Shocked to find smart thermostats raised remotely by “Smart Savers Texas” progrm
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The family’s smart thermostat was installed a few years ago as part of a new home security package. Many smart thermostats can be enrolled in a program called "Smart Savers Texas." It's operated by a company called EnergyHub.
The agreement states that in exchange for an entry into sweepstakes, electric customers allow them to control their thermostats during periods of high energy demand.
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Calling this "Shock" seems like some serious FUD. They signed up for this program, they got an alert at the time, and they were able to un-enroll after realizing the deal wasn't a good fit for them.
There is absolutely nothing "sinister" about this. They literally enrolled in a program to allow exactly this behavior.
Beyond that, the article says they got an alert when it happened and later decided to un-enroll from the program, so I really don't see any grounds to assume bad-faith on the part of the people running it.
In fact, the email begins by explaining how many heat deaths there are, how power outages affect vulnerable populations, and how if everyone could raise their temperatures 3 degrees during critical events we could avoid all of that.
And then a clear call to action to participate.
Basically, the inverse of the tragedy of the commons.
[0]: and they can even un-enroll... so the company is really doing it the right way.
All the fear mongering about the remote control is bizarre to me. You're warned in advance before the adjustment happens, and it's not like you're locked out of your thermostat. If you get uncomfortable just turn the temp back down. It's an easy way to reduce your fossil fuel consumption, especially since the thermostat will precool beforehand, which is typically a time when renewables are a higher proportional of the grid's supply
That's because you're being paid a hundred times as much. No I will not let someone else screw up my heating for a coupon. $60 a year? I'll try it and I won't feel scammed.
Here’s Austin’s utility: https://austinenergy.com/ae/rates/residential-rates/resident...
And even for customers that have time of day billing, peak times are correlated with high-cost energy production (peaking plants), but not necessarily grid instability events.
As a result, people avoid storing large sums of money on banks in Argentina
Note that all governments will do similar things. Either by raising taxes, doing mandatory bonds, etc
Sounds like you are not familiar with Houston. If I had to sleep like that I’d move.
I keep my AC at 26C/80F when it's really hot outside (like these days when we are hitting 95F with 104F expected in a few days), and the difference when going out still bothers me. My metabolism adapts to outside conditions and I assume most people's does to (eg. towards the end of winter, 50F/10C feels nice and warm whereas at the beginning of winter, it's chilly).
But even if you are uncomfortable at 78F/25C as the article states, does one seriously worry about overheating and babies becoming dehydrated at those temps? Like really? (I've got an 8 month old and I avoid ACs but did turn them on the last few days because of the outside temps crossing 30C)
To top it off, most ACs dry out the air too (to the point that this also bothers me).
Maybe if this kind of thing happens a few more times people will start to realize there are some major downsides to smart devices, including losing control of your own belongings.
Nest resells this program, without saying up front that it's about adjusting your thermostat for their advantage.[2]
The site will not work in private browsing mode - you get "Cookies are blocked. To continue, change your browser settings to allow third-party cookies and try again." Why it needs third party cookies is not clear. It's so Google.
What Nest tells users is this:
A Nest thermostat can help you use less energy by cooling your home in summer or heating your home in winter ahead of time and tweaking the temperature up to four degrees during the rush hour. You’re in control. If you’re home, Nest won’t let the temperature become uncomfortable. You can change the temperature at any time.
The Nest site does show terms under Legal. No mention of "Nest won't let the temperature become uncomfortable" there, of course. [3]
"Under the program, your Utility notifies Google of the existence of a Rush Hour Rewards event, causing Google’s servers to remotely inform your Google Nest thermostat (“Nest Thermostat”) to automatically change the temperature setpoint in your home on that day, without any manual intervention by you."
[1] https://my.radiothermostat.com/rtcoa/terms/ercot/rtcoa-ercot...
Electricity travels at the speed of light, so there's a huge dependency on spinning generator inertia to keep a stable supply. With renewables, this "grid inertia" is greatly reduced.
The reduction in grid inertia makes quick demand reduction important. It takes most generation sources several seconds to "spin up" and support load transients. Loads on the other hand can be cut within a few hundred milliseconds. HVAC is nearly ideal for load cuts because they use a ton of power and small variations in temperature can be absorbed by thermal inertia of buildings and product being cooled.
There's a great document on this and how it affects the Texas grid. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20osti/73856.pdf
People that willingly sign up for these programs then complain about it is a classic "leapords ate my face" scenario. The same thing happened to users of Griddy during the huge grid failure earlier this year. Griddy exposed users to realtime spot energy pricing which pegs at $9000/mwh when there's more demand than available generation.
A side note, ironically the same document praising ERCOT's innovative handling of renewable sources says the US national east/west grids are unlikely to face the same problems until the 2040's. Basically, if Texas grid was connected to one of the national ones, these problems they're trying to solve with innovation would just go away for at least 20 years.
Interesting! But wait... wouldn't that mean everyone would save effort and potentially money by hooking up to the national grid? One that has way more people working on innovation + a 20 year time line for it?
Honestly that sounds way more simple, straightforward, and literally more innovative than "let's just all turn our temps down when peaking" lol.
Then again Texas politics... :-|
The SMS should be reserved for turning the system off completely, not for minor changes.
Also, is 78°F really that hot? I live in Canada, but summers can get really hot. Yet I don't even turn on AC below 80° though maybe humidity is way higher there.
Otherwise nothing seems particularly unreasonable here: a utility used a tool (designed to let it better manage peak demand) to do exactly that while only raising the temperatures pretty mildly. I wouldn't personally opt in into a remote controlled thermostat but if I willingly installed it or bought a house that already had it, I wouldn't be surprised when it does exactly what it is supposed to do
On the other hand, today I learned that there's something called heat index and humidex.
It can't. When you cool air down to 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) or so (which is a typical outlet air temperature for a home A/C unit), it simply can't hold much water vapor, and the excess condenses out. That effectively dehumidifies the air--it lowers the dew point to whatever the outlet air temperature is.
> shouldn't the thermostat be coupled to a hygrostat so that that A/C runs when it is humid enough despite being cool in terms of temperature?
In principle it probably should, but in practice there is a close enough correlation between the two that it's not considered necessary.
If energy savings is the goal, the real fix would be to use variable compressors in home A/C systems: that way, instead of the A/C running full on for a while, lowering the temperature (and dehumidifying), then shutting completely off for a while (so humidity can build up again), the A/C could just be running all the time, and changing the thermostat setting would simply change how much cooling and dehumidifying the A/C was doing--what the actual outlet air temperature/dewpoint was. "Full on" would still be, say, 50 degrees F outlet air/dewpoint, but most of the time you wouldn't need that; "energy saving mode" could be, say, 68 degrees F outlet air/dewpoint, which would still be reasonable in terms of comfort but would use a lot less energy, so it could be kept on continuously. (There are already systems like this in cars.)
If you do that, then the outlet air will have twice as much water.
If you started with hot, humid air, that means you're still going to have quite a bit of humidity even as you drop the temperature through the 70s.
So you're going to need to cool the air more to reach the same level of comfort.
Are you sure the savings outweigh the costs?
As long as that dewpoint is reasonably comfortable, that's not necessarily an issue.
> If you started with hot, humid air, that means you're still going to have quite a bit of humidity even as you drop the temperature through the 70s.
So you're going to need to cool the air more to reach the same level of comfort.
You can't cool the air further without also further dehumidifying it. If you cool the air to, say, 60 F, the dewpoint can't be any higher than 60 F. There's no way to cool the air to 60 F but have a dewpoint of 68 F. That's physically impossible.
> Are you sure the savings outweigh the costs?
There is no such tradeoff: lower air temperature and more dehumidification always go together; they have to, as explained above.
The savings comes from running continuously at a lower level of both cooling and dehumidification, one that is just sufficient to maintain comfort, instead of switching between full on (which cools more than needed to maintain comfort--it has to, to compensate for the period when the system is going to be off again) and full off (which doesn't cool or dehumidify at all, so the air warms up and gets more humid again until it reaches the point where the system has to switch back to full on). The switching on and off is less efficient for a given level of comfort.
The other way around. It's not that the dew point will be above the temperature, it's that it could go below the temperature.
So as you suggested, let's have one AC that outputs air at 68F, and compare it to another that outputs at 50F.
So clearly we have to be cooling the room to a temperature no lower than 68F.
If we look at the initial cooling of hot wet air, there's not much difference. The 50F unit will cool a smaller volume of air and cool it to a lower temperature, and the resulting dew point is about the same for either unit.
But as heat keeps leaking in through the walls and windows, the 68F unit will never get the dew point below 68F. While the 50F unit will keep outputting air with a dew point of 50F.
If you had an airtight room with heat constantly leaking in, eventually the 50F unit would cycle all the air through it, and the dew point of the room would reach 50F, even though the temperature of the room might never go below 70.
All rooms leak some air, so you'll never get quite that far, but the 50F unit will get the dew point a lot lower than the 68F unit.
> The savings comes from running continuously at a lower level of both cooling and dehumidification, one that is just sufficient to maintain comfort, instead of switching between full on (which cools more than needed to maintain comfort--it has to, to compensate for the period when the system is going to be off again) and full off (which doesn't cool or dehumidify at all, so the air warms up and gets more humid again until it reaches the point where the system has to switch back to full on). The switching on and off is less efficient for a given level of comfort.
There's an efficiency penalty to letting the temperature wander. But if it only wanders a couple degrees, it's not a huge penalty.
On the other side, there's a penalty for keeping the fans and compressor going all the time, even if they're running at a lower power.
Neither one of those factors is enormous.
But if you could leave the room at 73 with a low dew point, instead of 70 with a high dew point, that could eventually save you a lot of energy.
So that's why I'd want to see real-life efficiency numbers and comfort ratings. It could go either way on base principles.
Your home's A/C unit can't just pick a particular volume of air and cool it. It takes in air from your entire house, cools it, and puts it back out into your house.
Moreover, your whole comparison is irrelevant to what I am saying. The objective is not to get the dewpoint (or temperature) as low as possible. The objective is to get the dewpoint (and temperature) just low enough for comfort (note that the target dewpoint might indeed be lower than the target temperature--see further comments below), and then keep it there by running the A/C continuously at a lower output, instead of running the A/C at full on for a while, which outputs air with a dewpoint (and temperature) lower than required, and then shutting off the A/C for a while, which lets the air's dewpoint (and temperature) rise to a level higher than desired. In other words, target the A/C's output to just where it needs to be, instead of cycling it on and off.
> There's an efficiency penalty to letting the temperature wander. But if it only wanders a couple degrees, it's not a huge penalty.
The main efficiency penalty is not from letting the temperature wander. It's from letting the dewpoint wander. Most of the work the A/C does is actually condensing extra water vapor out of the air, not cooling the air itself. If your room temperature rises from, say, 74 F to 76 F, that's not much more work for the A/C to do; but if the dewpoint of the air in the room rises from 50 F to 76 F (which it might well do on a hot, humid day during the off cycle of your A/C unit), that's a lot more work for the A/C to do to condense out all that extra water vapor.
> there's a penalty for keeping the fans and compressor going all the time, even if they're running at a lower power.
There's also a penalty for starting them up every time from off. For many such devices, given the number of times they cycle on and off during a hot, humid day, that penalty can easily average out to be larger than the cost of running the unit at lower power continuously.
> if you could leave the room at 73 with a low dew point
Which you can't if the system is off. The only way to control the dewpoint is to run the A/C continuously. As soon as you shut the A/C off, on a humid day, the dewpoint will start rising. And then your A/C will have to work harder during its next on cycle to lower it again.
If you run the A/C continously at lower power, then yes, you can adjust things so the heat coming into the house raises the temperature (from the A/C outlet temperature, which is basically the dew point) just enough to have the combination of temperature and dew point that you want. That's basically what I've been describing. The dewpoint of 68 F that I first threw out might be higher than optimal; the point was not to pick a specific optimal number but just to illustrate the concept.
I'm talking about how much air goes through the unit. By the time it's done, it will have emitted fewer cubic feet of air.
> Moreover, your whole comparison is irrelevant to what I am saying. The objective is not to get the dewpoint (or temperature) as low as possible. The objective is to get the dewpoint (and temperature) just low enough for comfort (note that the target dewpoint might indeed be lower than the target temperature--see further comments below)
It's not irrelevant if overshooting one target lets you undershoot the other target.
> The main efficiency penalty is not from letting the temperature wander. It's from letting the dewpoint wander. Most of the work the A/C does is actually condensing extra water vapor out of the air, not cooling the air itself.
Same difference. If you cycle the AC on and off every few minutes, neither one will wander much.
> There's also a penalty for starting them up every time from off. For many such devices, given the number of times they cycle on and off during a hot, humid day, that penalty can easily average out to be larger than the cost of running the unit at lower power continuously.
It only takes a few seconds of power to spin up. If that is the dominating inefficiency in the system, then it barely matters what you do.
> Which you can't if the system is off. The only way to control the dewpoint is to run the A/C continuously. As soon as you shut the A/C off, on a humid day, the dewpoint will start rising. And then your A/C will have to work harder during its next on cycle to lower it again.
If you run it a little bit every ten minutes it will do almost as good a job at preventing drifting. It will work "harder" but for less time, so averaged over the entire 10 minutes it's probably about the same. Might be more, might be less. Depends on how efficient the fans and compressor are at different speeds. And how efficient the evaporator is at different flow rates.
> If you run the A/C continously at lower power, then yes, you can adjust things so the heat coming into the house raises the temperature (from the A/C outlet temperature, which is basically the dew point) just enough to have the combination of temperature and dew point that you want. That's basically what I've been describing. The dewpoint of 68 F that I first threw out might be higher than optimal; the point was not to pick a specific optimal number but just to illustrate the concept.
The different modes having different dew points was a core part of your original suggestion.
If you're changing that, and now we're talking about a system where "full on" is an optimal dew point but high air flow, and "energy saving mode" is the same dew point but with low air flow, then that sounds great. And if you had suggested that originally, I wouldn't have posted to question it.
The dewpoint will, yes. There's a lot more room for dewpoint to rise than for temperature to rise.
> It will work "harder" but for less time, so averaged over the entire 10 minutes it's probably about the same.
I don't think so.
> The different modes having different dew points was a core part of your original suggestion.
> If you're changing that, and now we're talking about a system where "full on" is an optimal dew point but high air flow, and "energy saving mode" is the same dew point but with low air flow
Neither of those is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a system whose only mode (unless you want to have an "initial cooldown" mode as well, see below) is what you called "energy saving mode": the dewpoint is set higher than a current A/C unit's "full on" mode, so that it's just low enough for comfort, ahd the A/C runs at much lower power (lower compressor power and lower airflow) continuously to maintain that dewpoint, instead of running "full on" (high compressor power, high airflow) for a while at a lower dewpoint, then cycling completely off for a while and letting the dewpoint get higher than the comfort level.
The point of running in the above "energy saving" mode is that you do it all the time; you never shut the system off. But there might be cases where the system turns off for a while unavoidably (say a power outage) and the house gets well above the temperature and dewpoint target. For that case, the system would have an "initial cooldown" mode, where it does run "full on" for a while (high compressor power, high airflow, dewpoint below optimal) until it senses that it's back to its usual setpoint, then it goes back into "energy saving" mode described above.
Running at the same (low) dewpoint but lower airflow would save some energy (less fan power), but much less than running at a higher dewpoint, since that reduces the amount of dehumidification, and dehumidification is most of the work that the A/C system does.
This channel has some interesting videos about the subject:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDYh81z-RhxjQKC9CsJiJQHhy...
- Ecobee "AC Overcool / Dehumidify Using AC": https://support.ecobee.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000268887-Ho...
- Nest "Cool to Dry": https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9294957?hl=en
The concern is more one of safety than one of comfort.
Evidently you are not enrolled in the "smart thermostat" program described in the article, which allows the utility company to remotely raise your thermostat setting regardless of what you set it to. They apparently did that without any regard to the impact it would have on comfort and health.
Aagin, the point is the AC is definitely running if the room is only 78F in Houston.
Also I think people really overestimate the humidity level indoor. Even if you leave your AC off for 2-3 days, it will not reach 90% RH unless you leave all your windows and doors wide open.
(you could try to structure the program so that only low-risk healthy adults were in the voluntary reduction camp, but it does seem like a bit of a logistical nightmare).
78F is not even particularly warm. Just dress appropriately and you will be fine.
In the situation described in the article ideally the bed could be cooled somehow. Perhaps a device the size of a five gallon bucket filled with refrigerant circulating cool air around the bed somehow? Idk
Edit:
What I’d love to see is a window AC (Ptac maybe) that’s very large, say half a full sheet of plywood, so 4 x 4ft that’s 2in thin. Then you could actually fit this in like a window in between the walls. If it’s silent thru the use of an inverter it would be better than both a Mini-Split and a window ac due to the fact that it’s 16sqft footprint would afford it very large fans which could move the volume of air effectively silently.
[1] https://www.jansen.com/en/plastic-solutions/products/geother...
I'd go further and say modern housing is unsustainable. Check out passive houses.
only about $400 and slots under a sliding window, half inside the window and half outside with the window in-between. Virtually as good as a mini split but a fraction of the cost and trouble. Only for people with the right sort of window but still seemed an encouraging idea.
This is silly. 78 degrees is not that bad and it’s literally what the Department of Energy recommends setting your thermostat to in the summer.
I grew up in the midwest where it's not as hot but just as humid and A/C was a luxury. I never slept with any covers as a kid and a fan in the room sure felt like it was doing nothing.
Even in the winter, it’s not uncommon for me to have the fan on high while it’s 65-68 inside. I compensate with an extra blanket.
I'm a northerner, and when I moved to Texas, I was prepared for the heat. What they didn't tell me about was the air conditioning. During the summer, people bring a sweater or jacket to restaurants because the AC is so cold.
Today we live in Wisconsin, so we rarely use AC, usually only if we have elderly guests, or maybe the 1 or 2 most oppressive days of the year. We just have to manage the hours in the early evening, when the outside temperature has fallen but there's no breeze. So we have some window fans for that condition.
But I've noticed, that I can turn on the AC and it will run for a long time without the temperature changing, because it's using all of its available power to remove water. But it gets more comfortable. But of course if you're going to cool the air in order to dehumidify it, you might as well enjoy the cooler air.
Better existing residential HVAC controls already do that, combining settings and sensors for dehumidfying, heating, cooling, and, if a humidifier is included in the system, humidifying.
I guess I just expect there to be a more efficient way to cool a 78°F house to a degree where it's comfortable without having to use AC 24/7 but I guess the thermodynamics behind cooling homes disagree with me :').
If you're wanting to pull moisture out of the air for a whole home, that unit is going to be an air conditioner unit.
If you only need to reduce humidity, like in a cool and humid basement, that's fine; the waste heat doesn't matter or may be helpful. If it's hot and humid, you don't really want the extra hot air, it's a lot better to run the heated working fluid outside, so you can dump the heat outdoors instead of indoors. Of course, an AC unit is often a lot bigger than a dehumidifier, and so all the rest of the energy use is bigger too, but if you could get a similar wattage system, putting the condenser outside the conditioned space means you get dehumidifying and cooling inside vs just dehumidifying, so why do only one.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-is-the-ideal-sleepin...
This is called demand response programs and existed for years.
It's a way to shave the peak instead of building a new power station.
You usually get a notification in advance so you can opt out.
This is nothing new and existed in the past in some forms. There are also programs to remote control water heaters (to turn them on at night when demand is low) by having special circuitry in the electric box.
This will also be implemented more and extended as home EV charging stations pop up.
Meanwhile, if you want to express the idea "a device that uses local sensors + local processing to attempt to optimize for property a human configured it to optimize for", you don't call the device smart — you call it intelligent.
This is different in kind from generic common-language use of the word "smart" by consumers as an adjective attached to product categories ("smart fridge", "smart home", etc.), which is what I was referring to.
Even in the 80s, the X10 "smart home" automation technology was all about networking the devices in your home together to put them under control of a central hub; not about any active "intelligence" per se.
A thermostat has always been an example of "device intelligence", but has never been called "smart" technology... until recently, as there are now "smart" thermostats (like Nest.) But these are another Internet-of-Shit product, and that — not any clever behavior — is what makes it a "smart" device.
it's archived here: https://archive.is/5Teif
Yikes! Here I was thinking about jokes regarding smart fridges...
Thank you!
I used to work for a company called Opower, since acq. by Oracle, that worked on setting these temperatures with options/configurations on the user end. OhmConnect, Tendril, Simple Energy, were/are all in this same DR space.
Now granted, residential thermostats usually doesn’t have humidity detection, but any company doing DR probably has other sources of data already to figure out an optimal temp/humidity setting to drive better DR adoption. At the time, Opower had housing and demographic data to predict and calculate how long to pre-cool/heat a home.
Glad Texas is catching up, but the marketing and user education part seems to be lacking. Need to change behavior & hearts and minds or this type of backfire happens. If no one participated in DR, outages and brown outs could kill more people than cause an inconvenience of being too warm.
Shouldn't grids be ensuring they have sufficient supply so that no one dies? Why would we want to design a system where lack of participation in a demand response program means people could be at risk of death?
More broadly, I find it incredibly contradictory that a technology board would approve of intentionally-shitty quality of service because the engineering "is just too hard".
I agree that grids should be built better, but they aren’t due to economics and catch-22s. Take the Texas power grid again as an example. It wasn’t winterized properly in Feb. 2021, freezing 100s to death. The cost of doing so is a ~$10/month bump for everyone there. The usual process for increases go through the PUC process and it’s hard to get large increases through, it’s usually $10/year increases and people complain that’s a lot. The gov., elected by the people, get to approve the price hikes.
DR is a much cheaper solution $-wise and politically as well. Not saying that’s how things ideally should be, but welcome to reality, where optimizing for the individual doesn’t align with taking care of the community/city.