That entitles you to a a WHOOSH from me.
I have a perfectly good Internet connected thermostat/programmer that is peer-peer with nobody's server required. Take a look at the "Hestia Pi" project.
In one sentence can anyone explain to me why I should consider a thermostat that isn't connected to my boiler, but which is connected to a "server" goodness-knows-where which then controls my boiler.
One sentence. If it makes no sense ... (toys with pistol ....)
centrica_server_fault_on_wednesday_caused_hive_to_crash_on_the_tuesday_yes_thats_right_whats_wrong_with_that/
<phhhht>
Indeed. You can have remote control of things without connecting to the vendor's central server. But it doesn't "buy you in" to their data centre, their monitoring and their ability to up sell more s**te to you.
This is like one of the doorbells (Ring?) that let you see an image of who just pressed the bell on your phone. Again the data goes from your doorbell to your router to their server back to your phone or router. And when their servers crashed your doorbell wouldn't ring. What a crock of s**te.
And lest you think I'm some old luddite... I work for a semiconductor company that helps people design these stupid things and then makes the chips for them. So please buy them as my salary depends on huge numbers of n*****ts buying them. (You don't want one.)
Because that way you can fiddle with the thermostat setting when not in that place. That can be useful if you need to wind the heat up a day or two before you show up there in person, after say being away on holiday or for your holiday house etc.
But that takes some techie ability, the 1st gen remote thermostats required an inbound connection, with e.g. port forwarding on the router and were then found out to be as secure as a paper bag, so the 2nd gen systems tended to make an outbound connection fro the device to "a server" and then the inevitable apps rendezvous at the server ... of course it is possible to make secure software (and fix bugs when they're found) but it's judged to be "too hard" for the great unwashed to configure.
That looks like a neat project. But it's not for everyone.
In this case, it's unclear whether the heating on/off commands are coming from the server, or that the 'programmer' isn't getting updated from the server - ie the thermostat functions still work but you have to tweak it up and down manually and maybe program the timer manually.
While you or I might want to cook our own solution, people who want an easy life seem to want to be able to control their heating from an app and (in the absence of fiddling with their router) that does need some kind of server to join things all together. If that server goes down, the app won't work, but their heating might.
I'm also a bit wary of general IoT reliability - Raspberry Pis running Linux
24/7 aren't exactly designed for robustness, so I'd expect them to crash occasionally - order of once a year or so - and I don't see the HestiaPi attempting to mitigate that. There's no interactions with the watchdog timer I can see, nor running the thermostat algorithm on a microcontroller so that it still works when the app or Pi crashes/corrupts its SD card/gets DDOSed/whatever. So the risk is it crashes with the boiler on constantly (or off, and pipes freeze). I'm not sure if Hive is any better than this, but it's something I'd want to have in a system I'd install.(It wouldn't be too difficult to add a little microcontroller running a thermostat algorithm to the hardware module they're using, to handle the realtime stuff)
Some of the IoT thermostats control temperature by interrupting the thermostat wire on your regular controls, which you set to maximum temperature. So it can turn the heating off, but not roast you. However that's no consolation when everything freezes.
Theo
I was FTPing to the US in the 80s ... no luddite here either.
And ? Centrica don't seem to have any ....
If someone wants that facility, then it'd surely be better to communicate directly instead of via a server controlled by someone else.
SteveW
An independent frost stat will solve that one.
SteveW
Exactly.
I installed one some months back and we find it very useful when we travel.
I can turn the heating down or off while we are away but remotely turn it back on so the house is warm, there is hot water etc when we arrive home.
Combined with a mobilephone app, it will turn the heating off if we both leave the house but back on as one of us approaches home.
If we are out later than expected and/or it turns cold and I think we may want an extra warm house when we get home, we can increase the temperature or extend the time the heating is on.
Hive also works with Alexa, although we don?t use that facility much.
Even if the server crashes, the local system still works BTW, you don?t need to be linked to the server. When middle daughter / son in law bought their house, it had a Hive system but the box which links it to the server wasn?t there. The everything still worked locally, it was just a pain to set up. It seems the ?done thing? is to take the router/control box with you as it is personalised to you.
Our motorhome even has a remote system for the central heating I can control via my mobile phone.
Yes well this is the way the world is going. All is well until its not. Of course gathering data has nothing to do with this, of course not oh noo. I mean if I put in a few switches round my house under alexa control from my router, does the signal go to the cloud then back to my router just to turn the light on? Yes as the recognition of the words is not done locally, however since hive has no spoken component and is just a switch no real reason for it to go to the cloud other than to allow you to see what its doing on the phone app, You should have a failsafe local control maintained. Brian
Hive's outage notice said you could still adjust manually, so I presume the Hive thermostat must have a manual control on the front that overrides the settings from the app.
Hive have a new product they're plugging: Hive Link. It involves sensors in the home- smart plugs, and I'd guess door sensors etc to monitor the house for normal activity, and flag it up if that doesn't meet "normal": the intention being for elderly relatives.
Unsurprisingly, someone had done this before, with an RPi, a current clamp on the electricity meter, and a door contact, but as has been suggested, Hive commoditises and simplifies it for the non-techy- there's an install service too, so a British Gas tech comes round and sets it all up, then it takes a week to learn normal behaviour.
Not the sort of thing I'd want (given the Hive outage, the £14.99/month and the tons of data you're surrendering), but it is clever, and well packaged.
The way I do mine is - one light in each room (the dimmable one if any are) is on a Fibaro Z Wave module back in one of 4 wiring centers in the attic corners (balance of cabling and access).
These have manual hard wired inputs and in fact are wired to grid push buttons.
Best of both worlds - remote control, anti burglar timing can easily be programmed, good dimming control (soft start, very LED friendly, customisable upper and lower limits, overload and thermal protection) but if the controller goes away, everything works as expected.
For someone with tech ability, yes. But if you have no idea what a port-forward is or how to do it, using a server elsewhere as a broker or middle man works: the thermostat can make unrestricted connections out to the server, and so can the phone app. You don't need the port forward, or to worry about dynamic DNS; it just works- provided the server stays up ;-)
Consider also that if the product is considered obsolete in a few years time because they have something new to sell whet is to stop them from withdrawing the server options?
And if you want a cheap webcam just nick a ring doorbell!
but why would anybody?
Especially as in the original MO there was a monthly charge of 7 quid for being able to do this
I see that it's now free (presumably because people replied with "You've got to be kidding!")
What's wrong with just setting the time for normal usage and turning it on manually if you get home early one day
tim
but my phone hasn't got a bell
tim
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