Rant: That "smart" thermostat nearly cost me a weekend of frozen pipes

Installed a new smart thermostat last Friday because I thought it would save me some cash on heating my shop. Woke up Saturday to find the place at 38 degrees because the app glitched and never kicked the heat on. Spent the whole weekend running space heaters and checking every pipe joint for cracks. Does anyone actually trust these cloud things for critical stuff, or am I just unlucky with tech?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_riley25d ago

Cloud stuff is fine for turning your lights on and off? Nah man, you're underselling it. If your dumb thermostat fails a relay or the battery dies, you're in the same boat, just with a different failure mode. A good smart thermostat with a local sensor backup and offline schedule would've kicked on just fine regardless of the app, you just got a lemon or didn't set up the failsafes.

laura_black3125d ago

Got a dumb programmable thermostat from the hardware store instead, the kind with a little screen and buttons. Set it to kick the heat on at 45 degrees and never looked back. Takes 5 minutes to program and I don't have to wonder if some server went down overnight. Cloud stuff is fine for turning your lights on and off, but for pipes in a freezing shop I want something that works when the internet doesn't. My neighbor's smart thermostat did the exact same thing to him last winter, luckily he caught it before anything burst.