On 09/15/2016 07:54 AM, tony duell wrote: > My thermostat contains about 2 dozen parts, even if you count every > nut , bolt, and washer. It does the job and is not hard to understand > or repair if/when it needs it. > > Quite why I would want a thermostat with presumably several million > components, running a multi-user operating system is, to be honest, > beyond me.
(I don't mean to divert the thread stream; this is an explanation of why an IOT-connected unit wound up on my wall) It was a necessary (according to the installer) move as part of having my home's 24-year-old heat pump replaced. In that period, the US EPA has been in the picture very actively. The old R-22 refrigerant units are becoming a liability with ever-stricter restrictions on replacement refrigerant and technical certifications for handling. By 2020, dealing with them will be nigh impossible. The nature of failure of my own system was such that repairing it was impractical. The thermostat cable for the old one was the standard 7 wire hookup; the new system uses (IIRC) 9. Given the expense of pushing a new cable through finished walls and ceilings, a simple cable upgrade would have been prohibitively expensive. So a new 2-wire thermostat was employed instead (at the installer's expense) and it has WiFi, Web and Bluetooth connectivity as part of the package. Fortunately, all of the aforementioned can be disabled via appropriate selection on the (color) LCD graphic touchscreen. The previous heat pump started out with the usual mercury-switch bimetal thermostat--at some point I upgraded to a programmable electronic one and hoped to keep it. As an aside, I just about fainted when I saw the controller electronics for the heat pump. Boards full of SMT; lots of it. On the other hand, the unit does boast a lot of efficiency improvements and is very quiet. What with EPA regulations now, the old "builder's model" no-frills-barely-does-the-job units seem to be a thing of the past. --Chuck
