Thousands of Xcel customers locked out of thermostats during 'energy emergency' | Hacker News Reader

Thousands of Xcel customers locked out of thermostats during 'energy emergency'

thedenverchannel.com

12 pointslando23198 comments

I’ve never seen a program where the lockout can’t be overridden, like someone said in the article-generally the consequences are that overriding the lockout more than a couple times a year loses your incentives.

A cynic might say that the feature to “really lock you out” was always there/planned. Either way, damn the developers who built it, probably sitting in an air conditioned (or heated) room and thinking it could never happen to them. Or that they knew better than the stupid consumers, “who would just be uncomfortable for a bit”.

Not that the incentives are usually worth that much, either. If people rely on stable temperature at home for anything living and not-human, too, it’s really not worth participating.

We’re seeing more periods where local weather exceed the survivability range for humans for some portions of the year. When that happens, your “climate control system” would be more accurately called a “life support system”. Viewed from that angle, it becomes obvious that there should never be a lockout to forcibly disable life support.

A climate emergency could also spike AC usage so high that the grid fails and desynchronizes and takes days to boot up again- no life support for anyone.

Most likely, the alternative is rolling blackouts, where instead of a house regulated to 80 degrees, you just have no power for a few hours.

It's hard to feel too bad for them since it's a voluntary program. I'm part of it and I didn't feel deceived. 78 is hardly uncomfortable.

You have to be careful though since many of these programs (such as CPS energy's) don't set a specific temperature. They just raise your thermostat so many degrees. So if you are like me and already (or for voluntary conservation) set your thermostat to 78 it gets bumped to something like 82 which is quite uncomfortable.

That's good to know! I wasn't home for yesterday's event so I went off the article. I'm not actually sure what it bumped my thermostat to then.

I see a market for "lockout override kits", consisting of a $0.10 toggle switch and some clamps to switch Y/G on manually.

How can you control population collectively ? Step 1: make everything smart ie connected to command and control Step 2: sell the convenience and make it sound cool Step 3: use the command and control

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