31–40 of 45 posts
Unlike Nest, which I've always seen as a gimmick sold on false advertising, I believe this has legs. Making these kinds of air conditioning units into intelligent devices could have significant effects. Why do think I Nest is a gimmick almost bordering on a marketing scam? Because in only works in a relatively narrow range of applications (i.e.: small one or two room apartment). In a larger family home --and particul…
[1] http://thingsquare.com/customers/ [2] http://www.contiki-os.org/
Unlike Nest, which I've always seen as a gimmick sold on false advertising, I believe this has legs. Making these kinds of air conditioning units into intelligent devices could have significant effects. Why do think I Nest is a gimmick almost bordering on a marketing scam? Because in only works in a relatively narrow range of applications (i.e.: small one or two room apartment). In a larger family home --and particul…
You mention this magical whole house fan multiple times across your responses, but how exactly would a fan help those of us living where it's 70-80 F at night? I have one and besides being obnoxiously loud, on one of the aforementioned nights, it'd simply end up blowing around that hot, humid air without actually cooling anything.
I wonder where they got the name Tado? It's quite similar to the name Taco, which is an 80+ year-old American HVAC company [0]. I hope they don't get in trouble in the U.S.! Other than that, great idea! http://www.taco-hvac.com/whoweare.html
http://www.tado.com/de-en/blog/tadayimaor-how-we-chose-our-c... "The name tado° is derived from the Japanese greetings 'tadaima' and 'okaeri'. Loosely translated, they mean 'I am home' and 'welcome home'."
Unlike Nest, which I've always seen as a gimmick sold on false advertising, I believe this has legs. Making these kinds of air conditioning units into intelligent devices could have significant effects. Why do think I Nest is a gimmick almost bordering on a marketing scam? Because in only works in a relatively narrow range of applications (i.e.: small one or two room apartment). In a larger family home --and particul…
Nest is 250$ USD, tado is 150$ USD. Nest allows controlling multiple thermostats from the app, I couldn't find if tado did the same. Thus, your conclusion that Nest is a "waste of time and money" is fruitless. However, the geolocation support does seem quite nice. The bar has been raised once again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument is mostly right in terms of what would be required (the super-high efficiency filter is not necessary, nor are attic fans, to achieve anything interesting), but actually, you have to have multiple condensing units past a certain point. It's simply not efficient, even with auto-closing dampers, to zone and duct a multi-zone system with single condensing units. You'd be much better off, efficiency wise, e…
Why is a multi-zone system not efficient with a single unit? That's what I have, should I uninstall it or turn it off?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yours might be a perfect use case for it. Small home, highly irregular schedule. No issues there. My problem is that these things are being sold at my local Home Depot as some kind of magical device. This is a bedroom community of probably 100,000 to 200,000 homes. A huge number of them are two story homes of 2,000 square feet and above with three to five bedrooms. Nest is a waste of time for these people. I actu…
> $300 PER MONTH Wow, and I thought my energy bills were high in California. Where in the world do you live where there's room to save $300/month?
1) Seems like a lot of data, what exactly is it communicating and to whom? What are the privacy policies? 2) What happens if/when the company stops running its servers? Does the device continue to work or will it become junk?
That's about the right amount of data to do an HTTP POST home every minute with the basic temperature, humidity, what its internal IP address etc is.
Which seems completely reasonable to me. 5 megs is reasonable for your acks and occasional commands. I don't think there's anything suspicious about those numbers -- I'd probably have provided similar ones if I was designing this system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yours might be a perfect use case for it. Small home, highly irregular schedule. No issues there. My problem is that these things are being sold at my local Home Depot as some kind of magical device. This is a bedroom community of probably 100,000 to 200,000 homes. A huge number of them are two story homes of 2,000 square feet and above with three to five bedrooms. Nest is a waste of time for these people. I actu…
What kind of fan does that? Is it something I can install myself?
http://www.homedepot.com/p/MaxxAir-30-in-Industrial-Heavy-Du...
I've also used one like this:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-30-in-Pedestal-Fan-SFSC1-750S...
My neighbor bought a smaller one:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/MaxxAir-30-in-Industrial-Heavy-Du...
The idea is really simple. In our case these are two story homes with balconies. The fan goes on the balcony right outside the sliding glass door. You set it up to exhaust hot air from the house. Open all the windows. That will be your incoming cool air. The windows downstairs are fully open and the upstairs windows only four to six inches. Turn this on as soon as the temperature outside is significantly cooler than inside. There have been days when I've been able to get the house down to 65 degrees in a couple of hours.
I've also used the standing fan placed outside a ground level floor window blowing cold air in. Now you open the upstairs windows to push the hot air out.
So, you either pressurize your home with cool air or reduce the pressure (by sucking air out) in order to have cool air enter.
Not that hard to do. It takes all of five minutes a day to go through the open-windows-turn-on-fans dance and you save hundreds.
My next move is to automate this by integrating it into the ducting system as well as providing for a filtered cool air intake path.
The best part is that I saved the money I'll need by using this method during the last three summers. That money is going into system that should save me $1,000 to $2,000 per summer when compared to every house in my neighborhood. Nest can't even begin to compare to this performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is a multi-zone system not efficient with a single unit? That's what I have, should I uninstall it or turn it off?
Either you have motor controlled dampers, which means the system can't be entirely responsive all the time, or everything is open all the time, which means you are losing a lot of airflow to parts you don't need them.
I'm not seeing why that wouldn't be equivalent to two units.