A thermostat company shut down every thermostat in the middle of a cold night
twitter.com
twitter.com
When the internet connection is down, the thermostat maintains the current program. I'm not quite sure what the outrage is here. If the OP was home, he could walk over and change the temperature. If OP was away, one would hope the base program was set to something that didn't freeze the pipes.
The owner finally mentions that the thermostat is in a location that's not accessible 24/7. While that's a great use case for a net connected device, it's puzzling why you would sleep in a place where you have no control over your HVAC.
1. It works like a programmable thermostat when there’s no network
2. The additional remote sensors (our original thermostat wiring is in a crappy spot for keeping the house at even temps)
I’ve suffered through internet outages (some of my own making) on very hot and cold days and my thermostat keeps humming along on it’s programmed schedule for AC and heat.
I’ve even got an “exotic” config with only reading sensors in certain rooms at certain times of day (like ignoring downstairs when we’re all upstairs sleeping), a cycle of warming up before wake up times, a cycle of cooling down after bed times. This has all just worked for 3 years, through storms, snow, ice, and internet outages.
The Twitter user seems unreasonable in their assignment of blame here. Yeah, they had a crappy time- but a little self reflection here might be better than the lashing out.
They installed their HVAC controller in a spot they can’t access 24/7? What would they do without an Ecobee or similar? What’s up with their default schedule being so wonky that the heat shut off or wasn’t running hard enough?
Obviously, it’s best if Ecobee doesn’t have to take their servers offline but it really seems like a combination of user error and bad timing.
Speaking of making sense, why does your thermostat needs to make a connection to a computer that is not under your control?
It's unfortunate that for me using something like an ecobee requires a sandboxed network connection to protect my other devices from the ecobee and vis-a-vis, but that's how it goes in 2019. We are not as security conscientious as we need to be yet. Or we can all live in caves in isolation. That's okay too I guess.
like with a timer?
I've been on a real-time plan with my utility for the past decade now, overall I've saved about 15% by shifting some loads to off-peak times. Being able to dynamically hold off the air conditioning compressor is a key part of this.
What's odd, though, is that the major net-connected thermostat makers (Nest, Ecobee, Honeywell) have not integrated with the utilities at all. The capability is there, but for some reason this is still a far-off feature.
Oh well, I'll never own one of the stupid things anyway.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g...
when convieniences are affected thats one thing but when it goes into potentially life threatening or extremely destructive, like the IoT refrigerators [~7000] found to have a default password, prone to mal usage such as remotely putteing them all into THAW mode, thats a black eye. Please lets find some way of purging the default password, and developing a non damaging default mode that persists during power or command & control outages.
Unfortunately landlords want to skrimp on utilities so, they lock thermostats and hot water tank shunts away in a service chase or closet. Ive lived in a place like this as a kid and it was always freezing in winter and luke warm showers had to be supplemented with stove top hot water.