Yup.
There’s a reason why I wrote off every single wifi bulb and ‘smart outlet’ switch within the space of a month for ones using zigbee radios and a Hubitat. The only thing the hubitat uses internet for is to process voice interaction traffic to/from the echos, and updates.
That reason was having to re-build the entirety of one room’s lighting setup from scratch for the fifth time in a span of two months, because the bulbs would just… disconnect themselves and not reconnect, and the shitty app that was the interface with it had a random update that trashed it’s own database, AND required internet connectivity for everything. Shame really, because the remotes for it were actually well designed and built, but locked down in such a way that precluded hacking them to work with something else.
(And depending on how much spare time I can free up, I want to rip out the echo devices and replace them with something that runs entirely on-prem, but that’s a separate, longer, and profanity-filled rant.)
My electric blanket is on a double bed and each side has its own independent switch and temperature control for that half of the bed. I seem to recall it cost me about forty quid a few years ago.
This thing is just plain stupid expensive; but it looks like, even on the low end, options with active cooling don’t seem to go below roughly twice as much as pure heating ones.
Makes sense; resistive heating is fundamentally pretty trivial(though, certainly, with room for elaboration in terms of how tight the thermostatic control is; and, one hopes, reasonably high production values in terms of keeping common wear states from causing electrical fires); while cooling means either peltier junctions if you don’t mind pitiful efficiency and relatively low maximum thermal loads; or moving parts and plumbing if you want to do it the compression way.
None of that justifies a $2k gadget with a bunch of spy app grafted on; but, even at the low end, cooling looks to fairly stubbornly not go for under twice as much as heating; which roughly matches expectations from space heaters vs. AC units; where incipient electrical fires with cases start at almost nothing; while even pretty dire AC units that are probably lying about their duty cycles never get below ‘suspiciously cheap’.
I had cooling seats in my car once. On the rare occasions they might have added to comfort, I could never quite get used to the feel of fans whirring below my nether regions and cold air coming up through them.
Compleat side tangent:
I know that having heated seats in a vehicle that’s driven mostly in central Arizona sounds like a stupid idea, but in the winter, it was a wonderful thing, especially on morning commutes. (I was insistent that the dealer fix them when it kept blowing the fuse and they ‘could not find the fault’- more like “they didn’t want to tear the seat apart to replace the heating grid”.) Cooling seats? dunno about that one…
As an IT professional, I wouldn’t have one of these things in my house! I can still amuse myself, though …
Ah, the data-destroying potential of our polyamorous household! (Admittedly, it’s usually napping, but still …) Also, 3.5 pounds … so my partner and a large book?
I guess having a kettle brew at specific temps would be useful to some but I just heat water until it’s some undefined level of hot i would not have a use for it
