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Thread: Home comfort on Ask This Old House

  1. #1
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    Home comfort on Ask This Old House

    Was watching Ask This Old House and there was a part about installing a wireless motorized registers and thermostats (installed by plugging into a duplex outlet) in each room. That way each room was heated to exactly what you set using your smartphone. It's the future of HVAC!

    Price: $3000.00 for a normal house of 7 zones. They didn't mention the cost of the smartphone which I would have to get.

    Meanwhile here at the palatial manse, I still haven't taken down the full screen and installed the glass in the screen door. When the main door is opened the wind blows through and completely changes to air in the living room (somewhat bigger than a handicap Sani-Hut) about 4 times.

    Sound like a waste of heat? I just mentioned to SWMBO that maybe, just maybe it's time to TURN ON the furnace. It was 34 degrees outside this morning. The house was at a balmy 62. She suggested getting a sweatshirt. I did as orde-- um, as asked. I'm sure there will be a Palace Revolt soon from my daughters about the situation.

    Price to operate the furnace when off: Free

    Price for sweatshirt I have on right now: Free (got it from a paralympics I competed in).

    It seems to me that Ask This Old House finds ways to spend the most money possible to fix a problem. And really, how much of a market can there be for something like this? Plus for me the idea that a house can be controlled from the internet seems like the product of some truly bad minds.

    Being the wag I am, if I ever found a house with a system like that, I would unplug the thermostats and switch them around to different rooms. Who would want to try and figure that mess out?

    How many out there would consider such a system? And no, don't invite me over.

    -Tom

  2. #2
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    Tom, doesn't interest me. But, as my millennial nephews like to point out, those high-tech solutions aren't marketed for old-timers - they're for the young folks who want to do everything online by smartphone.

  3. #3
    No interest in such a system whatsoever.
    "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

    “If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

  4. #4
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    In the middle of summer when away from home turn it on and see what the wife says, sounds like a fun idea to me.
    Chris

    Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening

  5. #5
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    Seems the recent DDOS attack was propagated by harvesting the thousands and thousands of smart appliances. Seems for safety sake, we should start looking at opening fewer doors to hackers rather than more. At least till security protocols catch up and exceed hacker technology...
    Comments made here are my own and, according to my children, do not reflect the opinions of any other person... anywhere, anytime.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by Charlie Velasquez View Post
    Seems the recent DDOS attack was propagated by harvesting the thousands and thousands of smart appliances. Seems for safety sake, we should start looking at opening fewer doors to hackers rather than more. At least till security protocols catch up and exceed hacker technology...

    ^^^^^^^^^^^
    Like this.

    One trick with IoT (Internet of Things) is building in an update mechanism without opening the door to malware. And make it small and simple enough to fit in a thermostat or light bulb. Maybe use powerline networking and one box that provides the 'brains/firewall' for the various devices? I have no idea.

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Charlie Velasquez View Post
    Seems the recent DDOS attack was propagated by harvesting the thousands and thousands of smart appliances. Seems for safety sake, we should start looking at opening fewer doors to hackers rather than more. At least till security protocols catch up and exceed hacker technology...
    If the smart phone/internet devices report their status, a hacker may be able to redirect where the report is sent. If this is done to thousands of devices, the eddress receiving the status reports may be jammed.

    It seems to me that Ask This Old House finds ways to spend the most money possible to fix a problem. And really, how much of a market can there be for something like this? Plus for me the idea that a house can be controlled from the internet seems like the product of some truly bad minds.
    If you have a large house with sections that are unused, you may want to have an easy way to deactivate the heat vents in those areas. We are in a small house. Often our spare bedroom is closed off throughout the year.

    jtk
    "A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
    - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

  8. #8
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    It will likely cost you far more to repair it than to install it......I'm barely past starting a fire in the middle of a bunch of rock in a cave.... Computers don't belong everywhere.

  9. #9
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    Far less interested in the heating part than the cooling. I have two shunts in my skull, one tied off, one operating, both penetrating my brain; as a result, I don't regulate heat well at all. Being able to efficiently control cooling in my house this way would be worth the price of admission to me.

    Its funny, when we bought our heat pump in 2005, most of our friend thought we were nuts; because it cost so much money. It paid for itself in 5 years, and now they are all installing them.
    Paul

  10. #10
    Zero interest. I'm not lazy. I can actually get up, unlike a lot of Millennials who seem to think that standing is evil.

  11. #11
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    The ability to regulate room temperatures by room sounds like a great idea to me. Nearly every two story house has problems with regulating HVAC on the second floor unless the heat is zoned. Zoning can't typically be added after the fact and can cost a lot of money up front. My previous house was zoned and I wanted to zone this house, but no room for extra duct work. You should be able to use an inexpensive tablet instead of a smartphone to control this.

    I turn on the heat in the fall as soon as the inside temperatures drop much below 70 and generally run the A/C from June 1st or so until into September. Even with my HVAC habits my natural gas and electric is only about $1,300 a year.

  12. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by paul cottingham View Post
    Far less interested in the heating part than the cooling. I have two shunts in my skull, one tied off, one operating, both penetrating my brain; as a result, I don't regulate heat well at all. Being able to efficiently control cooling in my house this way would be worth the price of admission to me.

    Its funny, when we bought our heat pump in 2005, most of our friend thought we were nuts; because it cost so much money. It paid for itself in 5 years, and now they are all installing them.
    Hi Paul,

    Sorry to hear about your health problems. It's one thing to add a bunch of stuff to your house just because it can be done. It's another if you have a medical need for it.

    In your case I would make sure that any HVAC system you conjure up can't be controlled through the internet. Maybe monitored so if you leave you don't return to an intolerable environment.

    Take care.

    -Tom

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Stenzel View Post
    Hi Paul,

    Sorry to hear about your health problems. It's one thing to add a bunch of stuff to your house just because it can be done. It's another if you have a medical need for it.

    In your case I would make sure that any HVAC system you conjure up can't be controlled through the internet. Maybe monitored so if you leave you don't return to an intolerable environment.

    Take care.

    -Tom
    Thank you for the kind sentiment, Tom. I was a network engineer and owned and operated a network installation and servicing company (and a technical trainer) for 20 years, so if I ever installed such a system, I would be sure to tie it down properly. Hell, I even hard wired my whole house, cause I hate wireless so much; and you can't get on my wireless network without me authorizing the MAC address of your device on my network. Not foolproof, but as close as I can make it. I wouldn't even have wireless, but my daughter needs it for an iPad for school, which I also use for web browsing.

    I would add such a system to make it easier to zone my upstairs and downstairs. Beats the hell out of tearing out ceilings and redoing ductwork.

    ;-)
    Paul

  14. #14
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    I actually have this system installed in my house but currently deactivated. The installer was a little less-than competent and screwed up the setup so I ended up putting my thermostat back in and am waiting for them to come back out to finish but scheduling conflicts have delayed things. I'm participating in a pilot sponsored by my natural gas company which paid for the equipment and install in exchange for me allowing them to review the data and periodically come out to check on its operation. This is a small startup company from what I can tell, I suspect cost will come down if they can scale up.

    I have a 2-story house with huge windows on the SSW and NNW faces so we have a big problem with heat gain in the afternoon in the summer. The upstairs can be over 80 while the basement is 68 while the thermostat is set for 74. 68 is an improvement since I sealed up the super-leaky basement trunk. I bought a thermostat that allowed me to schedule the fan and circulating the air in the afternoons made a big difference but still not great. Its impractical to zone our house as every register is a home-run off a basement trunk, even the 2nd floor. We'd have needed something like 13 6" dampers and the control would be difficult. There's no good place for a second floor thermostat as a hall mounted one is essentially the same space where the first floor one is today due to a 2-story foyer.

    The system has a few rough edges but overall looks good. They use an Emerson Sensi thermostat, a proprietary "hub" and a small radio in each vent. The app is the user interface. The hub controls things day-to-day. The hub communicates to the thermostat via the cloud and essentially turns it into a dumb switch. Frankly I'm not crazy about that aspect--I would like to see them use a thermostat with a local API and communicate directly over wifi. In the event of an outage the thermostat can still control the system conventionally. I believe (this was poorly explained by the installer) that you set the temp to a safe fail temp--say 60 degrees in heat and 80 in AC and it will automatically kick in there. I talked to one of the developers for a while on the phone and I think they are going to add a couple features to fit some use cases I have. One big one is using the fan to circulate air to get warm or cool air and circulate it to rooms that art too cold or too warm instead of running the heat or AC.

    One thing they didn't point out on the show is that you can build scenes like many home automation systems. A scene sets a temperature for a room, but can also mark a room as unoccupied allowing the system to not consider reaching setpoint in that room. For example at night we can mark all rooms as unoccupied except our bedrooms. The system will run the furnace or AC to get our rooms to temp, but if the downstairs is off by 5 degrees, it won't care. If they implement the fan feature it seems like that gets even better.


  15. #15
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    Nov 2012
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    Had to replace our HVAC unit two years ago. Bought a Lennox that came with an internet controllable Wi-Fi thermostat (single zone) It was included with the unit we bought so I don't know what it would have cost by itself. (far less than $3000) It's handy, mostly to turn the temp up to something above arctic level after my hot-flashing wife dials it down. Other than that, being able to control it from my phone has been handy a few times. I probably wouldn't have bought it as an upgrade.
    Last edited by James Gunning; 11-14-2016 at 10:53 PM.

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