Smart Nest thermostats and Red light cameras

Today. Smart wifi nest thermostats and red light cameras.

If you sell red light cameras, you charge something like $60,000 for setting up cameras, a website and a system that takes photos of intersections and issues citations for vehicles in the photo graphs. The system generates $1000 per week. That revenue pays for the system in 14 months.

Programmable thermostats save energy by reducing the space temperature. The assumption is that tour current thermostat is the brass circle, Honeywell T87. It is set to a single temperature that is never insufficient. For heating, a temperature that you never feel cold. That temperature is something like 68 to 72.

The savings comes from reducing that temperature by 5 to 8 degrees for two 8 hour periods per day. The testing of this yielded 12 to 18% savings.

These thermostats started as weird contraptions, knobs, sliders switches. Often they had 2 thermostats and a clock that changed which one was active. The oldest one I have seen would be about 100 years old now and was powered by compressed air.

In the 1980s we got the Casio calculator watch and we got thermostats with a digital clock and buttons. The 1990s gave us the weekly schedule, hold button, back lighted display, and a few interesting occupancy related controls based on movement or light.

If your thermostat is more than 10 years old, a new 40 to 60 dollar thermostat will probably be an upgrade. Options that I paid for 15 years ago are now in the setup options. 1 day, 5-2, or 7 day independent. Change set point at time or compensated so the temperature is achieved at the time.

The thermostat has one issue, setting the times and the temperatures. Especially if you have different schedules for every day of the week. Cycling though every setting of that week is about 4 x 4 x 7 or 112 button presses with another 28 for each degree of temperature you want to change. Any new thermostat takes a little time to adjust to the temperature set point. I bought a new house ant it took about 1 month k to set the heating, and 1 month to set the cooling.

Smart, intelligent, wifi enabled thermostats have a lot of cool options. Apps to control and adjust it from you phone, voice assistant, computer, or the thermostat. This alone can have benefits, though mostly it would be to turn up the heat from the couch, car or bed.

The nest was a different concept. First, old energy guys didn’t like it because you were supposed to touch it. Playing with thermostat is like playing with mint in the box collectables, do so to your own financial detriment. But these learning thermostats are supposed to find the lowest acceptable temperature. The set back if your phone leaves the house, it doesn’t sense movement or any other tricks your particular generation of smart-stat has. Then it will also use your corrections to the temperature to make the time temperature schedule that is so difficult to hone.

Few specifics before the final turn. Smart thermostat is still a thermostat. The location matters for interface, accurately responding to space temp, and near the action for correction and sensing you. The wifi thermostats can require power from a secondary source, usb or 24V. This may require an electrician or tech to add a wire to the thermostat. They typically have a overbite phone price between $100 and $300. It might involve some drywall touch up,  or, repainting for the wiring or replacing an existing thermostat that has been there for many years.

Also, if you have a bizarre home or heating system, I might not use an intelligent thermostat. If your house is super insulated or passive house standard. If your heating system is overly complicated, multi stage, multi fuel, and any bizzare brand matching controls.

The turn. The novel town had no infractions. The system did not pay for itself.  And the Nest thermostat may not pay for itself either. If you kept your house at 55, if you had a good programmable thermostat, or the new one is going to cause the temp to creep up. The cool new toy might be that, and not an energy or cost saving device.