My smart home almost saved my vacation | Hacker News Reader

My smart home almost saved my vacation

theverge.com

7 pointsDemiGuru10 comments

This shows how bad we are at wasting resources running AC smart appliances things even when we are not home, I remember going on holiday and parents switching entire house off - electricity, gas, water. We would plan to eat stuff from fridge and freezer and whatever was left give it to relatives. When we came back after a week or two we had spotless freezer ready to go for another year till we do the same thing next summer. We weren’t around there was no waste of running appliances. First world problems like this just make you realize those aren’t real problems

Turning off appliances is a very small savings. Average fridge uses $0.50/day. Modern fridges have gotten much more efficient and have automatic defrosters. Throwing out any food wipes out any savings.

Article seems like a trove of advertising. They even references a weather channel app which is another Verge page showing you the best iOS weather apps.

If they had none of this smart technology, they would have still come home to the same situation. It's just that these sensors give you the ability to worry about more things while you're away.

Guy didn't even say if they enjoyed their vacation.

Also, they left a live mammal at home during a trip to London… presumably (hopefully?!) a house sitter would have been visiting soon enough and would undoubtedly have noticed the 90 degree indoor temp.

Unless they had an automated self feeder and water or something, you never know

This is where a smart home shines; The Ecobee is able to recognize the problem early (such as long run time or unresponsive) and avoid harder failure states because of this.

To challenge the author's conclusion; An AC repair person could have replaced the capacitor without interior access to the home - though it's preferred to at least have access to the thermostat.

As the Author is also from Atlanta; and we had a deep freeze last December (which we rarely do) the next step is to turn off the water automatically when water is detected (or done preventatively, though ideally you drain the pipes or keep them dripping.) *Ecobee won't know why your Ac is responding when its condensation pan is full (and tripped by a float sensor) but it could with one additional low voltage wire.

I'm not understanding the point of the article, and the title is weird. The alerts helped the author understand something was amiss, which is neat, I'm not sure what else was expected.

The conclusion is baffling. If I understand the author’s thesis, I think it was something like: “Wouldn’t it be neat if the thermostat had more insight and could have automatically arranged to have itself repaired? But I don’t know how that’s possible. And if it were, I’m not sure I want those privacy trade offs. But we have to figure out how to get there from here!” Uh, do we?

The first thing I think about a self-repairing HVAC (or, rather, an HVAC that summons a technician autonomously) is how quickly can you go from “working A/C” to “ruinously expensive”? Yeah, I think I’m gonna keep a human in the loop on this one.

This reads like a story from the Onion. "smart home tells me my air conditioner stopped working, hours before I could have worked that out myself when I got home".

Almost saved? So the vacation was still ruined?

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