5 ms·

There's a few 'handy' things I'd like to do - for example, I am considering replacing my basic central heating/hot water controller with a Raspberry Pi and havi

There's a few 'handy' things I'd like to do - for example, I am considering replacing my basic central heating/hot water controller with a Raspberry Pi and having features such as a low-heat, vacation mode where the system knows I am 'x' miles away from coming home (tied to my phone's location) and it will fire up everything again. Although I'd consider doing more (ESP8266 modules with MQTT looks interesting, albeit in its infancy), the proliferation of 'standards' (properitary and otherwise) is offputting. Then there's the standards designed to interface between all the different standards...rinse...repeat. Edit: Spelling - I have a dodgy laptop keyboard with melted keys due to a motherboard failure!! Waiting for Dell to come back again and change it!

herf 12y ago
Water heaters use a lot of household energy--automating them is a great idea. One smartthings customer did it here: http://community.smartthings.com/t/water-heater-automation/1904 http://community.smartthings.com/t/water-heater-automation/1...
- modoc 12y ago
  My understanding is that modern tank water heaters are extremely efficient, 96%+ so I don't think they use that much energy these days?
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    Switching a water heater completely off (or below Vacation setpoint) is an invitation to grow nasty things in your tank, like Leigionaire's Disease.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      To kill legionella you need to water at 140 F (60 C) or over, for more than 30 minutes. That temperature will cause a full thickness ("3rd degree") burn in less than a second in children and old people, and less than 5 seconds in adults. It's best to set the water temperature to no more than 50 C. This is still potentially harmful, but takes a bit longer. Or set the tank temperature high and have some safety feature at the point of delivery. Scalds hospitalise many people, killing some of them. Legionella, not so many. EDIT: It's hard to get legionnaire's disease. The "attack rate" is less than 5%. http://www.cdc.gov/legionella/clinicians.html http://www.cdc.gov/legionella/clinicians.html
      - joezydeco 12y ago
        We're talking about people that turn their water heaters down during inactive periods or completely off because of a "smart" system that tries to save electricity. Legionellae grow from 68 to 122F (20 to 50C). If you're letting the temperature of the tank drop into that range for a period of time and then running a shower before it's fully heated, you run the risk of aerosolizing the bacteria and contracting the disease.
jerf 12y ago
I think one of the big problems with the whole "smart home" idea is that people don't consider the use cases. As the article mentions but doesn't really follow through the logic of, trading a light switch flip for a smart phone fumble just isn't a win. But remote access is one of those cases that is a win. I have a relative that spends a lot of time about 1000 miles away for business and he's gotten some mileage out of his remote furnace control. Access for people with physical issues also makes sense, but relative to what I think the market is "expected" to be for this stuff, that's still quite a small niche too. (Large in absolute terms, that is, but nowhere near "we're going to have one of these in every house!") Beyond that, though, what's the best case scenario in practice? I spend perhaps a minute during the day tops flipping light switches... if you 100% eliminate that I will, frankly, not particularly notice. My heater already has a standard modern (and therefore a bit featureful) electronic control and I already don't use its sophisticated features. This isn't one of those cases where technical advances just made home automation possible, like the way tablets were a joke until all the pieces came together for the iPad and gave us a practical device for the first time. The tech has been here for decades, and it has never taken off, even among the geek set. I think the problem is there just isn't a use case here. At the risk of sounding simply contrarian, I'm still not convinced the whole "Internet of Things" isn't going to fizzle out the same way. It's a basic principle of good software engineering that it isn't enough to just throw code at people and hope; you need a use case that makes sense. There will be some use cases here and use cases there, but I'm not convinced there's a massive new market that deserves a new moniker so much as "use cases here and there".
- maxerickson 12y ago
  I think as soon as there is a comm protocol that is worth calling a winner (works well, widely supported), it will quickly become the case that LED bulbs and fixtures will come with it built in. A while after that, whole home lighting control is a $100 feature that you expect in every house (or less for smaller places), not a $500 or $1000 feature that doesn't work very well in houses where the owner really pursued it.
  - sly010 12y ago
    I don't expect there will ever be such protocol though, there is too much competition already and everyone wants to be the "platform", because no-one actually has any idea of what gadgets would be useful. Even if we just look at the low level, there already is a war between grid powered vs battery powered, which then influences the war between BTLE, WIFI and ZigBee. There are inherently very different architectures, I don't see a change for convergence. But then probably when everything has been already done Apple will invent THE Apple Home which will be (as always) the first of it's kind :)

herf 12y ago

Water heaters use a lot of household energy--automating them is a great idea. One smartthings customer did it here: http://community.smartthings.com/t/water-heater-automation/1904 http://community.smartthings.com/t/water-heater-automation/1...

modoc 12y ago
My understanding is that modern tank water heaters are extremely efficient, 96%+ so I don't think they use that much energy these days?
- joezydeco 12y ago
  Switching a water heater completely off (or below Vacation setpoint) is an invitation to grow nasty things in your tank, like Leigionaire's Disease.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    To kill legionella you need to water at 140 F (60 C) or over, for more than 30 minutes. That temperature will cause a full thickness ("3rd degree") burn in less than a second in children and old people, and less than 5 seconds in adults. It's best to set the water temperature to no more than 50 C. This is still potentially harmful, but takes a bit longer. Or set the tank temperature high and have some safety feature at the point of delivery. Scalds hospitalise many people, killing some of them. Legionella, not so many. EDIT: It's hard to get legionnaire's disease. The "attack rate" is less than 5%. http://www.cdc.gov/legionella/clinicians.html http://www.cdc.gov/legionella/clinicians.html
    - joezydeco 12y ago
      We're talking about people that turn their water heaters down during inactive periods or completely off because of a "smart" system that tries to save electricity. Legionellae grow from 68 to 122F (20 to 50C). If you're letting the temperature of the tank drop into that range for a period of time and then running a shower before it's fully heated, you run the risk of aerosolizing the bacteria and contracting the disease.

jerf 12y ago

I think one of the big problems with the whole "smart home" idea is that people don't consider the use cases. As the article mentions but doesn't really follow through the logic of, trading a light switch flip for a smart phone fumble just isn't a win. But remote access is one of those cases that is a win. I have a relative that spends a lot of time about 1000 miles away for business and he's gotten some mileage out of his remote furnace control. Access for people with physical issues also makes sense, but relative to what I think the market is "expected" to be for this stuff, that's still quite a small niche too. (Large in absolute terms, that is, but nowhere near "we're going to have one of these in every house!") Beyond that, though, what's the best case scenario in practice? I spend perhaps a minute during the day tops flipping light switches... if you 100% eliminate that I will, frankly, not particularly notice. My heater already has a standard modern (and therefore a bit featureful) electronic control and I already don't use its sophisticated features. This isn't one of those cases where technical advances just made home automation possible, like the way tablets were a joke until all the pieces came together for the iPad and gave us a practical device for the first time. The tech has been here for decades, and it has never taken off, even among the geek set. I think the problem is there just isn't a use case here. At the risk of sounding simply contrarian, I'm still not convinced the whole "Internet of Things" isn't going to fizzle out the same way. It's a basic principle of good software engineering that it isn't enough to just throw code at people and hope; you need a use case that makes sense. There will be some use cases here and use cases there, but I'm not convinced there's a massive new market that deserves a new moniker so much as "use cases here and there".

maxerickson 12y ago
I think as soon as there is a comm protocol that is worth calling a winner (works well, widely supported), it will quickly become the case that LED bulbs and fixtures will come with it built in. A while after that, whole home lighting control is a $100 feature that you expect in every house (or less for smaller places), not a $500 or $1000 feature that doesn't work very well in houses where the owner really pursued it.
- sly010 12y ago
  I don't expect there will ever be such protocol though, there is too much competition already and everyone wants to be the "platform", because no-one actually has any idea of what gadgets would be useful. Even if we just look at the low level, there already is a war between grid powered vs battery powered, which then influences the war between BTLE, WIFI and ZigBee. There are inherently very different architectures, I don't see a change for convergence. But then probably when everything has been already done Apple will invent THE Apple Home which will be (as always) the first of it's kind :)