Hacker News Reader

Comment by Levitating | Hacker News Reader

This is good advice but a simpler solution is to just not buy these things? Coffee machines don't need internet. Your thermostat doesn't either.

View on HN

I agree on the coffee machine. On the thermostat, not so much. We keep pretty irregular hours so being able to control the thermostat remotely, so the house isn’t being heated unnecessarily but is warm on our return, is useful.

That said, getting a Zigbee or Z-Wave thermostat and have Home Assistant or similar control it is a better option that buying a surveillance-ready WiFi-enabled one.

Honeywell Home T6 Pro Z-Wave.

It's smart and supports only Z-Wave, not WiFi. So something like a machine running Home Assistant must sit between it and the Internet. And then its up to you to decide how you want to do remote access, but WireGuard overlay networks (e.g. Netbird, Tailscale) basically solve that problem at home-user scale.

This. We should buy Z-Wave or Zigbee as much as possible (Matter over WiFi/Thread can access the internet, so are out) to grow that market. Both are completely disconnected from the internet and you decide how such devices can be accessed.

Reject all the WiFi-connected stuff, unless it's very user-centered and worst case you can upload your own firmware (e.g. a bunch of Shelly devices).

If the house is well insulated, keeping it at a constant temperature might be more efficient than running irregular cooling/warming cycles.

Plenty of houses are not well insulated though...

> Coffee machines don't need internet. Your thermostat doesn't either. reply

Yours may not, but that's just your personal preference. A lot of folks enjoy these products. An argument could be made that no one needs a coffee machine or thermostat to begin with.

I can definitely see the case for an internet connected thermostat. A coffee machine, much less so.

You're about 35 years behind the times about people networking their coffee machines [0]. People might want to know the status of the pot (the OG example), how their ground/bean coffee supply is, or the ability to trigger a coffee or water boiling before they walk to the machine. My coffee making process is entirely manual, and I like it that way, but I can at least see how there are some features that could be nice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

Reply on news.ycombinator.com