Hacker News Reader

> A bit of a faff - and possibly annoying to the new occupiers to not be able to easily set the heating until they've moved in, configured the WiFi, and registered for an account.

I would argue that that's a failure of the thermostat. It absolutely needs to have a dumber fallback mechanism, not just for new residents, but for the current ones. (What if my internet goes down? What if the cat pees on my router?)

You should probably start by changing the litterbox...

More seriously though, this is a major pet peeve of mine. Many of these devices will also become completely unusable when the manufacturer decides to terminate the service. This is a big reason why I hesitate to pay for products that don't adhere to open standards, and allow for local/offline use as a primary mode.

Yes, the #1 rule of IoT - if it doesn't have a solid LAN-only protocol, don't buy it. Anything relying on a single cloud service isn't worth your time or money. If you have LAN-only access it means not only that you'll have the ability to use it after the manufacturer goes away but also that you can always secure it by simply dropping it behind the appropriate NAT or firewall.

I was just reading a review of a sous vide stick the other day that mentioned that issue. Fortunately, it supported Bluetooth...

Even Bluetooth is a no-go. What happens if the control is app no longer available or drops support for your model? Something like a sous vide stick should have control buttons.

Ditto for stuff like Roombas. I've noticed all the new ones have their schedules set via an app. WTF? My current one has buttons and that works just fine. I'm seriously thinking of getting a spare now.

Smartphones are great solution for controlling a lot of things, but it seems like we're in a place where people stupidly think it's the solution to control all things.

I think Bluetooth could be doable; assuming their use of the protocol is well documented and open to 3rd party implementation. For a lot of these devices, the API could be described in AT commands (flung over any of several bluetooth profiles) pretty easily.

These devices use Bluetooth Smart/LE (as opposed to traditional). It provides functionality more akin to RPC and Pub/Sub. But yes, it's easily implemented if documented, I've done a device to replicate another vendor's protocol for some basic IO.

Yeah fortunately. I was just thinking the other day how terrible life was before Bluetooth enabled sous vide.

This has got to win HN today for the most HNist of comments. ;)

I actually had this problem with Nest thermostats: One of them was "locked", as in the whole UI was behind a password, by the previous owner, who moved out and took his wifi AP. I then moved in with a new wifi AP with a new SSID and new password, and the thermostat obviously couldn't get network access. Without network access it could not be unlocked remotely, and without being unlocked its network could not be reconfigured. There is no way to factory reset the device nor flash firmware to reset it. Eventually I called the previous owner and got a few candidate PINs (he had forgotten...)

If I remember correctly there’s a micro usb on the back of the nest specifically to factory reset.

I bought a smoker a few months back. The top of the line model had Bluetooth. A smoker does not need Bluetooth.

We have some Bluetooth food thermometers. They're great, you can monitor the temperature profile of your roast while you're lazing on the couch. :)

I left an Ecobee smart thermostat when I sold my house. I deleted my online account and you could still adjust the temperature manually. I assume the new owner would eventually set up an online account but they wouldn't need to if they just wanted a 'dumb' thermostat. The Ecobee also works as a 'dumb' fallback when wifi is down.

My Lyric T5 will revert to being a "dumb" thermostat after reset. I don't see why most wouldn't

I wasn't being rhetorical.

If I have a separate account for my home - say 742EvergreenTerrace@example.com - then it would be easier to hand that account and password over the the new owner.

It's almost certainly against the Terms of Service agreement. Presumably, you click-through agreed to a ToS for each one, and you have no right to transfer that agreement to someone else. The agreement is obviously tied to the human who "read" it, not whoever happens to control the account credentials.

Not that the ToS for your light bulb dimmer matters much in practice, but technically it's probably forbidden.

One might be able to work around that by creating a corporation, 742 Evergreen Terrace Management Company, in some state where it is cheap to incorporate, and having the corporation own all the accounts related to the house.

When you sell the house, transfer ownership of 742 Evergreen Terrace Management Company to the new homeowner.

That's not entirely outrageous. There are even existing Corporate and Trust structures in use for ownership transfer needs (mailbox keys and similar shared infrastructure that maybe can't be directly deeded/titled) in deed-restricted communities (Home Owners Association) and condo buildings (Condo Owners Association). A "smart neighborhood" could work to make sure that smart home functionality transfers smoothly between home owners.

Yes, I suppose that does seem like an interesting solution. But it seems like more trouble to go through than it's worth. Not to mention that if the new owner is sufficiently paranoid, then maybe they wouldn't trust that changing the password is sufficient to remove your access. So it would be all for naught.

That could be a cool exercise for your home. Document the various quirks and routines in a Github repository, then the new owner can gain access by forking it. Taking it a step farther, your family could submit issues or pull requests for various issues as they come up, generating an easy list of things that should be documented or fixed.

Now realistically the person buying your house probably doesn't know how to use Git and your family probably isn't gonna make pull requests, but it seems like a novel use of Git and Github. Maybe if it were effective enough a wrapper could be made?

It would be in your interest to conceal the problems that your house has, in order to compete with the ignorance offered by everyone else. While this would benefit humanity, nobody would do it.

All houses have problems. The selling point is, "yeah, we have problems like everyone else, but they're out in the open, so you'll never be surprised and you'll have a clear gameplan to deal with all of them".

You're selling it as a mitigation of stress.

YMMV. But I do this when I sell cars. I try to be up front with every issue I can, and take loads of pictures. Not only does it save people time, but I can basically say, "Well, I've factored all these things in already" and it's harder for them to use something like "there's a dent here" in negotiation, because I'm the one who brought it to the table. They also see me as more honest in my experience. Car sells faster.

On the flip side, I can only really get the true value of the car. If I didn't list the issues I could probably inflate the price and only discount on what they happen to find during inspection.

Except that many buyers would see this as an elaborate attempt to hide bigger issues...

I've thought of something similar, but much less fancy. I just keep an OmniOutliner document where I log repairs, maintenance, specs for things like air filters, and that sort of thing.

If I'm alive when I stop living here, my plan is to print out the log and have it nicely bound, and turn that over to the next owners as something like a ship's log, but for a house instead of a ship.

I'll also leave a thumb drive with the OmniOutliner document, exports of that document in various formats [1], and a PDF of the print out.

[1] Probably HTML, Word, OPML, and RTF.

> Wow, I hope this is rhetorical. No, you never give anyone your password for anything.

Well assuming it's a unique password, not connected to other accounts and you've deleted any sensitive data, why is this so obviously not even an option to you? Sometimes deleting an account is a ginormous pain and it saves some trouble for the buyer.

...because they would have access to data that is not theirs. I know we get so used to leaving our trail everywhere so folks don't care, but if you think about it, the Nest thermostat probably knows every time you've walked by it for the past few years, when you've interacted with the thermostat, settings / preferences, and a host of other data.

Left to the new owner, maybe "who cares!" but one should really try to get rid of data they no longer need / use wherever possible.

Or you could just change the password.

> not be able to easily set the heating until they've moved in ... the epitome of "first-world problems"

Staying warm is a first-world problem? How out of touch can the author be? That's a basic need.

One would think that a new homeowner, if actually locked out of the thermostat somehow, could go to their local hardware store and pick up a cheap $30 thermostat to control the furnace.

Or just remove the thermostat from the wall, and turn the heating on by shorting the signal wires together.

Yes, or that. Point is, the only thing that’s locked/secured is easily removed and replaced by a dumb, easily acquired device. Nobody that has accepted the responsibility of home ownership will be denied access to heat due to a smart home thermostat that they don’t have full access to.

After I bought a house, I couldn't turn off the dining room chandelier lights for three days while I figured out the box they'd stashed in a cabinet had a radio transmitter that talked to the light. A while later I paid an electrician to run some wire through the ceiling and a wall, and install an outlet with a switch.

There was also an outlet in another room with some complex controls. It stopped working after a while. Turned out the switch - which is connected to a freaking electrical wire - required a battery to work. I had that taken out too, and good riddance to all of it.

Meh, the furnace is perfectly operational and you could hold a screwdriver across two terminals to force it on. Not convenient, but not dire need.

The first-world problem is not the "staying warm" issue, but the fact that the fancy 'IOT' thermostat requires an internet connection to set.

In "third-world" areas, and even in many modern "first-world" areas, a heater can be manually turned on with a simple switch, regardless of thermostat settings, and just as easily turned off. The lack of these controls on a significantly more expensive thermostat is where the first-world problem creeps in.