Nest Thermostats

I think it's part of "cheapest". At least, in my experience the ones who are willing to hire us instead of the lowest bidder are significantly more likely to act ...well... normal. (That could be because they generally have a prior relationship though.) But the ones who want everything as cheap as possible --or cheaper-- are the ones who complain & berate the most.

It's my opinion that our products should have to go through us to get to the consumer, this keeps manufacturers on their toes. The consumer, even one that can wire a t-stat, is not educated enough to know whether a product will do what it claims, if we install something within the first few installs we know if there are issues and we drop that product, that's why they go around us.

The Nest was one of the few that had nothing to do with HVAC and went direct to consumers, it's a sales tactic, they knew once we figured out it's nothing amazing it wouldn't fly, it has wifi and smart phone capability, so does everybody else, they also violated copyright laws but that's another issue.

Dave said:

I believe what has been expressed on this thread gives validity to the Dunning - Kruger effect. No body has bashed the Eco bee, the lyric or others. There is nothing wrong with criticism as long as it is based in fact and not anecdotal . There may not be a place in the homes of older generations for the nest, but there certainly is with gen x and gen y. Someone commented that remote control authority of a thermostat was somewhat anal. I disagree . For those of us who travel frequently it is a useful device. I suppose I could ride a horse to work , but I prefer to take my truck. Ten years ago the talk was that Viega pro press would be here today and gone tomorrow . Both Viega pro press and Nest will out live all of there pallbearers.

Dave people have traveled for decades with out the ability to control their home environment from their cell phone while gone for extended periods. Not hard to turn the thermostats down, and shut off the water supply. Maybe have a friend, or a neighbor check on the place.

I would worry more about the domestic water supply than my ability to control temperature via cell phone.

Ask my friend who went to Arizona for 6 months, and never turned off the main water supply. Thinking he was covered because a neighbor checked his house weekly over the winter.

Amazing how much water an upstairs cracked cpvc supply pipe to a bath can dump in a week. He ended up,with basically a whole new house except the shell........

GreenGene said:

I think the big plus to any smart thermostat is the ability for a person who travels to check on the home, most will be going with a security system so while you travel you'd get an alert for burglary, fire, water, temp out of range and you can tap into cameras and see.

If your going to do all that. You may as well get a service that dispatches the appropriate authority to the home.

here's a good one

I am sharing here the fact that the thermostat we had from Comcast as part of our security system went crazy and started blowing hot air into our home even though it showed it was cooling our home.

http://forums.xfinity.com/t5/Customer-Service/Very-Dangerous-Thermostat/td-p/1331273

A power generation utilities would much rather operate with a power deficit than a surplus. In the end where else will one turn if they don't like the service? There are ways to handle surpluses. Normally done by selling surplus power to deficit burdened stations. Sometimes out of state.

Close. It depends where they want the site. Mostly how well the site lends itself to the construction of said plant. Let alone any wildlife, and water way impacts. It's a good thing really in light of past engineering disasters.

The work around use to be how the plant will economically impact neighboring communities. Jobs, taxes, growth etc.

An exception would be that our demographics are changing, people are moving out of the northeast into the south and Florida, so they need to ramp their green technology, some states tend to see it as some sort of threat, we have vast areas of desert that can be used for wind and solar power and it's blockaded.

Overall our population is dropping, babyboomers are retiring and passing, so we'll see but there will be some changes coming. One is that millennials for the most part don't want a home, they want a condo or apt. Home values are going to drop and home construction will drop considerably.

Take a look at Zillow, set your map for homes for sale and look at your surrounding towns, the amount of homes on the market for over a year is astounding, based on that most towns should not be processing any building permits, the market is saturated, if they don't stop building it's going to collapse.

Much of the country is served by transmission lines which have suffered decades of deferred maintenance, are overburdened, or both. New utility-scale RE generation frequently requires major infrastructure upgrades, which generally come with their own environmental challenges. Distributed generation is a big part of the answer, but most utilities see that as eating into 'their' business. The answer is probably rate decoupling, but the big corporate utilities find that even scarier.
https://www.ase.org/resources/utility-rate-decoupling-0

GreenGene said:

Actually they don't need new power plants anymore"

We might not need new 'baseload' plants but, ironically, the more renewables we have on the system the more fossil-fueled power plant capacity we need to install to back it up. That's because all of the wind and solar capacity that's coming on the market is intermittent (only generates power 20-30% of the time and can't be controlled by the Regional Transmission Operators). Grid operators need to ensure that have resources on the system that can start quickly when needed and that have the flexibility to ramp up and down to compensate. So, for every megawatt of wind we add to the system we need around 2 megawatts of new traditional power plants, like simple-cycle gas-fired combustion turbines, to back it up. So far, across the U.S. about 20 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity has retired and we've already started to see significant nuclear retirements. Renewables are great (although they're expensive) ... but we still need power plants to keep the lights on.

"power plants should be a back up and night use system."

It's actually more of the opposite. One of the challenges with integrating wind onto the system is that it produces a disproportionate amount of its power in the off-peak hours (i.e. at night). That actually creates a challenge because you have to turn off or ramp down power plants that would typically run overnight, and then you have to make sure you have what you need to meet daily peak loads.

FYI: building a new power plant these days typically has a 3- to 4-year development cycle, depending on lots of different variables. There are obviously some places you can't build a new power plant today no matter what.