Imagine a thermostat needing an internet connection.
It’s not a hard requirement, but it’s sure nice to leave the house at a low but non-freezing temp in winter while you’re away for a few days, then use a web app to bring the temperature back up right before you come back in.
Being on the home LAN, though, is a requirement for me. That is extremely convenient.
I do NOT want my thermostats to phone home. I don’t see any value of that.
But they are connected to MY smart home system (Hone Assistant), and THAT is accessible from the internet.
I get the remote monitoring and control that I want, and they don’t get any of my data. Perfect!
Yeah, I got some z wave thermostats for home.
I got an Emersonl “homekit” thermostat for my in-law and managed to get it on wifi without “cloud”. Unfortunately you have to be careful because the follow on model requires their cloud service for online control.
It’s a real shame that most every house is well equipped to do standalone hosting for remote access, but most of the investment has gone toward cloud connected to force the recurring revenue opportunity.
Good.
I built a thermostat with a Wemos D1 mini and a relay module about 10 years ago.
Still use it today integrated with home assistant and can turn the heat on and off while away from home. It’s been reused across three boilers, no parts replaced.
It was a really fun project and I had virtually no experience with Arduino when starting out. Would recommend it to anyone.
TBF, over 15* in Germany I’ve only seen a couple of actual thermostats. The vast, vast majority use a valve on each radiator. There are electronic solutions for the radiators, but sticking a Nest on the wall is going to do nothing for someone unless the customer installs specific hardware that the Nest would have to support
*edit : years
Those “valves” are, in fact, thermostats. They use thermal expansion of wax to open/close the valve to get to their set temperature. Settings 1-5 are 12, 16, 20, 24, 28 Celsius.
Yes, but they are not electronic and they don’t reflect the temperature of the room like a wall thermostat does.
They don’t (usually) display the temperature but they definitely sense it, and react to it. When the sensed temperature is at or higher than the set temperature, the valve will be closed, if it’s lower it will be opened. Mere valves can’t do that.
That’s what a thermostat is: A negative feedback control system regulating sensed temperature towards a setpoint, and keeping it there. They’re simple, inexpensive, reliable. Yes having the temperature sensor right next to the radiator isn’t ideal but unless the room is quite large that’s not an issue. Also with large rooms you probably have more than one heater and thus thermostat. And you could, in principle, put the thermostat far from the heater but I’ve never seen that done.
In the Netherlands, almost all houses have a thermostat. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t have one
Heating systems in Europe are unique and have a variety of hardware and software requirements that make it challenging to build for the diverse set of homes
AKA. Europe probably has hardware and software requirements that make it so Google can’t
A) Harvest your data; and/or B) Must be able to function without an internet connection (aka. they can’t kill it)
This is a thermostat (although an analog one). You set a temperature with it. “3” corresponds with about 20°C.
