When I was in Google Patent Litigation, I volunteered to work on Nest because it sounded cool. So I spent a couple days over there (they weren't on the Mountain View campus) and sat in on some deposition preps. They were being sued by a Texas company called Allure, which was not a troll; they actually had a product that, at one time, you could have found on the Home Depot web site. I'm not going to reveal any legal secrets here, sorry.
I did a ton of research on this space, and dove into their source code. Literally all over the world, companies have been working on this problem for decades. How you know when someone is coming home so you can turn on the heat or A/C, or how the utility company can do it for you: all that is very, very well covered. I don't think there's anything fundamentally new about the Nest, and I don't have one in my house.
I actually stayed in someone's house that had two, so it's not as though it's completely foreign to me. I don't think that web-ifying your whole house is ever a good idea and I'm never going to do it. YMMV.
I wish they could solve the basic use case of "Let me set a temperature and thermostat keeps the house at that temperature." I tried several versions of Nest, and they all inevitably decided on their own that they were smarter than me and generated some weird schedule despite my never commanding them to operate on a schedule. I just want my thermostat to hold whatever temperature I set it at, until I set it at another temperature. This shouldn't take AI wizardry to achieve.
You need to turn off learning mode, otherwise it eventually overrides your schedule.
Personally I think it's significantly better than what was common ( in the UK ) before, but the tech is dime a dozen, and new houses should probably come with underfloor, and control per room, though most still don't.
I had Hive before and prefer that; being able to boost the heating to a certain temperature for 30/60/120 mins is a common use case for me that Nest doesn't do.
> I just want my thermostat to hold whatever temperature I set it at, until I set it at another temperature.
If it only takes one of heating or cooling to do this, not both, a standard "dumb" thermostat can of course do this just fine. Just set it to "cool" or "heat" mode and set a temperature. But of course you will need to change modes as the season changes (unless you live somewhere where only one mode is ever needed).
If you want to not have to change modes when the season changes, it gets more complicated, because the simple control system in the standard thermostat is too dumb for that. For example, suppose you set your temperature to 75. The actual temperature rises to 76, above the setpoint, so your A/C comes on. It cools the house to 74 and then the thermostat shuts it off (you have to have some buffer so the A/C doesn't come on again almost immediately). Now the temperature is below the setpoint, so your heat comes on. It heats the house to 76 and then shuts off. Now the temperature is above the setpoint... You can see what's going on.
From a pure design perspective, the right way to solve this problem is an outside temperature sensor (and probably a sun sensor as well since sunlight is a significant heat input to your house), so the system can predict what will happen when both cooling and heating are off. Given reliable sensors, the control algorithm is fairly simple (automatic climate control systems in cars already do it). I have never seen this in a house, though. I'm not sure why.
This is solved in thermostats with hysteresis and even many DIY or close to it solutions like esphome[0] implement it. I know on my Nest when heat and cool mode is on the set heat and cool temperatures have to be two degrees away from one another, which is fine with me because for whatever reasons 67 in the summer feels great but I want close to 69/70/71 in the winter.
The linked esphome docs are actually great whether you care about esphome or not - they explain all of this very well and you can tell from the configuration values and samples what kind of logic goes into all of this.
I really wish I could have my thermostat's set point use "heat index" (a straightforward function of temperature and humidity) instead of just temperature.
I am perfectly comfortable (and therefore want my system to turn off) after my AC has been running long enough to drop the humidity a bit, even if the temp has only dropped a fraction of a degree. As humid air leaks in, I want the AC back on even if the temp has barely increased a degree. Basically the heat index in my house swings enough to change my comfort and therefore could be a useful trigger, even if the temperature doesn't swing nearly enough to be a useful trigger.
The Nest even has a humidity sensor, but it only gets used in very specific (hardly useful) situations.
I considered writing a Works With Nest app for this. Then that platform disappeared in favor of Works With Google, but I never found the time for either...
If you’re willing to spend the money, I’d recommend getting a ZigBee or z wave thermostat(or an EcoBee, as it has local control through HomeKit) and then you can combine the temperature readings with your own humidity/temperature sensors - as mentioned above, ESPHome/Home Assistant may be overkill, but would work great for this kind of setup
> I really wish I could have my thermostat's set point use "heat index" (a straightforward function of temperature and humidity) instead of just temperature.
You could try wrapping your thermostat in a wet sock.
I'm not sure my wife would love that, and I'm not sure how to keep it wet at all times (apply water of a known temperature??) but I am intrigued: how does it work? The temperature of the sock will somehow correlate with the heat index of the ambient air?
Actual web-bulb thermometers would either require manually adding water when you want to make a measurement, or have a large tank of water that gets continuously wicked onto a cloth which is wrapped around the thermometer. The general idea is that, if the surrounding air is dry, the water in the cloth will evaporate and cool the thermometer below the temperature of the air itself (the "dry-bulb temperate"). This is just the same evaporative cooling effect that makes sweating and swamp coolers work. If the surrounding air is very wet (humid), very little evaporate cooling will occur, and the wet-bulb temperature will be very close to the dry-bulb temperature.
I'm not sure how well a thermostat that only used the wet-bulb temperature would work. To actually calculate relative humidity, you would need at least a wet-bulb and dry-bulb measurement. But given that relative humidity in most places probably doesn't swing that wildly, I imagine that just finding a comfortable wet-bulb temperate for your thermostat might work okay in practice.
This is brilliant, thanks. I do see how additional calculations between wet and dry (or just a hygrometer, which the Nest does have already) would be ideal, but as you say, using just a wet-bulb does seem a bit better than using just a dry-bulb in terms of approaching my goal, even if it's not quite all the way there.
Rigging a wet sock (with constant wicking from a water source) onto my actual wall-mounted Nest Thermostat would never fly, as I said, but I have no qualms about doing this experiment with my Nest Temperature Sensor, being a small and relatively cheap thing that I can easily steal for a while...
According to a psychrometric chart [0] it looks like if the dry-bulb temperature stays locked at 70F, while the RH drops from 60% to 40%, the wet-bulb temperature will drop from 62F to 56F. Or if the dry-bulb temperature stays locked at 80F while the RH drops as before, the wet-bulb temperature will drop from 70F to 64F. That's linear enough for my purposes.
Therefore if my conventional (dry-bulb) set point is 75F in the summer, and I'm most comfortable around 50% RH combined with that 75F, then I'll try a set point of 63F with my Nest using the remote Sensor wrapped in wet cloth!
Apparently I also need continuous airflow over this wet-bulb thermometer. I wonder how much.
Humidity definitely plays a part in my preferences but where I live there are 100 degree temperature swings and interacting with the elements outside leads to (for me) more extremes inside.
When I get back from a run in August at near heatstroke levels I will almost never cool down if it's not set on the "chilly" side. Conversely, in winter when heatstroke is replaced with near frostbite I am chilled to the core and need much higher heat to ever warm up.
Surely a basic PID controller with reasonable tuning could mostly mitigate the problem you describe, which isn’t really a different problem than a thermostat that would attempt to turn the furnace on and off multiple times per second if the thermometer was fluctuating between 74 and 75 multiple times per second. Granted, tuning the PID controller implies loosening the “maintain the exact target temperature at all costs” spec.
> tuning the PID controller implies loosening the “maintain the exact target temperature at all costs” spec.
And if you loosen that spec, then, as others have already pointed out, just having two setpoints, a lower one for heating and a higher one for cooling, will be sufficient as long as the difference between them is large enough (probably 2 degrees or more would be enough for many use cases). That would be simpler than adding a PID controller.
You'd just set a low point and a high point far enough away from each other that the thermostat wouldn't cycle back and forth between heat and AC. You could also add a timeout so that the heat cannot turn on for at least two hours after the AC cycle just finished. During November, we always seem to get crazy temperature swings where we run the heat one day but need to run AC the next. I'd love a dumb thermostat that didn't require me to manually switch over to heat or AC mode.
> If it only takes one of heating or cooling to do this, not both, a standard "dumb" thermostat can of course do this just fine. Just set it to "cool" or "heat" mode and set a temperature. But of course you will need to change modes as the season changes (unless you live somewhere where only one mode is ever needed).
Why ? What would be so hard in detecting "every time I don't do anything temperature goes up therefore summer and I need to use AC" ?
> If you want to not have to change modes when the season changes, it gets more complicated, because the simple control system in the standard thermostat is too dumb for that. For example, suppose you set your temperature to 75. The actual temperature rises to 76, above the setpoint, so your A/C comes on. It cools the house to 74 and then the thermostat shuts it off (you have to have some buffer so the A/C doesn't come on again almost immediately). Now the temperature is below the setpoint, so your heat comes on. It heats the house to 76 and then shuts off. Now the temperature is above the setpoint... You can see what's going on.
All would it take is to put a gate "if I used cooling to correct temperature last time, don't use heating for few hours or until it drops to higher difference and vice versa". You're trying to portray it in way more complicated way that it is.
> From a pure design perspective, the right way to solve this problem is an outside temperature sensor (and probably a sun sensor as well since sunlight is a significant heat input to your house), so the system can predict what will happen when both cooling and heating are off. Given reliable sensors, the control algorithm is fairly simple (automatic climate control systems in cars already do it). I have never seen this in a house, though. I'm not sure why.
Too simplistic. Which side of house you monitor, is it in shade or does it show temperature when sun heats up the wall ? Which room is closest to "hot" wall/window?. It would be a lot of work for very little improvement
> If you want to not have to change modes when the season changes, it gets more complicated
There's an additional complication for multi-story houses that I didn't mention before. In multi-story houses, when you're cooling, you want most of the ducted airflow to be directed to the upstairs outlets, to take advantage of natural convection (cooler air sinks); similarly, when you're heating, you want most of the ducted airflow to be directed to the downstairs outlets (warmer air rises). That requires adjusting dampers in the ducts, usually just downstream of the output of your HVAC unit. Unless that adjustment can be automated (which would require automatically controlled motors on the dampers, something I haven't seen marketed, though again I'm not sure why), your airflow will be suboptimal for either heating or cooling if the system automatically switches between modes.
Switch controlled open/close dampers are common enough.
A typical suggested application is controlling the airflow to a room using a thermostat to open or close the damper, but they can be hooked up to anything with a switched output.
Can these dampers stop somewhere short of full open/close? Typically one wants full open for one season and mostly closed but not fully closed for the other.
Is it not possible to forecast temperature changes rather than installing a bunch of extra sensors? If the device knows its location and has an internet connection, it can examine the day's weather forecast, know where the sun will shine, and know how cloudy it will be.
Good point. I wonder if the temperature sensor in the thermostat would be able to help correct that error.
E.g., if the thermostat expected a temperature of 75 F at 12 PM but it was actually 78 F, then you know the house received a lot of sunlight and can correct accordingly.
The rate at which your house warms while the heat is on is an indirect measure of the effect of both the temperature of the outside of your walls and the amount of solar radiation coming through your windows.
As others have indirectly pointed out, for the range of circumstances a given house is going to encounter, the linearizing assumptions in a standard PID controller are probably sufficient. If tuned properly, the "differential" portion of the PID controller will shut down the heater earlier when it's warmer out and/or there's more solar energy coming through your windows.
I wonder if the quote is referring to balancing 2 systems. I don't have AC, but I use my heat to maintain a minimum acceptable temperature, not to maintain the temperature I find ideal. I don't want it to go a lot lower than the setting.
As a kid we had a very simple (mercury) thermostat which had two levers -- one for heating set-point & one for cooling set-point. I recall it working quite well.
Always thought the old mechanical bimetallic strip solution was particularly elegant.
In effect, two strips of metal were bonded together forming a coiled "spring." Because each metal had different coefficient of thermal expansion, the spring would expand or contract to different lengths depending on the temperature. Place the electrical contact at the temp where the heater or HVAC should turn on & bam.
No electronics at all, just a temperature-dependent mechanical switch.
they still exist, that's what cheapo thermostats still use. i've wired up a couple thermostat controlled extension cords over the past couple years for a dog house and chicken coop using them
they all inevitably decided on their own that they were smarter than me and generated some weird schedule despite my never commanding them to operate on a schedule.
Seems to be a Google habit. I regularly get "commute traffic reports" several hours before or after I leave home or the office. Of course there's absolutely no way to set the alert schedule yourself.
You think there’s nothing fundamentally new about the Nest, but it arguably changed the home smart thermostat industry and people love it. People loved it even before Google acquired them so you can’t even argue it’s because of cost or marketing.
They define do have something fundamentally new. I think it was exactly what was described in the video - easy installation, intuitive design, and right timing.
I think you are looking at only what's available in the Home Depot. Connecting to your HVAC system is "fundamentally" simple and lots of companies have done it.
"Home automation" is also not a new concept. X10 came out in 1975:
In the 1980s I spent several years defending Honeywell against some programmable thermostat patents filed in the late 1970s by one Burness C. Hall, who had aspirations to start a company. There was a ton of prior art out there. (The parties eventually settled.)
How often do you change your thermostat? On its own that statistic means about 3% of Americans have bought one, which, when you consider that it's more expensive than the traditional kind, you only really need one thermostat per household (maybe two or three if your house is extra fancy and has multiple zones), only a homeowner would consider the purchase, and thermostats are exceptionally long-lived devices that rarely actually need to be replaced, that's pretty good.
Property managers likely buy many more than one per property - it’s not likely that 3% of Americans decided to buy a Nest if you consider that apartment buildings would buy these in bulk
just look at the alternatives, they're horrible. The Google Nest thermostat has revolutionized the thermostat ecosystem in the same way that the iPhone revolutionized the cellphone industry.
I was getting quotes for some heating/cooling projects at home and, while discussing the control panels, I expected that Nest would be an option. I was surprised and found it comical when the salesperson claimed that the Nest control panel was not supported. This is an instant non-starter for me.
I've recently been wanting to change the three Nest (v3) thermostats in my house to something else. I'm looking for something that has a 1 degree (F not C) hysteresis, and can be controlled via WiFi, but not the cloud. (I don't like the idea of the government changing my temperature settings.) So far I haven't found anything, but I did find a few that allow local control when the cloud cannot be reached. It should be easy to put them in a separate guest network with no Internet gateway.
You might try something from Honeywell, which is the brand that most HVAC contractors use. The stock Trane and American Standard thermostats are also white labled Honeywell I believe. Nonetheless, they use a concept of "CPH" or cycles per hour tied in with some PID circuitry.
I go for longer run times and use a CPH of 2, so the thermostat tries to run for 15 minutes followed by 15 minutes off. In mild weather, it is more like 8 minutes on and 20 minutes off. I was skeptical about replacing my Nest with it, but I think it holds the temp more comfortably. Plus you can add wired and/or wireless sensors to various rooms in you house so everything stays more balanced.
> I'm looking for something that has a 1 degree (F not C) hysteresis...
Maybe not what you're looking for, but if you're just looking for a 1F degree lag in temperature change, you can also try just increasing the heat stored in your house's thermal mass. For example you could add something with high thermal mass (i.e. concrete) to the place you want higher thermal lag, and position it so it soaks up a lot of solar radiation. That'll buffer out your temperatures.
Thanks for that. Probably not practical for my needs. The Nest "Smart Learning Thermostat" tries to save energy a little too aggressively for my taste. I think another brand would do better. In addition to the "Lag" being too wide, it also seems to have a low sample rate for the temperature. My master bedroom will often go to five degrees above the setpoint because the Nest will keep the heat on thinking it's still cold. It's really complete garbage. (I've measured the temperature separately to confirm it's a Nest issue.)
Often turning on and off heaters (and more especially heat pumps) is harder on them than keeping them running a bit longer? Were you sure it was actually wrong about the temperature and not just intent on not having to cycle on and off a ton?
Well I don't know for sure, but the displayed temperature on the Nest would only update every few minutes. My independent measurement showed that it had reached the setpoint about two minutes before the Nest updated its reading (to show that it had overshot by several degrees). It's possible that the Nest is trying to reduce the cycling, but if that were the case, it shouldn't affect the displayed temperature.
the HVAC people call this Swing but Ecobee calls it 'threshold' and you can have as little as 0.5F of it. It's gonna cause more wear on the equipment though, and you gotta keep in mind that furnaces will ignore the thermo until a cooloff period has elapsed anyways.
For local WiFi, anything that's HomeKit compatible should work, but you'll likely lose out on something by restricting its access to the internet. For example, my Ecobee can be controlled locally via Home Assistant (using Home Assistant's HomeKit Controller), but it gets outside weather (used to figure out how early to turn the heat up to meet the schedule requirements) via some cloud service. Plus the HomeKit interface, at least when used in Home Assistant, is not as full-featured as the native (cloud-based) one.
If you desire 100% local control, it's worth looking at Zigbee and Z-Wave thermostats. Using Home Assistant can give you full local control without requiring a vendor's hub and app.
Yes! American Radio is what I'm leaning toward. I wanted a CT-80, but they have discontinued it (confirmed with them). I guess I'll go with the CT-50. The CT-80 had a nice feature in that it could support both Z-wave and WiFi, but apparently they had too many bugs and pulled it.
I think you'd need more than a thermostat to keep the temperature stable. This is the main selling point of variable speed systems and I'd imagine cheaper brands would have been selling "Stability of a variable speed for the price of a single stage!" packages with such a thermostat if it existed.
"Up to this point, installation was so complicated that it required a professional. "
Not even remotely true. The Nest wires the same as any other thermostat. Prior to the Nest there were plenty of inexpensive to high end devices with simple instructions included .
It wasn't hard, but it did ask a lot of questions that your average homeowner may or may not know. Do you have a humidifier on your furnace? A dehumidifier? How is the emergency heat configured? Is the fan DC or AC coupled? Questions like that. I self installed mine no problem, but I can see how people could be intimidated.
For what it is worth, I think the Nest has been generally worse than a dumber programmable thermostat, especially after Google took it over. The App only allows a single phone to be connected now which is a problem when both me and my wife want access. There is also no way to run the fans without switching it on heat or cool. The fans can also only run for a maximum of 12 hours before it needs manual intervention to restart. All of which are a problem if you have say a pellet stove providing heat in one part of the house and want to circulate the air to the rest of the house using the furnace fan. On my old thermostat I could even switch the fan to low speed mode when the heat pump wasn't running, which is something the Nest seems to have no concept of. There is an API, but it's all Googlefied and requires a subscription and kind of assumes you're already a full stack Google developer.
My wife has an iPhone and is able to use her Nest app at the same time I'm able to.
But we generally don't use the Nest app much any more, except to use its horrible scheduling interface (horrible because Google's UI for changing the schedule is way too finicky and non-standard).
Everyone in the house uses HomeBridge which has a fantastic Nest plugin. The plugin uses the API you mention. Much faster than opening the Nest app. Less than 1 second to update the temperature and hear the furnace kick on via the iPhone's control center.
Back when we first did the switch I couldn't find a way to do this, but apparently now it is possible by adding the other person as a family member in the Google Home app, although we have not actually been able to make this work yet. Supposedly it is easier on Android phones, but we have iPhones. The old Nest app was much less confusing.
It seemed crazy to me from day-1 they didn't have a "I want to always run my furnace fan" option since it is such a common requirement. And it seems to not exist to this date so when I want to turn my furnace off and circulate air I have to set the temperature to some goofy setting so the fan will run.
The last time I used the Google Home app I couldn't set my fan to continuous but the Nest app still allowed it. Seems wild to me that they don't have this basic stuff nailed down.
I have an Ecobee which I mildly hate and was considering a nest. You’ve managed to make me rethink it.
My ecobee has connectivity issues over HomeKit and the API requires the cloud (which is annoying for something like home assistant). I’m also convinced it’s intentionally dumb in its scheduling. I always felt I needed to manually update the settings and could never trust it to just maintain temperature.
It does let you manually control the fans and stuff, which is a feature I really liked when I had air filtration built into the HVAC. I would miss it on a Nest I guess. Edit: it seems others are contradicting this claim.
That said, the API doesn’t require a subscription, just a one-time $5 fee (which is likely less than server and ops costs to run the API). And the API seems like a pretty standard rest api based on the docs. Similarly, the ecobee api seems roughly as complicated. The only difference is auth with a Google account or ecobee API key.
I also have an ecobee and find it extremely frustrating how hard it is to get a complete dump of _my_ data from their servers. You have to manually download a bunch of files and piece them together (which would be fine if they documented it some way), but even their web UI to see charts wont let you see very much at a time.
I have a couple Nests and a couple Ecobees. In summary, they're both frustrating. An HVAC contractor told me (and it rings true), the ecobee is like hvac peeps figured out the interwebs, and the nest is like internet peeps figured out HVAC.
I don't think the Nest has any options for local control though, so HomeKit on the Ecobee seems like a win, but I got distracted before I figured out how to do what I want with HomeAssistant.
The Nest does better fan scheduling IMHO, although neither one does anything smart with sequencing multiple units, which is really frustrating.
I went with Venstar because there is an on device API that can be switched on. I don't use it (a schedule and their cloud app do what I need), but I like knowing it is there.
They seem to have been hit pretty hard by supply chain problems too (most online prices 2x or more than what they were).
I had actually bought a Nest but never installed it. I sold it on eBay when it was announced that Google was requiring people to use Google accounts with Nest products.
What I installed instead (myself) was an Ecobee 3+. I've been very happy with it. I have it set to run the fans 10 minutes of every hour to move air around a little bit. With a previous dumb thermostat, using the fan more often caused a noticeable spike in the electric bill. We live in a 1914 house with multiple levels and minimal air returns so there tends to be variations in temperature (top hot in summer, cool in winter; basement coldest in summer even with vents closed but exposed pipes are full of cold air, etc.) that aren't easily fixable.
Ecobee has started selling security cameras, which I haven't looked into. I really do like the idea of having a best-of-breed thermostat and I hope that Amazon doesn't buy them. I'm a little surprised that they haven't.
> The App only allows a single phone to be connected now which is a problem when both me and my wife want access.
Polar opposite of our experience. We have two Nest thermostats in our home and both my wife and I can connect to and manage each one with our respective phones.
> There is also no way to run the fans without switching it on heat or cool.
Also not our experience. We can run the fans independently of heat/cool. That could be a consequence of your HVAC system opposed to the Nest itself.
Is one of you (saidmasoud vs. jandrese) using the Nest app and the other using Google Home maybe? I tried out a Nest thermostat briefly and found it confusing that there were two different apps with different featuresets.
I originally had the Nest app where we could both access it using our phones, but my wife clicked "yes" when the Nest asked her to "upgrade" to the Google interface and there's no way to switch it back.
Sounds like this piece was written by someone who doesn't really know the space and follows along with Nest marketing.
> These leaf springs allowed for the self-configuration of the unit, saving the time and troubleshooting that would have prevented a regular person from tackling installation. And it worked! It was so simple that grandparents were making YouTube videos of themselves installing it.
Did Nest sponsor this article? It's a Google property and they managed to reference another Google property.
I saw a lot of presentations in engineering school that were effectively distilled marketing copy, wouldn’t surprise me if some people never outgrew that behavior.
My parents had a nest and I will say that there are failure modes that are not found on a normal standalone thermostat.
I remember my very cold mother calling me because there was a message about a wifi problem and she didn't know she could somehow bypass it and turn up the thermostat.
And funny enough, it probably caused more issues because installations without a common wire would trigger short-cycling of the HVAC as it tried to draw power from the furnace wires.
Can you elaborate? I installed my nest years ago without a common wire and it…seems to work but I have horrendous gas bills and the system cycles often, but I attributed both of these to the poor insulation of my 120 year old building.
If you have no common wire you have no return path for current so that you can power a consuming device. Original thermostats were entirely electromechanical switches with no power requirements.
The Nest gets around the common requirement by cheating - it charges a rechargeable battery by leeching current into the signal wires. If the endpoint is a coil on a relay or solenoid, this usually causes no problem, it often causes no problem if the relay is solid state, but on some equipment that return current will switch on the equipment when it tries to charge its own battery. In other cases it won’t charge at all. Usually it’s quite clear if this happening as the equipment will be cycling even with no call for heat.
Yes, what happens is that the power draw is large enough to cause the heater to see that as a demand for heat. There are little converters for this that ensure that the thermostat has enough power to run and the heater only sees a potential free switch when there is actual demand. Google 'Nest Thermostat C-wire adapter'. This is especially convenient if you'd otherwise have to run new wiring which can require a lot of work.
I had a frequent cycling problem and the issue was that the air conditioning A-frame in my furnace was plugged.. it was causing a constriction that caused the natural gas furnace to overheat when it went into the second stage and cycle.
(I thought it was a shortage of return but once I eliminated that I cut open the furnace and found the problem)
An interesting element to this is knowledge and ability to do work on ones own house. In the US it used to be required that men take shop class. It shifted into being offered for both boys and girls for many years. Then it was phased out by in large.
Those who took hands on classes like these could read the simple instructions with a traditional thermostat or even a Nest and easily install it. They were comfortable with a handful of low voltage wires, some screws, and a simple diagram.
I wonder how the lack of hands on practical teaching in schools has impacted folks comfort with handling these fairly simple tasks.
I guess a big problem is that people who were not taught how to use tools usually don't have them and don't know how to use them so they cannot do much even if they watched YouTube. For example, my wife declines to use any power tools (other than drill, for some reason) so she prunes trees with a hand saw, even though I have a power saw, which could have done the job 100 times faster.
This would be a great study/survey to do! What percentage of how to watchers go on to practice the skills? How often? How well?
Many people in my previous social circle would regularly take on personal car repair, plumbing, electrical, pest control, etc jobs based on youtube. Others including myself upskilled or got entirely new jobs with no experience beyond a youtube "apprenticeship".
I live in a high rise, and we've had several people do their own plumbing and do many thousands of dollars in damage. So I try to discourage people who don't have any idea what they're doing from trying to follow a youtube video.
I used to live in a high rise, and it’s a different experience than someone in their own home. Usually the high rise has their own on staff maintenance crew so there’s no need to do your own plumbing.
Also in a normal home, the only things you can damage are yours. Also the repairs are probably cheaper in a normal house.
Depending on your state and local town/city codes, you can do a lot of damage by (a) not abiding by code and (b) being unlicensed, even for work in your own home.
I struggled installing my nest, despite having electronics and wiring experience, because of the age old documentation problem. My wires at the wall are both mislabeled and miscolored, and the thermostat controller at the boiler doesn't have a diagram.
One model of Nest works fine with two wires, but the cheaper and assumed less power hungry (less features) Nest does not.
But back to your point, I think we should be teaching much more hands-on and life-oriented tasks at the high-school level.
When I was in school (20+ years ago, Poland), we had a class with variety of just that, anything from "how to sow a mitten", thru model kits to making sandwiches
As 'scrolljacking' goes, this is excellent, I actually really like the design - showing multiple angles/layers without taking up so much vertical space with multiple images, since it changes (instead of moving) as you scroll.
That is because it does not actually take control away from you with any sticky/magnetic spots. A lot of scrolljack presentations have a really laggy pagination that is somehow about as precise as fast rewinding your DVR was back in 2011.
Yes, that's a sure way to make it bad. I don't think it's given (as a sibling comment to yours suggests) that simply not doing that is sufficient for any other scroll manipulation being fine though.
The intention's always good, I think, it just rarely is as nice as the author felt it would be.
big difference between scrolljacking and just using the scroll position for something. This is a legit good use of it, because the actual scroll behaves exactly the same as any other page.
The wiring base is the coolest part of this IMO. In the video Tony talks about how the leaf spring connectors physically reconfigure the circuitry when a wire is plugged in.
They don't really reconfigure the circuitry, they are themselves reconfigured when a wire is plugged in. What he's talking about is similar to technology that's been in 1/8" jacks for years and years: plug detection.
And in almost every headphone connector since the 60's or so... That's how it used to switch the sound from the speakers to the headphones when you just plugged them in.
Well, that depends. Prior to finish planing they are exactly 2" x 4", and that's where they get their name. You can buy these in bulk straight from the sawmill or lumber wholesalers. But most lumber is sold neatly planed and then the outside dimensions change.
As noted in my comment, never noticed 1/8" before (and am American, so no particular metric bias...). All e.g. MP3 players historically called them 3.5mm jacks, is what my brain is telling me.
Some googling:
3.5mm jack - 49million results
1/8" jack - 63 million results
3.5mm stereo jack - 19 million results
1/8 stereo jack 5.9 million
1/8" stereo jack - 5.47 million
Evidently, it's a common term! Guess once I decided what I was calling them, that's what I searched for, and what I skimmed technical details for.
Right .223 Remington has the same bullet diameter of .222 Remington; namely 0.224 inches.
Metric dimensions of rifle-cartridges, however, seem to reliably be the land-diameter: 5.56x45, 7.62x51, and 7.62x39 all have eponymous land-diameters.
Ok, I went into a on-off rabbithole this afternoon due to mistaking your comment as a claim that the 3.5mm jack had microphone as a standard in the 60's. Findings:
* Regarding "Jack" In February 1884, C. E. Scribner was issued US Patent 293,198 for a "jack-knife" connector that is the origin of calling the receptacle a "jack". . . . The current form of the switchboard-plug was patented prior to 1902 . . . It is today still used on mainstream musical equipment, especially on electric guitars. [0]
* 3.5mm connector There are at least four different varieties of 3.5 mm plugs and jacks, each with its own purpose and application. . . . TS, TRS, TRRS . . . The letter T stands for Tip, and the R stands for Ring (like a ring on your finger, not like ringing the telephone). . . . a TS plug has two conductors, a TRS has three, a TRRS has four, and a TRRRS has five. . . A TRRS or Tip Ring Ring Sleeve plug has four conductors and is very popular with 3.5mm, and can be used with stereo unbalanced audio with video… or with stereo unbalanced audio plus a mono microphone conductor. . . . Unfortunately, there are two conflicting standards associated with its use with stereo unbalanced audio plus a mono microphone conductor. [1]
No, the older ones are much larger, and still in common use in audio studios and for musical instrument connections. They are exactly the same form factor as the ones used for patching and routing phone calls on the old switchboards, as your comment lists, and the addition of switches behind and next to the plug to be operated by the insertion of the plug is a pretty old practice as well. I've never seen a TRRS or a TRRRS in 6.3 mm but in 3.5 TRRS is pretty commonly used for the headset connector (and, just like in the days of old, when you plug it in the sense switch will disable the speaker and mic on the phone and route the signals through the plug instead).
I still have an old phone (not a smartphone) that uses a 3.5 mm TRRS jack for that purpose and I would not trade it for any Bluetooth gizmo, it works perfectly, you just need to be a bit careful with the cable. But no stress about the earpods running out of juice.
The first time I saw a 3.5 mm was in my 1975 six transistor Japanese little 9V AM radio. It came with one of those weird pinkish earpieces.
Can you recommend a 3.5mm TRRS headset that doesn't suck? All the ones I've tried have a terrible in-line mic that I think is supposed to work as a Lavalier, but in fact makes it sound like I have several layers of cloth over my mouth.
I use an original Nokia headset (the old ones from before the crash-and-burn), it works very well. Finding them could be an issue though, I got mine from the junk bin at one of those phone repair places, it was brand new and still bagged.
Ah yes, you are, I'm in Europe. The one I have is called the HS-45, the multimedia controls don't work with my current phone but the basics (mic, headphones, break connection and volume) do.
Microphone/headphone combos with a single TRRS jack are fundamentally going to be poor, because the microphone line isn’t balanced. Microphone signals are very low level and pickup noise easily.
You might get better luck with mic-in-cable jacks, my headphones came with one (TRS plug on headphone side, TRRS on other) but they can be bough as separate items.
Mine was pretty non-trivial to install (some weird heat pump system). The standard installation instructions didn’t apply and told me to get on the chat with google.
The chat experience was really shockingly good, and I expected it to be pretty bad. There was no wait, the person was knowledgeable, and at the end they emailed me a picture of how to do the wiring.
I think whatever Tesla is doing with their heatpumps can be readily applied to residential.. it works pretty well. it'd direct heat from either outside or cabin to heat the battery or shift heat from battery to cabin depending on some sort of built in scenario, it all works rather well... at the end of the day people just want the indoor to be within band of hospitable temperature and relative humidity...
The only Nest I've used was at a vacation rental we stayed in once a year for a number of years. That thermostat was horribly confused by the new guests with different behavior every few days. And after a years' absence I always had to search the Internet for instructions on how to use its "intuitive" UI.
Nah, that’s just how it works. I had my own Nest that no one else messed with and it was still a constant battle. It was always trending towards power savings and making the house uncomfortable. The only useful part of it is that you can remote control it from your phone.
We have started replacing our Nests with the dumber and cheaper (and better looking) ones because the more expensive Nests' UI locks up constantly and we turn off all "smart" features.
Sort of off topic, please let me know if this isn’t allowed, but does anyone have any strong opinions on heat pumps vs gas furnaces? And on single stage AC vs dual stage vs variable stage?
If I ever redid the AC in my house, I would go with a mini-split system so that each individual area could be precisely controlled, and thus it would be more efficient.
I just checked my Amazon order history and I bought my Nest thermostat 10 years ago this past October.
I’ve got some beef with the original design, for example there’s no good reason why they don’t support a local thermocouple versus Wi-Fi local weather, but overall I have to say it’s been a welcome addition to that household. The installation was painless and with a propane furnace I’m certain that it has saved me thousands of dollars over the years.
I'm surprised the 3rd gen still has so much discrete circuity. Miniaturization and consolidation of components into a few larger chips seems to have worked elsewhere.
I have one - the clever features are switched off because they didn't work (didn't heat up the place to the temperature I wanted). I just have a set schedule instead. It has a nice phone based UI and looks very classy. The thermostat can start to read too high (possibly due to the device itself generating heat) so it can get colder than the temperature that you've set.
I think that often depends on where you live. The Nest makes no sense where I live, so basically no one knows about it. Our homes simple aren't wire/configured in a way that a Nest Thermostat is of any use.
I did a ton of research on this space, and dove into their source code. Literally all over the world, companies have been working on this problem for decades. How you know when someone is coming home so you can turn on the heat or A/C, or how the utility company can do it for you: all that is very, very well covered. I don't think there's anything fundamentally new about the Nest, and I don't have one in my house.
I actually stayed in someone's house that had two, so it's not as though it's completely foreign to me. I don't think that web-ifying your whole house is ever a good idea and I'm never going to do it. YMMV.