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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

As an example: your driving home on a cold night, and you want to turn your heating on to preheat the house before you get home.

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That would be a dumb home then. A smart home would be properly insulated and a lot more passive, it wouldn't leak as much heat and wouldn't be cold when you get home. All without "smart" tech or burning extra fossil fuel.

The “smart” tech is affordable and costs less than renovating or rebuilding a home, a luxury which many people cannot afford.

Did you run the numbers on savings with insulation vs using "smart" tech?

Usually, it's only a matter of time before insulation pays for itself, the time being roughly a decade. Still, people would rather limp along rather than fix it up.

I guess the question is really the upside/downside ratio. I think for many the upside is marginal compared to the potential downside.

Grandma tech: keep rolls of sugar cookie dough in the freezer, and bake 'em when you get home. An excuse to hang out by the oven, and then you have cookies.

Each generation toils away to solve problems that were first solved more than 200 years ago

Or maybe our problems and potentials are radically different than they were 200 years ago?

Spoken like someone toiling away at something your great-grandpa had a solution for.

Actual grandma tech: keep grandma at home using the oven so the house is warm when you get home.

Nah, my grandma had a life, as I fully intend to when I'm her age.

I have never found this feature useful. In cold places you tend to leave the heat on to keep things stable. Same when it is hot and humid.

You can turn down the heat a few degrees when you’re out of the house and save quite some energy this way.

Not really, not where I live.

Curious if that saves any significant energy, if you visit home regularly. The same with summertime AC. I believe that allowing a properly insulated room to get hot/cold and then reheating/recooling it takes the same work, because half a day is barely enough for it to get equilibrium with the environment. For a week probably yes, but then again you don’t want your home to cross a freezing point too often. Am I right or naive here?

You are half-way right (or half-way naive, it depends on points of view).

Generally speaking (but it depends greatly on the specific home thermal properties and on the kind of heating or AC you have) it is usually less energy intensive to keep in winter your home at a certain temperature (lower than normal but not too lower) than to switch off completely heating and then when you get home boost to the wanted temperature.

Many years ago I knew someone (an electrical engineer by trade) that modified a standard/ubiquitous Panasonic telephone answering machine connecting it to his home thermostat, he used the code to hear messages to switch the heat on.

You don't need the internet, nowadays the equivalent would most probably be something like :

https://www.ezyswitch.co.nz/

Both voice calls and SMS are routed over the internet today, though…

A smart system would learn your patterns and eventually be able to predict your arrival, setting a temperature that's further away from ambient and towards some target the more confident it is.

Or a tad bit more risky, you could email it.

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