this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Actually...
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!
This is the way.
I for sure also want to access it on my Home Assistant, and it really can save alot of power to automate it. Even going down to 20C in the night, and make it going to 22C before anyone wakes up saves alot in a year.
But stay the fuck out of my data.
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.
Yep, all my smart thermostats are zugbee. No phoning home by design, so I don't have to worry about missing functionality by not giving them internet connection.
And that goes for almost all my smart home. I only have wifi things when I couldn't find a realistic zigbee option.
My wife and I were forced to travel for work for some years and it was absolutely worth it to have a remote programmable thermostat. The number of times we were able to fix the temperature setting after it turned out we were both gone and the heat or AC was left on by accident saved us, in all likelihood, thousands of dollars.
Similarly once we got in the groove with that we started renting the place when we’d both be gone for long stretches of time and we were able to remote control prevent things like a guest turning the AC on in the late fall and letting the compressor freeze or just leaving the heat on after they checked out.
I know piling on an unpopular opinion by claiming it is a solution to other unpopular lifestyle choices isn’t what Lemmy is usually looking for, but yeah they serve a really valuable purpose to some of us.
I’m sure when our kids are teenagers and fucking with the thermostat all the time I’ll appreciate it all over again.
There's a difference between something having an optional internet connection, and something requiring one. I can control my smart home through the internet, but when the internet connection breaks and I'm at home, I can still control it.