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The system in my house just has an exterior temperature sensor. You don't need an Internet connection to know the temperature outside your house, and the "outsi
by _-___________-_ 7y ago
The system in my house just has an exterior temperature sensor. You don't need an Internet connection to know the temperature outside your house, and the "outside temperature" it's getting from the Internet may be quite different than the temperature of the air outside your house anyway.
Knowing when you're home can also be done quite well without any Internet access - just see if your mobile device recently associated to the wifi.
These things can trivially be built without the privacy concerns. The business model might be a bit harder if you can't collect the data, though...
- balabaster 7y agoOf course, I'm not discounting these things, nor am I suggesting it can't be done other ways. I'm just saying that this is what you get with a smart thermostat that you don't get with most non-smart thermostats. The thing I really liked about the Nest is that I just turned the dial to where I felt comfortable and it just took care of everything else for me without me needing to do anything. As long as you're brave enough to put screws in a wall and hook up a handful of wires to connectors, it took about 15 minutes of me getting it out of the box to it being installed and configured. I can't say the same about any other programmable thermostat I ever had. Seriously it wasn't an awful lot more complicated than the mercury switch thermostats I've installed. The handful of Honeywell programmable thermostats I've installed had a disastrously bad user experience. In fact, I installed the Ecobee in my current house because I got so pissed off going through the programming cycle of the Honeywell I gave up before I got to Wednesday :'D