We could even go more basic... safe defaults when disconnected should be mandatory.
For example, if I pull the thermostat off my wall, the furnace should drop into a fallback mode that keeps the heat above freezing (I'm in Canada where this is a concern.)
I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
A standard furnace and thermostat won’t even know if you pull the thermostat off the wall, much less have any way to handle it beyond “full blast heat 24/7”
More challenging: you expected the sprinkler setup to do the opposite. Instead of following its last-known plan (the schedule) it should stop doing anything (possibly killing the plants it’s watering)
Good off-line only mode in a reasonable plan for what to do without the Internet makes a lot of sense, but at some point, there’s a control system and you need to change it (or even just have one in the thermostat example)
> there’s a control system and you need to change it
Why does the control system have to live on someone else's server in "the cloud"?
There's no reason for smart home devices to require an internet connection to the producer's service. Companies could just as easily put compute on device, or sell some sort of "bridge" (aka a home server appliance) that runs the compute and the accessories connect to.
Fully offline, local network only.
Save the online stuff just for analytics or other value-add features, but core functionality shouldn't require a web service.
The only reason it's 100% internet connection required all the time is to sell subscriptions, aka consumer hostile behavior.
In both cases the control system is physically in your house. It sounds like the sprinkler system did work completely offline (though it's not clear if you'd actually be able to change anything without internet - that would be a problem if not), they didn't set up an account so the system was in "offline" mode and dutifully ran the sprinklers on the last known schedule.
For the thermostat the example was physically removing the control system, which is typically not connected to the furnace through any sort of internet connection, and expecting the furnace to know what to do.
The way I see it is... I'd rather my lawn be yellow, plants dead, than a burst pipe underground causing significantly more expensive remediation.
I agree it's not likely (especially if the system is running as-scheduled), but it was a surprise is all. What if I didn't set up the service at all, and it dropped below 0 C? I would be in for a nasty surprise in the spring.
Yeah both my furnace and sprinklers require a local controller to do anything, and that just maintains my settings. Idk what an internet connected version of those things looks like, but would hope it's the same except local settings can be read/written remotely.
> Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
I'd have expected (and strongly prefer) that it keep running with whatever the last settings were. That's almost surely going to be healthier for the lawn, ornamentals, and vegetable garden than shutting off.
I would wager that most people with automated irrigation systems prefer plant growth/protection over water conservation.
I'm not sure how you'd program a furnace to run to keep a house above freezing without any temperature feedback from the house. You could potentially run it until the area immediately surrounding the furnace itself was above freezing, but that would be nowhere near enough in some cases and way, way more than needed in other cases. You might able to use outdoor weather compensation (easier/more effective/comfortable with hydronic heat distribution than with ducted air heating) if programmed correctly, but my experience is that most are either not installed or are configured to be far too hot [because call-backs are expensive and paid by the HVAC company usually].
The connection between the furnace and the thermostat probably shouldn't go through the internet.
So it's perfectly reasonable for the furnace to turn off when it is disconnected, because disconnection would be a very strong signal for an error state instead of regular intermittent network/service issues.
They're not, "smart" thermostats have a WiFi frontend that allows devices to connect to it from the network but the thermostat itself is hardwired to the furnace/HVAC.
You could in theory put one next to the furnace in your machine closet but that would be dumb and expensive
Certainly, the standard smart thermostat set up is that your ecobee is connected to the Internet, but controls the furnace using good old-fashioned signal wires
Which is only extremely tangentially related to "if I pull my thermostat off the wall"
The overwhelmingly most common connection between a thermostat and furnace is a contact closure when calling for heat, with no ability to differentiate between “thermostat is present but not calling for heat” and “thermostat is not present” as both present as "these T-T contacts are not closed/shorted together".
the connection to my thermostat is via a cable, if I pull it out of the wall it won't be connected to anything at all. the whole furnace is not connected to anything but mains power.
yeah the default in this case has to be “off” to prevent damage from running blind, on that note other things in the house should be certified to be able to handle being frozen perhaps
Typically when people are concerned about their house freezing in cold climates, they are primarily worried about water freezing, expanding, and cracking pipes and fittings.
It is extraordinarily hard to design something that can withstand that pressure and still be fit for purpose. The item needs to be able to withstand pressures in excess of ~10k psi for -10c, with the pressure rising as temp decreases.
The standard solution for people that need to winterize a building that will not be heated is to drain as much water as possible from the lines, and then fill them with a liquid with a lower freezing point.
> I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
Not running when disconnected is definitely a safe default, but I'm not sure it's automatically desired. If I found out I couldn't use my sprinkler system unless it was connected to the internet, I'd be annoyed at the unnecessary gating of such functionality.
Only two examples and you are already contradicting yourself. One service should keep running and the other should turn off in the event of loosing the connection to the “outside world”.
What we need is a “in the
event of X - keep doing Y”.
It isn't clear that 'conserve water' is a reasonable default position. Perhaps 'keep doing what it was programmed to be doing' would be a better position?
Depends... the focus here isn't on convenience or utility, but on safety.
The furnace defaults to on to save the water pipes. The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
Defaulting a furnace to on certainly shouldn't be considered safe. What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
A thermostat and controls are a necessary requirement for HVAC systems and defaulting anything to "run" if your control plane doesn't exist anymore is definitely not the safe option.
The other issue is that in almost all situations (like this one) what you think is a safe and sane default won't align with what other people think.
There should be defaults and they should be clearly defined, but I don't think it's always obvious to determine what they are.
While I agree with your overall point, this clause is irrelevant to/not supportive of it. The presence of a thermostat wasn't going to help you here either and there are vastly more furnaces with connected thermostats than disconnected to worry about.
CO detectors and alarms are needed to address this risk.
Your thermostat is in a far less likely place to be overloaded with CO should the alarms start going off, though. If the thermostat is gone, you have to physically go to the furnace itself or shut off power at the circuit breaker.
Freezing water pipes are bad, but a furnace running non-stop is going to exceed its duty cycle and pose a greater hazard.
Whatever was implemented as this poorly-thought-through fail-safe would be implemented in the furnace itself, thus that furnace implementation could manage any safety-related concerns, though heating equipment is overwhelmingly rated to 100% duty cycle already. (My goal for my boiler is to have at least 22 hours per day of heating demand to ensure that I'm using the exact minimum temperature water to maintain temp in the house, to maximize efficiency.)
My furnace runs pretty close to non-stop when it’s below -30 outside, I imagine a bigger concern than duty cycles if it did that when it wasn’t -30 would be that it would still be pushing the indoor temperature to 50°C above the outdoor temp.
If something is leaking CO into your house, then it's a major safety issue and needs to be immediately scrapped. Whether or not it's internet connected is the least of your worries.
> What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
Furnaces have multiple checks when they turned on, even on the dumbest furnaces. There are multiple safety mechanisms preventing it from getting too hot. CO leak - what thermostat will do for you here?
> The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
I had a friend in Australia who ran cattle on his farm. Failing open would waste water, but failing closed would mean dead cattle (and hundreds of thousands in losses). It depends on the application.
You can already see the “sane defaults” vary with the person.
When it comes to safety it’s a bit more clear cut. The job of a heating system is to heat so don’t turn off heating when this can endanger people and houses.
The job of a lawn irrigation system is to irrigate. Who wants a dead lawn just because the internet or wifi are down, or to conserve water only when the system is disconnected from the internet but not from electricity?
Depends on the part of the world. If you intend on turning off your furnace in Canada, you best be prepared to winterize your house too! (Lots of cottagers do this... indoor plumbing is flushed and water is turned off at the pump, etc.)
I've said for years that any smart thermostat should have a bimetallic backup that controls maximum ranges and acts in the dumbest way possible. Just max temp and min temp for AC and heat. Nothing that should ever be hit... but there nonetheless.
For example, if I pull the thermostat off my wall, the furnace should drop into a fallback mode that keeps the heat above freezing (I'm in Canada where this is a concern.)
I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.