no - mine never seem to drop off the wifi. I can only recall one incident when the servers were down and I needed to adjust the thermostat.
and by cheap I mean they cost less than any of the other remote controlled thermostats on the market when I got these 3 yrs ago.
“How to find them” is a great question that currently takes a grad school degree and months of work to answer. There is no commonly accepted ‘Privacy Certification’ that means anything; no accreditation body to validate anyone’s claims.
One thing I can say is to look for a short range protocol for your home automation devices, such as Z-Wave, X-10, Insteon, 433MHz, or something similar. These protocols can’t be routed on the internet, so if you want to access them remotely you will need to install a “hub” or “gateway” type appliance. This consolidates all your privacy concerns into one system that you can independently vet.
Many commercial hubs, like Wink, Nest, AssureLink, Philips Hue, Samsung SmartThings, etc., have a “cloud-based infrastructure”. This means that your systems are constantly sending your data to their servers, and you have only their word that they will respect your privacy - even so, that assurance lasts only as long as the current company’s owners. Some, like Vera, are local hubs that don’t/can’t use a cloud account unless you set one up. And you can always build one on a Raspberry Pi from an open source project like domoticz or OpenHab, HomeWSN, or truly roll your own with something like an MQTT server; with these solutions, you can assert full control over your data.
If you use WiFi connected appliances, they’re already on the Internet. You have no visible way to know if/when they are phoning home. You can set up complex network routing rules and firewalls to try to prevent them from talking, but then they might not work at all.
If you use Bluetooth devices, it’s true they can’t talk directly to the company servers, but most smartphone apps will happily and silently echo your data back to the mothership.
Good luck!
Yeah, I get the occasional Honeywell email “sorry, we are down” or “we are going down for planned maintenance at these times”. I almost never control via the servers, I used the internal control pad, so if I need to adjust anything, that’s what I use. And my server is almost certainly in Europe, not US.
My use case for remote operation via smartphone/app is for the few times we are returning home from a vacation and I need to switch on the HW before we get home.
But I do get a lot of random dropouts - which then reconnect at random - even when nothing moves or changes. I blame being at the limit of their wireless comms capability combined with thick brick walls and the poltergeist who wanders around my home with a large sheet of tin foil (well, it’s a theory!).
Rarely, this does happen when the HW is due to come on and I get grief from the household about luke warm showers, but it was the least worst solution to the problem and I still think it was a good solution. Especially as I plan to replace a load of radiators soon and will be able to set each room up as its own zone - currently operating as 2 zones - up and downstairs.
HA HA HA HA HA HA. You have never been to the BoingBoing store? I have actually used it as an inverse recommender - I was planning on buying something until it got featured in the store. Didn’t have time to research why it sucked, but if it was featured, surely it sucks.
$200? heck, the honeywell’s start at $90 and that’s what I don’t get. You look at the Smart whatever market and see most, well reviewed dewhickies are $200+ and you buy the cheap one and expect it to not be lacking somewhere in it’s feature-set?
Be a rebel, go analog. Save your money. Never worry about “server outages”.
I might have thought that before I got one. The smart thermostat I installed saved me more than that in its first year of use, so for me at least the cost is very much justified.
Save money on the (non-recyclable mercury containing) thermostat. Pay hundreds more for heating and cooling through the year
I have. Note the word “could”.
Didn’t do a thermostat. Did do remote controlled lights and music with a remote hygrometer/temp meter.
Actually a threw it together to create a believable light/music pattern to deter burglars after there were a lot of break-ins in the neighborhood. As the RasPi was on anyway decided to open a remote ssh port.
Worked perfectly. But wouldn’t work for a non-computergeek person. I had to connect to it with a http tunnel over ssh 
.
It’s usefulness (apart from deterring burglars by making it look as if someone was at home) was limited however, as I hardly ever (never, actually) needed to remotely turn on the lights 
.
Knowing how cold it was at home sitting on a beach in italy was quite nice though.
We have one of these. It has been down for six weeks. Oddly, the first error coincided exactly with a cooling motor failure. After the motor replacement, it continued to send me error messages every few hours. “THERMOSTAT not communicating with My Total Connect Comfort”. Then it says it is connected again, but it is not , since it cannot be accessed remotely, even during the brief window when it says it is connected. I have gotten hundreds of these messages.
I spent a couple of hours on the phone with their tech people, who pretended to not know about any system-wide issues.
At this point I am going to try warranty replacement, or just wait for the class action lawsuit.
Someone with vision, mobility or dexterity issues who may use assistive tech that won’t work on the purely physical device? They’re a group we often overlook in our rush to say “who needs that, really?” for a lot of things.
Helping to look after aging parents makes it easier to see how useful some of these functions can be, in enabling independence.
I got one, and just wanted the ability to monitor or change the heat/ac while I am in Colorado. I do not need it to integrate with anything else, or respond to voice commands, or record my conversations for the politburo. I expected that the features claimed, limited as they may be, would work. And they did for a while.
They built the ECS for the Apollo program, so a thermostat with telemetry seems within their area of competence.
I’ll second the mention of OpenHAB. They even maintain a list of compatible hardware and services which includes both IoT style as well as more traditional Home Automation (ZigBee, ZWave, X10, etc.) The software runs on a variety of platforms and is much easier to install, set up, and use than it used to be. They have a mobile app and even a cloud service if you aren’t willing to set up a VPN to bridge the Internet to your house.
On the subject of thermostats, here’s one that should work with OpenHAB, and is even cheaper(~$30) than @anon48584343’s suggestion, although maybe not as aesthetically pleasing:
I get that, and for some such use cases maybe a large ipad or whatever is needed (maybe this enables voice control or other assistive tech by using native tablet functions on a Honeywell app??), and of course this requires access via the servers. But the Honeywell TotalComfort control panel/box (“physical device”) that came with my system has a mobile (rechargable batteries) operation capability within the house, and has a touch screen much like using a smartphone with relatively large icons and easy-to-use ‘wizards’ for programming or simply over-riding programmes and switching stuff on and off. It is entirely ‘local’ and needs no link to any server in order to control the system.
Unless they’ve changed, I recall the IKEA “Trådfri” line behaves sanely.
Thoughts of the Battlestar Galactica reboot and how that low(er)-tech spaceship was able to escape.
I remember when we had free-range devices of shit.
One of the biggest challenges in IoT is security. Device which accepts incoming TCP/IP connections is very hard and sometimes even impossible to make secure as its limited hardware and memory simply does not have enough power to defend itself. So prohibiting device to accept incoming calls and only initiate connection from device to well secured backend servers is very often only secure enough solution.
Disclaimer: I am one of those $&#@^& developers who made this thing.
