Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

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"Most UK heating systems don’t even have thermostats"[1]

I died laughing.

[1] Citation Needed.

Oh, but thank goodness this California-based company is here to save us with their £250 thermostat because we just don't have them and we've been dying for some way to control house temperature all this time.

Oh, wait, B&Q offers me a choice of "Wireless Thermostat | Room Thermostat | Heating Controls | Central Heating Controller | Thermostat | Digital Room Thermostat | Central Heating Programmer | Digital Thermostat (97 products)".

And every house I've ever lived in has had either a central thermostat or per radiator thermostat.

Please, Nest, I'm begging you. Come up with some way to keep the ever present rain from touching our heads. We don't even have umbrellas over here.

During the course of last 7 years I've rented 7 different flats / houses in the UK (all of them in London), 4 of them didn't have a thermostat, 3 had centrally controlled thermostats, only one of them from the 21st century. They were all fairly typical London dwellings. So there you go, anecdotal evidence supported by some data points.

There's definitely a lot of variety in the London rental market, which isn't surprising given the size and age. I've had central controls, single thermostats, thermostatic radiator valves and, in one particularly sketchy conversion, radiators that were connected to someone else's heating system.

However, I wouldn't have paid someone to install the Nest thermostat in any of these properties because I didn't own them and I wasn't planning to stay long enough to benefit. I can't imagine that it would have been of any benefit to my landlords to install one either.

I presume that Nest's target market is homeowners, but their statement that there aren't many thermostats certainly appears to be based on anecdotal evidence from the rental market.

I guess the other question is, how many of the houses and flats with no thermostats had heating systems that were actually compatible with Nest?

Damn you and your data that doesn't support my outrage :-)

Data suggests that all properties outside London have thermostats, those within the M25 live cold and impoverished lives?

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