I can’t think of many companies I would be less willing to buy home automation tech from than Google.
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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TBF, over 15 in Germany I've only seen a couple of actual thermostats. The vast, vast majority use a valve on each radiator. There are electronic solutions for the radiators, but sticking a Nest on the wall is going to do nothing for someone unless the customer installs specific hardware that the Nest would have to support
Those "valves" are, in fact, thermostats. They use thermal expansion of wax to open/close the valve to get to their set temperature. Settings 1-5 are 12, 16, 20, 24, 28 Celsius.
Yes, but they are not electronic and they don't reflect the temperature of the room like a wall thermostat does.
They don't (usually) display the temperature but they definitely sense it, and react to it. When the sensed temperature is at or higher than the set temperature, the valve will be closed, if it's lower it will be opened. Mere valves can't do that.
That's what a thermostat is: A negative feedback control system regulating sensed temperature towards a setpoint, and keeping it there. They're simple, inexpensive, reliable. Yes having the temperature sensor right next to the radiator isn't ideal but unless the room is quite large that's not an issue. Also with large rooms you probably have more than one heater and thus thermostat. And you could, in principle, put the thermostat far from the heater but I've never seen that done.
That's what I meant, the device is directly next to the heat source. It's never going to be accurate. And you can tell in the way people use the two systems. In Germany, people don't think about our check the temperature of the room or what the dial is set at, just, I'm cold, turn it up. In the US, the room is set to a specific temperature and just left alone except for day/night, home/away.
But, anyway, the comment was about how they wouldn't work for Nest, and that's true. You'd need a third party solution. It would be hard to sell these and then say, hey, by the way, you can't use it until you go out and buy something from someone else and install it
In the Netherlands, almost all houses have a thermostat. I don't know anyone that doesn't have one
I haven't been in many private houses in the Netherlands. I could only speak to Germany
So Google is telling us, they cant make a product if there are standards or requirements for what they are doing?
That means whatever US customers are buying, theres something in it, that does something illegal in EU.
This is why companies want US citizens to believe that EU is a bureaucratic hellscape (I mean there's also the forces that want to tell them it's communist for the same reason I guess)
Aah, the US.
The only place in the world where everyone knows the word 'communism' and nobody knows what it is.
Russia and China are not communism btw. :shocked Pikachu:
"Sorry, we can't adjust the thermostat until we have audio evidence of whether the family is going through a divorce"
I would have been surprised if this weren't the case
They call the product line 'Nest', because it's where their data servers is getting nutrition from.
I built a thermostat with a Wemos D1 mini and a relay module about 10 years ago.
Still use it today integrated with home assistant and can turn the heat on and off while away from home. It's been reused across three boilers, no parts replaced.
It was a really fun project and I had virtually no experience with Arduino when starting out. Would recommend it to anyone.
Heating systems in Europe are unique and have a variety of hardware and software requirements that make it challenging to build for the diverse set of homes
AKA. Europe probably has hardware and software requirements that make it so Google can't
A) Harvest your data; and/or B) Must be able to function without an internet connection (aka. they can't kill it)
European heating system:
TBF, I have those AND a programmable thermostat.
Imagine a thermostat needing an internet connection.
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.
It's not a hard requirement, but it's sure nice to leave the house at a low but non-freezing temp in winter while you're away for a few days, then use a web app to bring the temperature back up right before you come back in.
Being on the home LAN, though, is a requirement for me. That is extremely convenient.
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!
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.
Yeah, the zwave/zigbee options tend to be more barebones on the local display, so I very carfeully looked at the wifi options to find the best of both worlds.
Of course my opengarage is wifi based too, but that's fine.
Nothing against wifi, just it's so difficult to tell a 'local wifi' from a 'cloud wifi' device.
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.
Actually...
Good.
Anyone in Europe looking for an alternative might want to check out Tado
Netatmo as well if I recall
Or Drayton Wiser
We have a Tado system, not the current generation but the one before. It was easy to self-install and configure and has never given us any trouble. There are a couple UX quirks, such as not having a confirm dialog after you touch the Shut Down All or Max Out the Heat buttons, but overall it's one of the rare electronic gadgets that has led to no buyer's remorse.
Do they integrate with Home Assistant?
Yes
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tado
You can also control locally (i.e. without internet connection) using homekit integration.
Been working fine for me for a couple of years.
Aren't there a lot of split units in Europe? Here I just needed an IR blaster to make my AC(s) "smart".
AC is not common in Europe. There's a variety of heating systems: gas boilers, direct electric heating, district heating, etc. Heat pumps are a growing market though.