5 ms·

The "Nest" is simply the wrong approach. By itself it is nearly worthless (my not-so-humble opinion) for anyone but the most technologically incompetent thermo

The "Nest" is simply the wrong approach. By itself it is nearly worthless (my not-so-humble opinion) for anyone but the most technologically incompetent thermostat users out there. And even then, you'd have to wonder. Where is the data on how many people can't or don't program their thermostats? Now, some people might buy it just because it looks cool on the wall, and that's OK. A real thermal management system for the home does not start with a high-design thermostat on the wall. You need multiple types of sensors in every room and multiple outdoor points. You need to change the way airflow can be channeled around a home. You might even need to change the paradigm and heat/cool objects that can provide thermal inertia (like the floor or walls) rather than just air. You need to be able to selectively inject other heat sources or sinks into the system. You need solar thermal panels and geothermal heat exchange system in the ground. As far as control, a very simple embedded PC board running embedded Linux would be the "lazy" way to build it. It would actually be overkill, but there's an argument to be made for the COGS aspect of it. Any number of relatively low cost embedded boards running very simple embedded software could monitor the sensor array, make decisions and activate valves, fans, etc. as needed. I guess what I am saying is that you really can't fix the problem without engaging in a fundamental pivot from what we've been doing to thermally manage homes for the last, say, 100 years. Having said that, it is a lot easier to sell a cool looking $250 gadget than asking someone to spend $5,000 to modify their home. Even though the gadget is very likely to not do much and the more extensive home modification is almost guaranteed to save the home owner thousands of dollars per year. Talk about an opportunity for government stimulus!

BrandonM 15y ago
> Having said that, it is a lot easier to sell a cool looking $250 gadget than asking someone to spend $5,000 to modify their home. I think a little creativity in the payment model could help this problem a lot. The whole point of the system is to guarantee a decrease in the cost of heating and cooling, right? Doing some statistical analysis, it should be possible to estimate how much your customers will save. Tell them you'll pay their bills for them for the next X years. Charge them 90% of their current costs, pay the actual bills yourself, and keep the rest to pay for your system. After 3 years (or whatever statistically works out to be a comfortably-profitable threshold), they own the system free and clear and pay their bills themselves, again. Obviously they can pay off the system in full at any point, to allow for home sales and things.
- algoshift 15y ago
  > I think a little creativity in the payment model could help this problem a lot. 100% agreed.
egypturnash 15y ago
> By itself it is nearly worthless (my not-so-humble opinion) for anyone but the most technologically incompetent thermostat users out there Last year, I was living in a house with several people much, much fatter than myself. The living room was upstairs, where the heat collected. My studio was downstairs, partially buried in the ground, which sucked all the heat away. There were heated arguments over the thermostat settings. Eventually these arguments resulted in a housemate trying to solve the problem by installing a "fancy" new thermostat downstairs - it was a programmable monstrosity with a completely unintuitive LCD display. To this day I am never sure if I ever actually managed to change the temperature it was trying to maintain, or merely dinked around with specifying a temperature that would have taken effect IF I'd put it into the program. There was probably a manual but I really wanted to talk with the housemates as little as possible to find out where the hell it ended up being stored. I have written fricking 6805 assembly code, I am not technologically incompetent by any means, but I sure as hell couldn't be bothered to try to deduce this thing's operations from first principles. (Arguably this means the thing did exactly what they hoped it would - make me quit bitching and put on a couple sweaters instead of maintaining a shirtsleeve environment comfortable for a skinny chick in a house largely full of 300lb folks. But I digress.) > A real thermal management system for the home does not start with a high-design thermostat on the wall. You need multiple types of sensors in every room and multiple outdoor points. Well, let's see: a Nest has an activity sensor, temprature, humidity, and an Internet connection, which means it can find out what the weather's like outside. Plant one of these in every room and you've got something starting to happen, if you're using local heaters rather than a central system. Admittedly you won't be doing this yet until they get the price down. > As far as control, a very simple embedded PC board running embedded Linux would be the "lazy" way to build it. It would actually be overkill, but there's an argument to be made for the COGS aspect of it. Care to lay wagers on what's inside the Nest? I'm betting it's exactly that. You may be willing to spend the time and money to get the thing going and write software for it. But there are a lot of people out there who are not. This is a really attractively simple version of that. You're describing a level of commitment akin to "I compile my Linux kernels from scratch", this is for the "I open my Mac and it just works" crowd.
- algoshift 15y ago
  Let's see, for $250 you can spend $10 per room in sensors. Let's say you have 10 rooms. The remaining $150 can easily cover the cost of a fairly intelligent controller. That would be a better system with potential for far more intelligence, particularly if coupled with a simple zone system modification to the AC ducting (valves that can route air where it is needed and prevent it form going where it is not). Something like that would have a far greater effect on the cost and efficiency of controlling an environment than a single expensive thermostat in one room. That's what bugs me about these kinds of products. They never address the real problem. They are only there to find a niche that you can sell a gadget into with some pretext that may or may not exist, like the idea that thermostats are hard to program. OK then, try this one, it's cheaper: http://www.smarthome.com/30429/Venstar-T5800-ColorTouch-Full-Color-Touch-Screen-Thermostat/p.aspx http://www.smarthome.com/30429/Venstar-T5800-ColorTouch-Full... The thermostat is not the problem. Homes (and buildings in general) are wasting energy because we are still approaching thermal management they way it was done 50 years ago. Here in the US it is not uncommon to cover the top of a commercial building with black tar (for waterproofing purposes). And then you wonder why it cost so much money to keep that building cool. These outdated ideas and methods need to change. That's the problem.

BrandonM 15y ago

> Having said that, it is a lot easier to sell a cool looking $250 gadget than asking someone to spend $5,000 to modify their home. I think a little creativity in the payment model could help this problem a lot. The whole point of the system is to guarantee a decrease in the cost of heating and cooling, right? Doing some statistical analysis, it should be possible to estimate how much your customers will save. Tell them you'll pay their bills for them for the next X years. Charge them 90% of their current costs, pay the actual bills yourself, and keep the rest to pay for your system. After 3 years (or whatever statistically works out to be a comfortably-profitable threshold), they own the system free and clear and pay their bills themselves, again. Obviously they can pay off the system in full at any point, to allow for home sales and things.

algoshift 15y ago
> I think a little creativity in the payment model could help this problem a lot. 100% agreed.

egypturnash 15y ago

> By itself it is nearly worthless (my not-so-humble opinion) for anyone but the most technologically incompetent thermostat users out there Last year, I was living in a house with several people much, much fatter than myself. The living room was upstairs, where the heat collected. My studio was downstairs, partially buried in the ground, which sucked all the heat away. There were heated arguments over the thermostat settings. Eventually these arguments resulted in a housemate trying to solve the problem by installing a "fancy" new thermostat downstairs - it was a programmable monstrosity with a completely unintuitive LCD display. To this day I am never sure if I ever actually managed to change the temperature it was trying to maintain, or merely dinked around with specifying a temperature that would have taken effect IF I'd put it into the program. There was probably a manual but I really wanted to talk with the housemates as little as possible to find out where the hell it ended up being stored. I have written fricking 6805 assembly code, I am not technologically incompetent by any means, but I sure as hell couldn't be bothered to try to deduce this thing's operations from first principles. (Arguably this means the thing did exactly what they hoped it would - make me quit bitching and put on a couple sweaters instead of maintaining a shirtsleeve environment comfortable for a skinny chick in a house largely full of 300lb folks. But I digress.) > A real thermal management system for the home does not start with a high-design thermostat on the wall. You need multiple types of sensors in every room and multiple outdoor points. Well, let's see: a Nest has an activity sensor, temprature, humidity, and an Internet connection, which means it can find out what the weather's like outside. Plant one of these in every room and you've got something starting to happen, if you're using local heaters rather than a central system. Admittedly you won't be doing this yet until they get the price down. > As far as control, a very simple embedded PC board running embedded Linux would be the "lazy" way to build it. It would actually be overkill, but there's an argument to be made for the COGS aspect of it. Care to lay wagers on what's inside the Nest? I'm betting it's exactly that. You may be willing to spend the time and money to get the thing going and write software for it. But there are a lot of people out there who are not. This is a really attractively simple version of that. You're describing a level of commitment akin to "I compile my Linux kernels from scratch", this is for the "I open my Mac and it just works" crowd.

algoshift 15y ago
Let's see, for $250 you can spend $10 per room in sensors. Let's say you have 10 rooms. The remaining $150 can easily cover the cost of a fairly intelligent controller. That would be a better system with potential for far more intelligence, particularly if coupled with a simple zone system modification to the AC ducting (valves that can route air where it is needed and prevent it form going where it is not). Something like that would have a far greater effect on the cost and efficiency of controlling an environment than a single expensive thermostat in one room. That's what bugs me about these kinds of products. They never address the real problem. They are only there to find a niche that you can sell a gadget into with some pretext that may or may not exist, like the idea that thermostats are hard to program. OK then, try this one, it's cheaper: http://www.smarthome.com/30429/Venstar-T5800-ColorTouch-Full-Color-Touch-Screen-Thermostat/p.aspx http://www.smarthome.com/30429/Venstar-T5800-ColorTouch-Full... The thermostat is not the problem. Homes (and buildings in general) are wasting energy because we are still approaching thermal management they way it was done 50 years ago. Here in the US it is not uncommon to cover the top of a commercial building with black tar (for waterproofing purposes). And then you wonder why it cost so much money to keep that building cool. These outdated ideas and methods need to change. That's the problem.