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Speaking as a former HVAC/mechanical maintenance engineer, technology like Nest is obscenely underdeveloped. Commercial HVAC systems like Liebert dont get 5-6

Speaking as a former HVAC/mechanical maintenance engineer, technology like Nest is obscenely underdeveloped. Commercial HVAC systems like Liebert dont get 5-6 strikes at the plate to figure out how to avoid shutting off a customers heat in the dead of winter. Screw up the HVAC in a nursing home or elementary school, and you can kill people. Honeywell's commercial offering should be the gold standard here in my opinion. Its fully ipv6 and ipv4, and relies on time tested probes and monitors to determine what the hell is going on. You cant force it to short-cycle motors until they burn up, and it cant be forced offline from the control interface if environmental conditions are outside a certain range (Desert summer, for example.) Januaries update even included EC25519 for console and PFS support for the web interface. Best of all, if something is egregiously screwed up in the system, it failsafes to a simple thermostat or pulls settings from a cluster.

lostlogin 9y ago
Your example of a nursing home is a good one. Other critical areas include equipment that fails when temps get out of spec and this can be expensive. MR imaging units, labs, server rooms etc.
robgurley 9y ago
Great examples. The biggest benefit of "smart home" technology is the commercial sector, anyway. A large office building or school campus uses many times more electricity than residential counterparts, and they have the P&L incentive to cut costs wherever possible (such as through smart metering and devices that communicate with one another to maximize efficiency). I hope that advances made in security for these commercial systems (by necessity) trickles down into the residential space, sort of like how "dumb" construction techniques, high-efficiency window glazing, etc., have all made their way into the residential sector over time.
- ellisv 9y ago
  > A large office building or school campus uses many times more electricity than residential counterparts, and they have the P&L incentive to cut costs wherever possible (such as through smart metering and devices that communicate with one another to maximize efficiency). The difference is that commercial and industrial buildings already try to minimize costs. In the residential space, occupants often aim for comfort over cost - sometimes missing out on opportunities to retain comfort while minimizing cost. So there may be more relative opportunity to cut costs in the residential sector than commercial or industrial. Of course the sector with the largest opportunity is probably transportation.
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>Commercial HVAC systems like Liebert dont get 5-6 strikes at the plate to figure out how to avoid shutting off a customers heat in the dead of winter. There's more money to test in that side of the industry, I'd wager. Unless the people developing commercial HVAC are simply better software/hardware developers than consumer companies' solutions.
- nitrogen 9y ago
  Unless the people developing commercial HVAC are simply better software/hardware developers than consumer companies' solutions. Sometimes this is true, relative to the purpose at hand. Take a mediocre web developer and ask them to build a smarthome system, and you end up with a wire protocol of raw, unverified, unfiltered Python code in plain trxt, running under eval() on a grossly underpowered microcontroller (true story, was fixed eventually AFAIK, not naming names). There's something to be said for the discipline that comes from working in a resource-constrained hardware/software project. We could benefit from more cross-pollination between industries, as long as experienced engineers are sanity checking the resulting ideas (Python is not a protocol!).
- themaninthedark 9y ago
  At what point does it become criminal negligence? If a go kart manufacturer made a kart whose roll over cage failed in any circumstance we would not excuse it by saying that there is more money to test in the automotive side of the industry.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  They don't necessarily have to be "better" to deliver more reliable products. They have a head start and don't have to aim for the same feature sets that companies like Nest aimed for in their first product.
MR4D 9y ago
I really hope your post gets upvoted a hundred times! Despite loving cool tech, I have nothing like Nest in my house for exactly the reasons you stated. Maybe Honeywell should move downmarket with your post as the basis for their marketing. I might actually consider it then.

lostlogin 9y ago

Your example of a nursing home is a good one. Other critical areas include equipment that fails when temps get out of spec and this can be expensive. MR imaging units, labs, server rooms etc.

robgurley 9y ago

Great examples. The biggest benefit of "smart home" technology is the commercial sector, anyway. A large office building or school campus uses many times more electricity than residential counterparts, and they have the P&L incentive to cut costs wherever possible (such as through smart metering and devices that communicate with one another to maximize efficiency). I hope that advances made in security for these commercial systems (by necessity) trickles down into the residential space, sort of like how "dumb" construction techniques, high-efficiency window glazing, etc., have all made their way into the residential sector over time.

ellisv 9y ago
> A large office building or school campus uses many times more electricity than residential counterparts, and they have the P&L incentive to cut costs wherever possible (such as through smart metering and devices that communicate with one another to maximize efficiency). The difference is that commercial and industrial buildings already try to minimize costs. In the residential space, occupants often aim for comfort over cost - sometimes missing out on opportunities to retain comfort while minimizing cost. So there may be more relative opportunity to cut costs in the residential sector than commercial or industrial. Of course the sector with the largest opportunity is probably transportation.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago

>Commercial HVAC systems like Liebert dont get 5-6 strikes at the plate to figure out how to avoid shutting off a customers heat in the dead of winter. There's more money to test in that side of the industry, I'd wager. Unless the people developing commercial HVAC are simply better software/hardware developers than consumer companies' solutions.

nitrogen 9y ago
Unless the people developing commercial HVAC are simply better software/hardware developers than consumer companies' solutions. Sometimes this is true, relative to the purpose at hand. Take a mediocre web developer and ask them to build a smarthome system, and you end up with a wire protocol of raw, unverified, unfiltered Python code in plain trxt, running under eval() on a grossly underpowered microcontroller (true story, was fixed eventually AFAIK, not naming names). There's something to be said for the discipline that comes from working in a resource-constrained hardware/software project. We could benefit from more cross-pollination between industries, as long as experienced engineers are sanity checking the resulting ideas (Python is not a protocol!).
themaninthedark 9y ago
At what point does it become criminal negligence? If a go kart manufacturer made a kart whose roll over cage failed in any circumstance we would not excuse it by saying that there is more money to test in the automotive side of the industry.
maxerickson 9y ago
They don't necessarily have to be "better" to deliver more reliable products. They have a head start and don't have to aim for the same feature sets that companies like Nest aimed for in their first product.

MR4D 9y ago

I really hope your post gets upvoted a hundred times! Despite loving cool tech, I have nothing like Nest in my house for exactly the reasons you stated. Maybe Honeywell should move downmarket with your post as the basis for their marketing. I might actually consider it then.