfortable temperature by the time someone gets home. You are not present to actuate manual controls when you're not home. Programmable thermostats have been doing this with schedules for decades, but they tend to have shitty UIs and not every household runs on a regular schedule. >for 10 minutes Whenever we'd come back from vacation, it would take my house at least 3-4 hours to move from ~40 to ~70. Our house was actually pretty small for the neighborhood. Being able to kick the heating back on from a few hours away in the car would have been amazing. I think you have a hilariously overpowered furnace, a tiny space relative to Midwestern suburbia, or an exceptionally temperate climate.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    This is a highly unusual situation (not to mention dangerous in the winter) to turn off your heat. Certainly not something you would worry about when trying to make a babysitter cozy.
    - superuser2 11y ago
      Not all the way off, but there is a wide margin between comfortable and safe where it is generally cost-effective to let the temperature rest when you are not home.

glitcher 11y ago

The way I see it, the appeal is to our love of gadgets and our desire for technology to make our lives better. Clever marketing of these products can also go a long way towards convincing us of their potential, while in practice we're now seeing a lot of problems people may have not considered when first purchasing these products. Personally, I do have interest in a thermostat that can learn how to be more energy efficient for the sake of saving me money. But I don't think that requires Internet connectivity at all. And it is beyond me why anyone would want or need an Internet connected toaster or coffee maker as well.

greglindahl 11y ago
There are a couple of ways that connectivity can save everyone money: 1) Peak shaving. The utility pays homeowners to be able to change the temperature slightly during peak electrical load. 2) Short term adjustment. One challenge of integrating large amounts of wind and solar into a grid is that sometimes you get short-term fluctuations in power generation. Smoothing these fluctuations out by turning off a bunch of residential AC units can be very cost effective. Utilities are willing to pay consumers in both of these situations. And both of these work better with 2-way connectivity. Looking forward, if electric cars become more popular, it's likely that they'll have smart chargers which will optimize when overnight or at-work charging takes place.

increment_i 11y ago

One possible explanation is the peacock feathers effect. People come into your home and go "Oooh, what's that?". The homeowner now has a chance to stand out from her peers. Interestingly, most of the scrutiny of these early entrants into consumer IoT come from software developers themselves, who are already well aware that "all software is shit." (In the tongue-in-cheek sense of course)

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Interestingly, most of the scrutiny of these early entrants into consumer IoT come from software developers themselves, who are already well aware that "all software is shit." (In the tongue-in-cheek sense of course) That's one angle. Another one is that people who have enough understanding of how "smart devices" exactly work can see that cloud-dependence is ridiculous engineering, if you look at the product as something designed to provide value to users. The question becomes, whether or not it bothers you that the companies building this stuff are actually user-hostile. Personally, it does bother me - that's why I steer clear of them and warn people about this.
- increment_i 11y ago
  Again, something software devs catch right away, that the layman often doesn't.