It sounds like what you really mean is that this is not a product which you benefit from, because you work from home and your house is actually continuously inhabited most days; it's an amusing combination of arrogance and naivety to assume that your lifestyle is the only valid option.
Beyond that, you're completely missing the point about a smarter thermostat: the savings don't come from the temperature outside is -15° and your heater is running almost constantly. You have to deal with that by adding insulation or living in a colder house. Where many people can save money is waste: when the heating or cooling would have run without benefit – e.g. it's 40° outside and you're paying to keep it over 65° but it'd really be perfectly fine if it drifted down to 50° for the 8+ hours in the middle of the day when everyone's at work. A serious miser will religiously turn it off before they walk out the door but most people won't. Many people even leave the thermostat set at a comfortable temperature because they dislike coming home to a very cold/hot house.
Those people are the ones who will benefit the most from something programmable but unfortunately most of the devices on the market have horrible UIs and none of the $30 ones will do things like detect when you aren't home, which is significant for people who don't have rigidly predictable schedules. Again, it doesn't have to be a game-theoretical optimum – only better than what most people are doing now.
> Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties
Head to New England and your new neighbors will complement you on your frugality, as most people have heating bills 4-8 times that high in the winter. Toss in, say, a spike in heating oil costs and anything which reduces inefficiency starts to look pretty cheap. Hint: none of them had McMansions, either – it's just cold during the winter in Connecticut.
> So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039.
Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops.
When you need to make up numbers so the math makes your argument seem less arbitrary it's time to accept that other people are allowed to make decisions in life without your approval. You're overstating the purchase price by nearly 25% and assuming the worst possible purchase method – and you're doing that for an amount which the average American household spends on cable tv / internet / smartphones every couple of months.
> The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.
You do seem to need a lot of external validation for your decisions. Hopefully the smug feelings will keep you warm.
1) doubling is the same as an order of magnitude (or more), ah math who cares.
2) it costs the same amount to heat a house to a given temp no matter the outdoor temp (for a house built to be comfortable down to -30, heating at 40 costs almost nothing)
3) The public is stupid, far too dumb to program something, so lets prey on them with something real expensive that tries to avoid that.
4) average and peak are the same. Pick whichever advances an argument more.
5) Its OK to rip people off as long as you don't rip them off for more money than other people do.
6) I do admit you are 100% correct on the price. And given the mighty power of Google and expansion and wider availability of capital not only are you correct that the price has slightly dropped, but I suggest going further and in the long run it could drop to $100 or so, maybe lower. Fundamentally, from an electronic standpoint, the inevitable Chinese clones will probably only be $75 or so. See also #1 above, 25%, order of magnitude, who's counting.
7) Paraphrase to something like I don't like the results of your math equations, so I'll call you smug instead. Come on, you can do better than that. If we're going to go all playground here, "Your mom" me or something.
Oddly enough you haven't convinced me you're correct and I'm wrong.
I selected the points which were well defined enough to respond to:
> 2) it costs the same amount to heat a house to a given temp no matter the outdoor temp (for a house built to be comfortable down to -30, heating at 40 costs almost nothing)
This is not about how much it costs to heat a house to a given temperature. It's about how often heating or cooling is used when the occupants don't need it.
> 3) The public is stupid, far too dumb to program something, so lets prey on them with something real expensive that tries to avoid that.
The only thing I said on this is that most programmable thermostats have bad UI and I'd extend that bad UI to note that they also tend to assume a rigid schedule.
It came as no surprise to me when I read the government studies concluding that programmable thermostats: the Honeywell which my Nest replaced allowed you to set two temperatures per day and there was no way to adjust for changes in your schedule without clicking through the entire schedule — 3 (hour, minute, AM/PM) pairs with two high/low temperature thresholds for 7 days or almost 40 clicks on low-quality buttons which would have shamed a $2 calculator. If you knew you were going to be out late one evening, do you spend 15 minutes clicking through that UX disaster or just say “Meh, we'll heat the house for a couple extra hours”? Maybe you plan to go out for a couple hours mid-day? There's no way to express that short of turning the entire thing off, which is fine part of the year and annoying during the rest when it means you'll come home to a very hot/cold house because there's no way to say “Keep the house over 50° (or under 80°) for the next few hours”.
That's not saying that the public is stupid, it's saying that there's been a market failure in producing decent thermostats. It'd be great if there were options between the Nest and the junk $30 thermostats for people who wanted more intelligence (or just the silly auto-away sensor) but don't mind, say, cheap plastic fittings or losing some of the more processor-intensive features.
> 5) Its OK to rip people off as long as you don't rip them off for more money than other people do.
You're arguing against something which I didn't write.
> 7) Paraphrase to something like I don't like the results of your math equations, so I'll call you smug instead. Come on, you can do better than that. If we're going to go all playground here, "Your mom" me or something.
Your entire argument has been that if people lived exactly the same way as you do and made the same decisions which you've made it's wrong for them to want a Nest. That's smug because it assumes that there are no other valid positions. Using terms like “ripped off” implies a moral judgement rather than, say, people making decisions based on different circumstances. Similarly, assuming that people will finance everything on a bad credit card is implicitly stating that most people who are not you make bad personal financial decisions — that's both insulting and irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Beyond that, you're completely missing the point about a smarter thermostat: the savings don't come from the temperature outside is -15° and your heater is running almost constantly. You have to deal with that by adding insulation or living in a colder house. Where many people can save money is waste: when the heating or cooling would have run without benefit – e.g. it's 40° outside and you're paying to keep it over 65° but it'd really be perfectly fine if it drifted down to 50° for the 8+ hours in the middle of the day when everyone's at work. A serious miser will religiously turn it off before they walk out the door but most people won't. Many people even leave the thermostat set at a comfortable temperature because they dislike coming home to a very cold/hot house.
Those people are the ones who will benefit the most from something programmable but unfortunately most of the devices on the market have horrible UIs and none of the $30 ones will do things like detect when you aren't home, which is significant for people who don't have rigidly predictable schedules. Again, it doesn't have to be a game-theoretical optimum – only better than what most people are doing now.
> Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties
Head to New England and your new neighbors will complement you on your frugality, as most people have heating bills 4-8 times that high in the winter. Toss in, say, a spike in heating oil costs and anything which reduces inefficiency starts to look pretty cheap. Hint: none of them had McMansions, either – it's just cold during the winter in Connecticut.
> So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039. Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops.
When you need to make up numbers so the math makes your argument seem less arbitrary it's time to accept that other people are allowed to make decisions in life without your approval. You're overstating the purchase price by nearly 25% and assuming the worst possible purchase method – and you're doing that for an amount which the average American household spends on cable tv / internet / smartphones every couple of months.
> The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.
You do seem to need a lot of external validation for your decisions. Hopefully the smug feelings will keep you warm.