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After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Our smart thermostat has never been all that useful to me. The main thing is I don't have to walk over to it to change the temp. But that convenience isn't really worth the $150 I paid for it.
The idea is that you can use peaks and drops in electricity pricing to optimize the usage and also to lower the house temperature when nobody is home and raise it again when an occupant enters maybe a 1km radius around the place again.
The way you're using it is just a gimmick, that's true.
I get the idea and it's kinda cool, but not +$100 cool when I can just turn it down/off before I leave.
No, my point is: using it as I described really saves money. The effective power price for my heat pump over the last year is at about 20% beneath market average because I use the thermal mass of my floors to store energy during low price hours. That needs to run automatically, controlling that by hand would be massively annoying or not possible at all when I'm not home.
In addition, when one of our cars is started at one of our respective work carparks the hot water supply is checked and gets heated if it is below the necessary temperature for a shower. So either the day brought enough solar energy that it's hot enough anyway or the water is heated very specifically for the after work shower for a person returning home. That prevents the heat pump from having to keep high temperatures all day in winter.
The blinds follow the sun when the room temperatures pass 22°C and the solar panels deliver more than 2kW, because in that case it's obviously sunny. Saves a lot of energy for the AC.
All that saves way more than 100€/year, so remotely controllable fixtures stop being just a gadget when you start to think about the whole energy management in your house, is my point.
Assuming I:
"No you idiot, you just have to spends thousands of dollars on equipment and then you can save $100 a year"
Do you realize how ridiculous you sound? Good for you that you're saving money, but I'm just giving a personal anecdote here, not writing a thesis on home energy management.
You don't need solar panels. Could also just be dynamic energy pricing. Also do not need a water heater. Thermal mass could just be heating the place at a certain time. Don't get the bit about temp changes, maybe you mean you never heat or cool your place?
Yeah, but don’t give the power company control over the temperature in your house. That has gone poorly in Texas with people unable to turn on their AC on super hot days because they opted in to some program that they may not have understood.
The built in features of occupancy detection / geo fencing are cool though.
A lot of those smart thermostats do not support things like OpenTherm. As a result they often either start the heating or they do not heat. There's no modulation.
OpenTherm is from 1990s. Having a thermostat with a presence sensor is also not really anything new. Adding remote functionality would be nice if those "smart" wouldn't be so utterly terrible at being a thermostat. Meaning, the lack of modulation. And no modulation is pricy way to heat your home.