I Wish Nest Did More Than Thermostats

http://www.jorgecastro.org/2013/05/03/i-wish-nest-did-more-than-thermostats/

by krondor • 13 years ago

46 52 13 years ago

gms• 13 years ago

They will, once they feel that their thermostat is satisfactory enough.

notatoad2• 13 years ago

This seems like kind of a silly. The Ubuntu panel he shows there is simple because programmers have hidden all the complexity. Whoever installed the sprinkler system hid the complexity too - they closed the door on the sprinkler control panel. If you wanted it to be simple, you should have left the door closed. You don't need to adjust it. It should have been programmed by the installer to account for seasonal rainfall. Day-to-day rain does not matter at all to your sprinkler programming.

If you want to poke around (literally) under the hood, you don't get to complain about complexity.

spingu2• 13 years ago

But the point is it shouldn't feel like you are going "under the hood" to simply change sprinkler schedule. We still INTERACT with Nest without the need to go under the hood. If you simply "closed the door of sprinkler", you can't interact with it. Nest hides the complexity and provides simple interface for the user.

igul222• 13 years ago

The problem is that poking around under the hood shouldn't be necessary. If the sprinkler system worked well enough without ever needing to open the hood, then everything's fine. But it looks like that's not the case.

secabeen• 13 years ago

Well, it's an interesting question. Is there a market for a $300 sprinkler controller? Rain Bird doesn't think so. I paid about $50 for my controller, and it's relatively easy to use, certainly better than the OPs: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003LY4I14/ref=wms_ohs_prod...

Also, the OP is eliding over the fact that that controller is probably 10 years old.

notatoad2• 13 years ago

Not only is it unnecessary to poke around under the hood, it's bad. If you're changing your sprinkler configuration, you're doing it wrong. You're supposed to set the schedule and never touch it again. Changing the schedule (because of rain or weather) is not as good for your lawn as just leaving everything alone. The only control you should ever be touching is the master shutoff valve. Your sprinkler isn't supposed to care about daily rainfall, because that doesn't matter in lawn care.

The only problem with the sprinkler in the article is that the internal clock is set wrong, and you can be pretty sure that the reason the internal clock is wrong is because the author tried to tweak things. Don't do that, and the problems go away.

snuze• 13 years ago

I have used those exact sprinkler system controls and can attest that they are absolutely terrible.

dfc4• 13 years ago

Nest folks, once you are happy with your thermostat product please pivot to water heaters. There is no reason why I heat the water in the tank up throughout the night. I think that my household demand for hot water is fairly predictable with spikes in the morning for showering and in the evening for dishes and laundry.

shawnz• 13 years ago

Have you thought about switching to a tankless hot water system?

mikegreen• 13 years ago

So I can spend $2800 on a water heater that has questionable reliability, requires a bigger gas line, and will save me 40% off my $18 a month water heating bill?

Yes. I've thought of it, but no, it is not a good idea.

chad_oliver2• 13 years ago

In general, there's a good reason for heating the water overnight: electricity is often cheaper at night, and (on a national level) it means that electricity demand is spread more evenly over the whole 24 hours.

fancyketchup• 13 years ago

This is a good idea, but are you by chance located outside the US? Every water heater I've personally encountered in North America has been powered by natural gas. Even so, it only takes an hour or so to fully replenish the hot water, so it still makes sense to allow the water to cool down between, say, midnight and 5am.

dfc4• 13 years ago

Electricity is cheaper at night (from some utilities) because the demand is a lot lower at night. But why is it a good idea to heat water at night when I'm not going to use it?

And as others have pointed out I have a natural gas heater.

_delirium• 13 years ago

I've considered doing this manually, but when I ran the numbers, it barely saved anything, at least if your water heater is insulated to modern Energy Star standards. In the past decade or two, standby losses have been brought down so low that they're almost negligible compared to actual hot-water usage, e.g. one shower will take more energy than a whole month of standby heating.

When I looked into it in my own case, it worked out to slightly under 1 kWh/day in standby losses, or about $2/month. I turned off the water heater when I was gone for a month once, and the savings do seem to have been in the noise somewhere. Assuming a Nest-like device to do that for me would cost the same ~$250 that a Nest does, it would take 20 years to recoup the cost of the device, even assuming it was so perfect that it saved all standby losses.

dfc4• 13 years ago

Nice. How did you estimate the standby costs? I wonder if gas v. electric makes a difference? Any chance you live in a colder (40 degree basement in winter) climate?

corresation2• 13 years ago

There is no reason why I heat the water in the tank up throughout the night

Aside from the fact that you need the water to remain above a certain level or the water can become dangerous (e.g. legionella), what happens the night you play glow in the dark flag football and decide to take a shower? Or do a load of dishes? Etc.

The Nest "works" (in the absolutely marginal way that it does so) because it makes a middling difference. That would be a stark difference with a hot water tank.

dfc4• 13 years ago

What happens the night i stay up late with the nest and want the heat turned up?

My dishwasher contains a heating element and so does the clothes washer.

huhtenberg• 13 years ago

Virtually everyone modern home has thermostats, but far fewer households have dumb water boilers.

dapak• 13 years ago

"For bonus points it would also check Google Maps and compare how green my lawn is to my neighbors"

How's that going to work when the imagery isn't real time?

cbhl• 13 years ago

Alternatively, it could check what neighbours' sprinkler systems are set to, and recommend the median or mean (or maybe just the max of immediately adjacent neighbours).

He's just making a wishlist of features; the particular method of implementation doesn't have to match.

CamperBob23• 13 years ago

Glad to hear Nest is still around. Last I heard, they were getting the thermonuclear treatment from Honeywell's patent attorneys. Was that resolved recently?

spingu2• 13 years ago

Agreed. But specifically for lawns, I actually wish someone makes much cheaper artificial turfs. Good for aesthetics, better for the environment.. saves hassle time money and water.

briancurtin• 13 years ago

This can't be all that far away. At the size of a baseball field, I'm told it's a no-brainer to go turf at this point.

I don't actually know the prices, I'm trusting the college coaches who have mentioned this to me over the last several years (I umpire on the side). One has been on artificial turf for three years, another put turf in this year, and the rest want them.

plorkyeran• 13 years ago

The usage patterns of a baseball field and a lawn at one's house are generally not going to be very similar, so it doesn't necessarily follow that what's cheaper for one is cheaper for the other. (I have no idea how the prices actually compare.)

rscale• 13 years ago

Personally, I don't want Nest; I'd prefer coherent locally accessible APIs for monitoring and control.

mgraczyk2• 13 years ago

We're working on it.

https://github.com/makilian/Mist

smcguinness• 13 years ago

Any more info you can share? I'm very interested in something like this.

mgraczyk2• 13 years ago

Yes. I few friends and I have been working on this for a few months as a school project. We're done with school now, but we may still continue the project. So far we have been more focused on the mathematics and the software and less focused on the product because the project was for school.

atdepth• 13 years ago

Myself and a friend looked in to doing this for sprinkler timers. The aim was to simplify the interface to a large degree and allow for configuration via a browser or mobile device.

As it turns out there is a patent on sprinkler timers with embedded web servers. The owner of the patent has posted hostile messages threatening legal action on any public facing website that posts about the handful of consumer products that might infringe on their patent.

Here is a link to the patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US7010396

gregable2• 13 years ago

This makes me sad.

tzs• 13 years ago

This appears to be the manual for that sprinkler controller: http://www.rainbird.com/documents/turf/man_ESPModular.pdf

Setting the time doesn't appear to be too painful.

mrb• 13 years ago

His point stands: if you need a manual to set the time, then the UI is poorly designed. Period.

rentzsch• 13 years ago

This is where Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with web tech (ideally) and/or Apps (practically) could shine: the sprinkler system could vend a much better software UI to our smartphones than the hardware UI it's currently offering.

msutherl2• 13 years ago

I can't stand UI controllers for physical stuff:

1. When you want to change some parameter of the physical thing, you have to know where your phone is. You can't just go there.

2. You need to take your phone out of your pocket, navigate to the icon, press it, wait, probably tap a button or two, then slide your fingers along a smooth surface in some sort of complex pattern. Meanwhile, you could have walked downstairs and turned a dial, which you can actually feel with your fingers and you don't need to look at.

Nest makes big awesome dials. I too wish more startups with good designers would find some way to displace common hardware controls that are unfamiliar and complex.

CamperBob23• 13 years ago

Did Android ever get their act together on BLE? Last I checked there are a lot of phones out there with perfectly good BLE chipsets that the OS doesn't acknowledge.

jmomo• 13 years ago

I have an Ecobee thermostat in my condo, which I am currently in the process of selling. Young people are usually pretty excited about seeing it in action, but older people are actually turned off. My guess is they see it as another complicated VCR that they can't program, and so, it's actually a negative.

Even the Nest, with it's simple dial would probably scare them, because smart things scare stupid people.

When I tell them that it's an Internet enabled thermostat, they must immediately think, "OMG CHINA HAXORS GUNNA STEAL MY THERMOSTAT MHZ" because that's what the scare-monger media has been telling them over the last six months.

msutherl2• 13 years ago

That thing looks like a nightmare. I don't blame them.

CamperBob23• 13 years ago

Even the Nest, with it's simple dial would probably scare them, because smart things scare stupid people.

Sigh. Yes, that's it. They must be "stupid."

iramiller• 13 years ago

An irrigation system is far more complicated than a thermostat however there are already strong contenders in this space. I use a Cyber-Rain[1] controller which adjusts based on humidity, temperature and forecast along with details provided during setup such as sprinkler types, soil types, grade and more. When your system has a flow sensor the controller will even shut down the system in the event of a broken head and send an email instead of letting hundreds of gallons of water run down the street.

[1]http://cyber-rain.com

supercanuck• 13 years ago

I've had this exact same thought. The other area is pools. Turning on the pool heater and pump via wifi, or turning the hot tub on as I leave from work.

bdwalter• 13 years ago

I find these guys very interesting http://irrigationcaddy.com

I Wish Nest Did More Than Thermostats

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