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Comment by Xirdus | Hacker News Reader

Empirically, my wife can perceive a 0° change on a bad day. The same temperature can be too hot and too cold at the same time. That said, I have never encountered a situation where 1°F makes any difference. If somebody feels bad, it takes at least 2-3°F change to make them feel good again. Celsius is granular enough for that. All workplace safety and food safety regulations in Europe are expressed in whole, non-fractional degrees Celsius.

What's so special about the number 50? Why aren't you comparing to 40°C instead? 40°C is a more useful boundary than both 50°C and 100°F.

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Thermostats normally use 0.5˚C increments because people can feel the difference. Then they disable the decimals when in F mode.

50˚C is the highest temperature that regularly occurs in the hottest place I can think of, Death Valley. The point is, half the 0-100 range never gets used even in extreme settings. But yeah, in most places, more than half is unused.

Thermostats are made with way more granurality than needed, like body scales with 100 gram/quarter pound precision or battery testers with millivolt sensitivity. Most people have single zone HVAC with one controlling thermometer, and it's literally impossible for the whole house to have uniform temperature. And yet, most people are fine around the whole house, not just where the controlling thermometer is.

I still don't get why are you so fixated on 50°C. Why not 125°F? You'd get even more unused range if you go 0-125.

The drift is consistent if your doors aren't randomly open/closed. If I set my upstairs thermostat to 73˚F, the master bedroom with a closed door is always 71˚F. Downstairs thermostat is 70˚F, office is also 71˚F. We don't care about ±1˚F when working but do care when sleeping.

Also, I get some measures being pointlessly precise just cause it lines up with the units, but they deliberately add a decimal place to the displays to support ˚C, even in countries where ˚C is default. The same display could support 0.5˚F increments, but they intentionally don't.

> I still don't get why are you so fixated on 50°C. Why not 125°F? You'd get even more unused range if you go 0-125.

The 0-125˚F range gets used though. Usually 0-100 though. It's perfect.

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