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Comment by beembeem | Hacker News Reader

Agreed on the "smart" features.

When I moved into my current house we had painters working on one floor. They cranked the newly programmed Nest that was in learning mode to 90 degrees for one night to keep the paint warm while it dried. I, of course, had no idea they had done something that silly, but for weeks afterwards this smart thermostat will crank the heat to 90 and I have to manually turn it down. I'm convinced that it will not be able to unlearn and I'll have to delete the profile and recreate it. I should set it on a schedule as you mention.

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Am I the only one who sees "learning" features for things like this as nothing more than overcomplicated ways to engineer in unexpected, unwanted behavior?

My heating/cooling desires are straightforward: unless I'm gone, stay in this range. I am not gone on a predictable schedule, any pattern it picks up will be incorrect.

The only thing the "ugly beige box" doesn't do that I want is remote access, and that would only have been handy a couple of times in the last 11 years I've been in this place. And that is not worth the surveillance or the freakishly buggy behavior some people report.

I'm increasingly convinced the major effect of "AI" will be to ensure that instead of bugs not being fixed because ultimately they aren't considered worth fixing, bugs will not be fixed because nobody understands them.

My homegrown solution is Home Assistant talking to the Lennox API for my system. If my phone moves more than a mile away from the house for more than 30 minutes, then it switches to Away Mode (62℉–82℉), and when I get back within a mile of the house it switches to Home Mode (70℉–78℉).

It works flawlessly. It's been months since I manually tweaked the thermostat. When I do need to override it, it keeps that override in place until the next leave/return event.

I have the same setup but with Ecobee 3 lite instead of Lennox

> I am not gone on a predictable schedule, any pattern it picks up will be incorrect.

Very much this. Either the pattern is predictable which makes it easy to program into a simple thermostat or it is not in which it'll always be wrong in any "smart" thermostat.

Nest and similar are great case studies on the ills of overcomplicating something that should be super simple and reliable.

My mid-90s thermostat is much more reliable. I programmed my schedule into it decades ago and it does its thing with zero confusion ever since then. When I need to override it's just a button press and it automatically resets back to the schedule next cycle. Nothing to go wrong.

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