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I totally get this concern. Any good piece of critical home infrastructure should be able to operate without the cloud or an internet connection. Following this
by cmui 4y ago
I totally get this concern. Any good piece of critical home infrastructure should be able to operate without the cloud or an internet connection. Following this logic the thermostat + heat pump combination can operate fine without the cloud. You leave some optimized behavior on the table like demand response and weather response, but everything else will work (you'd have to manually enter your TOU rate plan to get that energy optimization).
- dawnerd 4y agothat's good to hear, I'd make sure it's mentioned in the FAQ at the bottom.
- daredoes 4y agoWould your company be willing to provide an open-source local-first websocket-based integration with https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/ or use the new Matter + Thread standard to provide it for everyone? If that's available, this would be my top choice as I'm actively shopping for all-electric heat pumps
- stevenpetryk 4y agoOr the company could at least leave it easy to hack :)
- walterbell 4y agoImplement with a swappable compute module?
- samstave 4y agoWe need an entire industry of 'appliance based Rpi's to be able to act as modules in a standardly compute plug-in-form factor (just like blades) with a unit preloaded with a config and just swap out inter connects - ich that we have an appliance hub, the solar/whatever input pushes power and the distributor determines where to push or halt the power - with a selector that tells me the input costs, and output draws, such that it can have a system to auto switch to best performance. Honywell missed the mark on the importance of thermostats on the economy.
- whstl 4y agoMy dream is something equivalent to a Dumb TV + Chromecast.
- cmui 4y agoIt's something we'd definitely consider. Is the desire to have thermostat control via any third party? edit - The current plan has been Matter/thread Homekit + Google Home integration. We can expose at least temperature control via this to everyone.
- JshWright 4y agoI think the desire would be a locally accessible API so that anyone could build an integration to it.
- mabbo 4y agoConsider it is as a competitive advantage. An API that is public, well-documented, and easy for other systems to securely integrate with would mean that customers get the integration they want. If someone builds a better way to utilize your system, then you just got value-add on your product at basically zero cost. Amazon can hook Alexa into it. Google can hook their Home thing into it. And whatever comes next, whatever doesn't even exist today, should have an easy time integrating, continuing to add value.
- RicDan 4y agoCompletely agree on this point. I've worked over half a decade with smart home systems, and it's just so much easier (and cheaper!) to integrate well documented, open APIs (and please make them secure, I have nightmares of all the open, unencrypted UDP based alarm systems) that is purely local. This means we would highly recommend these products even tho we made zero money off them, and customers would actually prefer them as well - it's well beyond the time of people naively buying this stuff, and they know that clouds can just "go offline". What also can't be underestimated is the tinker community. Many people in the smart home business are tinkerers themselfs; create a great product for them and they will inevitably try to use it at their job. But this really isn't only applicable to integrators, really.
- AYBABTME 4y agoYes, and particularly in a local/LAN/no internet manner. Local push or local pull.
- jacquesm 4y agoSeconded.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoIf I'm gonna invest in a heat pump for the long term, I don't want it committed to any software technology that may be obsolete in 10 years. I want it to use something so dead stupid simple that anything in 50 years can still operate it without a lot of work. The simplest example I can think of is MIME (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME). It can be embedded in basically any transport type. It can encode anything you want (binary, UTF8, etc). It is very old, stable and well-tested. It is fairly trivial to implement a limited instruction set of. Transport security, authentication, authorization, etc, are nice, but not nearly as important to me as a future-proof interface to my heat pump. Give me the option to enable an admin port and just run a single unsecured connection with a basic dumb text protocol, and I can hack together a client in 30 minutes in any programming language. It's not fancy but it will work forever.
- dminor 4y agoI agree on the point of not wanting to end up with a brick due to obsolete software. Note though that heat pumps typically last 10-20 years.
- oblio 4y agoWhat happens to them after 20 years?
- blincoln 4y agoThis is extremely disappointing, given their price point. I've seen an oil furnace still running after 50 years with just basic maintenance. Did it cost 2-5 times as much in inflation-adjusted dollars as a heat pump does now? No.
- oblio 4y agohttps://www.evergreenenergy.co.uk/heat-pump-guides/how-long-do-heat-pumps-last/ https://www.evergreenenergy.co.uk/heat-pump-guides/how-long-... I don't see why a heat pump wouldn't run for a long time. I imagine many people want to replace old heat pumps because newer ones are more efficient. But otherwise this is quite old and widely available tech, it should be possible to replace individual components that break down.
- seiferteric 4y agoIMO I would prefer a Bluetooth thermostat that once paired, you don't have to login again. One thing that really annoys me about home "smart" devices is arbitrarily being logged out and having to remember passwords etc. and I don't see a reason I need to be "logged in" to control my thermostat. Also I don't want it to stop working when your servers are down... (had this happen the other day with my garage door opener sigh...) If you want internet connectivity, it should connect to some hub to bridge the Bluetooth to the web account.
- soheil 4y agoI'd be careful catering to everyone asking for everything but the kitchen sink. Creating a non-cloud capable system is dumb. If you have customers like commenter above maybe put in a clause in the contract that says they will receive a partial refund if/when there is an acquisition event during the warranty period and bump up their price by 20%.
- robertlagrant 4y ago> Creating a non-cloud capable system is dumb No, you haven't understood. It will be cloud-capable. They're asking that it's not cloud-only.
- soheil 4y agoNo, you don't understand. Making it non-cloud-capable incurs a cost. And there is no they, the commenter is a single individual.
- robertlagrant 4y ago"As someone about to be in the market for something like this, propriety lockout is a complete deal breaker for me." - StrangeATractor "Would your company be willing to provide an open-source local-first websocket-based integration with https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/ or use the new Matter + Thread standard to provide it for everyone?" - daredoes "Most of your competition has no sensitivity, and almost no openness, about these aspects. I think this could become a really important part of your go-to market, but also a differentiator vs other products." - simonebrunozzi "I would like to be able to add it to HomeKit without it ever phoning home once. Matter + Thread help make that a possibility." - X-Istence They.
- soheil 4y agoYes this is HN what do you expect, of course everyone and their grandma here is gonna want a fully unlocked, open source and free as in freedom fries product.
- itake 4y agoI also would appreciate a local-only user experience. I'd also be concerned about dealing with "cannot find server" alerts popping up every time I use it.
- nickparker 4y agoPlease also be careful about selling to incumbents without a strong guarantee (ie contractual penalties) your product will stay in market for many years. I know smoke detectors and a couple other crappy home goods have been fixed by scrappy upstarts, sold to the losers for <100M, and then shuttered to avoid pivoting the existing business. Heartbreaking lost progress every time it happens.
- mlfreeman 4y ago1. There's a plugin for WeeWX that will happily fling readings from a weather station to my RainMachine sprinkler timer, so perhaps you could still support weather response as long as the user ran their own weather station. 2. The thermostat should support at least as much local control as the REST-ish API on the Venstar ColorTouch series.
- samstave 4y agoCrazy idea: Pressure plates in the streets which are pressed when cars drive over them - pushing fluids through your coils, but connected to multiple units on either side. Harvest the kinetic energy of cars passing through the streets to apply pressure to pumps that feed fluids through the system, capturing that energy in a dynamo way? Put these plates in every high trafficked area. Piping the pumping action from parking garages to freeway exits and shipping ports which roll off weight from water to street and pump a f-ton of fluid based on vehicle traffick and weight. Make smaller installations... make an adapter interface to railway. heavy as cars on trains constantly hitting the pump valves. (yes we still need to deal with the bureau assholes in that industry... Im talking engineering)
- cmui 4y agoI like the out of the box thinking! Unfortunately I think this one doesn't quite pass first principles. Any pumping action from the vehicles would be extra work they have to perform, so you just shuffle the energy expenditure from your local heat pumps, to a fleet of vehicles.
- lazyasciiart 4y agoAren’t the cars already performing that work, just letting the energy dissipate into the road surface instead of going somewhere?
- faefox 4y agoIt takes more energy to drive a car through mud than on pavement. The same principle would apply here.
- sfink 4y agoNo. The cars would be doing a little extra work. Imagine if you did it with half-filled hoses of water going in a loop. The car tires would be pushing the water through the hose, adding drag. The energy cost would come from the gas or electricity of the car. It's like the usual analogy I used to use for content mills or adtech: it's like setting up wind farms along the interstates. The wind from the trucks creates free energy! Awesome, right? Except that those trucks are no longer drafting off each other quite as much... (And I say "used to use" because it used to be a small tax, a bit of an extra nuisance here and there, and people largely felt like it didn't really cost anyone anything. Now it's more obviously expensive, like making the entire roadbed out of little rolling wheels that charge generators, so you have to "drive" 80mph in order to progress at 50mph...)
- nullbyte808 4y agoI agree with this. I would rather have it automated without cloud functionality. I think people on HN just like hacking lol. But when it comes to appliances and cars I would rather not mess with their code and break them.
- Psype 4y agoYou can either go using open source protocols at first or at least guarantee open-sourcing most of it in case of leadership change. For reuse. I'd go starting with it and let a community build by itself around it, tho.