ps. We know that the Ecobees can actually be wired into the zone valves directly, but this setup gives us much greater flexibility with full HomeAssistant control, and the potential for configuring the Ecobees and American Standard thermostats to work together better.
Qhy not ise the Generic Thermostat integration in HA? It lets you keep it all in HA and not have to write a whole big automation for each one. you just set it to read the sensor from the ecobee and turn on/off the relay. If you want to keep the ecobee scheduling you could even read the set point from the ecobee, or maybe even the hvac action. There should be a state attribute for the Hvac action and the thermostat should set it properly.
I remember working in HVAC and we had a house that we installed AC in and The homeowner complained that it would freeze her out in the afternoon. We asked her what time and she said around 3:00 so made an appointment to be there the next day at 3:00. The light would come in from the window and hit a mirror and get reflected onto the thermostat like it was Indiana Jones finding the room where the ark of the covenant is held. We just tilted that mirror bit, problem solved
Reminds me of problem at work, when camera on one machine stopped working randomly. It was happening for about three days at relatively same time, so one day I came in sooner. There was square of sunlight, sized about 5x5 centimeters traveling thru whole plant and that one machine. And somehow it traveled exactly over camera lens! Solution? I just grabbed some sticker and placed it on plexiglass cover on machine :D
lol, I'm happy that I live in tropical country so we doesn't really need to control my room temp, just my lovely fan is enough. well a lot of people using AC too here, I just can't afford it and can't really stand cold
Totally different type of problem, but I recall a satellite Internet connection that would go down like clockwork in the morning. The problem was reported for a few weeks. Finally, we were able to check it while it was offline rather than getting to the location after it had come back online. Turned out that dew was getting into the coax shorting it out, but later in the morning it was evaporated fixing the connection. A little application of dielectric grease to prevent the moisture ingress solved that problem. It's funny how things you'd never normally think of being related to a problem can absolutely be the specific issue.
If Linus ever sells this house, they're going to have to write a massive technical manual for the new owners and be on call for tech support just to turn the heat on.
"they're going to have to write a massive technical manual for the new owners" reminds me of Mr.Bean in Man vs Bee when they gave him a manual for their over complicated house XD uaclips.com/video/PDTgmRdODQY/відео.html
I recently sold my house and i took everything with me to our new build house. everything still worked manually so i also destroyed the technical manual and am writing a new one ;)
It will basically be impossible to sell a house like this without ripping all the tech out. It's all super niche to Linus' needs. Very unlikely he will ever want to sell though.
Thats why thay made the videos never mind the next owner but him in 5 years like what the hell was the plan with this or how did I rig this thing up and make it work years ago
I feel like the amount of effort that goes into fully setting up this system so that you never have to touch the thermostat again is equal to the amount of effort you'd spend over a lifetime adjusting the temperature valve on your radiators manually.
@FuckedUpGenius Yeah I set a schedule on my boiler in 1999 and I think I might have changed it once. The radiator in each room has a thermostat on it, technology from the 50s. Smart homes are very dumb.
I have a smart heater that allows me to set a program and never look at it again. It took about 15 minutes to set up, it has a tablet-like controller in the living room and works with an app. Easy as can be. I've only manually adjusted temperatures a couple of times in the past few years, mainly when my mom was visiting and complaining about the cold 😂
It’s definitely more of a hobbyist thing than average consumer. That’s _starting_ to change but it’s still stupidly complicated if you’re inexperienced.
@Tyler Hauth I would not be bold enough to claim that much. I don't know Linus that well. But I have known people who would futz with their thermostat something like a dozen times a day. To be clear, that was due to them attempting to be energy conscientious with an old thermostat and not much sense of finesse. So they'd get up in the morning, run to the thermostat, jack it all the way up, run back to bed to get under the covers where it's warm, then wait until it was too warm under the covers. Then they get up, shower, get dressed, decide it's far too warm, so drop the thermostat all the way down. That would probably last until time to go to work, at which point they'd set it up to 50 to keep the pipes from freezing. When they came home, they'd go into the same kind of routine, doing the work the thermostat would have automated had they any sense. I'm not sure if they continued doing that. I haven't seen them in decades. But when I went over to visit, after they'd turn the thermostat all the way down, I took to moving it up to about 5 degrees less than where it happened to be just then, and they'd enjoy a night of not messing with the thermostat all the time. I'd like to think that Linus has more sense than they were demonstrating. But then he suggested that *this* was going to be a net time saver, so I do have to wonder just how much was he futzing with the thermostat. However much it was, it would've been less effort than what this took. I think if he messed with his thermostat about the normal amount, that 5000 factor might be about right. I just don't feel like it could've been accurate for him, unless the real purpose behind all of this was to just get another video out.
You can offset the temperature sensor in the ecobee thermostat by looking for an option called thresholds in the installation settings and offset the temperature accordingly. I had a similar issue with my thermostat incorrectly reporting the temperature.
After watching this, my conclusion is that "smart homes" and "home assistant/homekit" are all so insanely complicated that it only works if have Jake come over to your house to install it.
@John Gelnaw my stability issues are more than just Z-Wave. The integration in home assistant broke for me at one point (don't upgrade to a x.x.1 home assistant version) and I have a few switches on a circuit with a motion flood light. When that light turns on, the other lights dim for a moment. I suspect that effect is happening in the switches as well, so the switches are getting errors that cause them to fudge up the mesh. Way better than ADT's implementation, though. If the mesh gets messed up for ADT, you lose all your devices for months.
My take on smart home systems is that they should always only help automate or more easily control things, but not be the only way to control things. That's the downside of these fancier systems vs aftermarket add-ons, you don't have still the manual controls in place in case things stop working. Most everything in my house I can now control from my phone, yet my wife who can't be bothered can still do things the old school way.
I love how much tech your house has, and I enjoy that you know enough to keep the interface communication well in-house. Thanks for making this a YT series by the way, I'll never own my own home so it's cool to see what a fellow tech nerd would be able to do.
some people are technologists who love technnology, that's why. Making a smart-home is kinda like having those project cars you used to work on everyday in the 90s
To be fair, they're highlighting problems for content. Not much good content in "I plugged in X and it seamlessly controlled Y". Plus, he's using more fiddly solutions that are kind of fringe like Home Assistant. Those allow much more configurability, but at increased complexity most people who just throw in an Amazon/Google/Apple/Samsung solution would never see. Not saying the HA market doesn't have a LONG way to go. It does.
I have a semi-smart home, all devices run on my local network and only 1 thing, the heater, has it's own seperate controller that can't be accessed by any smart home app or hub. But it's fine, it was easy to set up and has been running smooth for years. I've saved so much money since I've had these smart devices, so I understand why someone would want a smart home. I just don't get why anyone would want this complicated system, it's expensive and hard to control.
I know people who installed heat pumps in Alberta. They are suffering on the -35C days. House is 13C as it can’t keep up. And they don’t have a server room.
Yeah pretty much the definition of overly complicated and over engineered. But i'm sure these things will lead to better solutions and innovations we can't predict.
Hey Linus; Christmas gift tip: A few years ago someone gave us a bed cover that heats the bed. Not an electric blanket, this goes on over the mattress and under the sheets. Has a control for each side of the bed so I can have a cold bed and the fiancé has a nice warm bed.
@Kenny W. Ashton in another video they installed a weird AC unit that has one compressor unit outside and air handlers in each room... which is proprietary and only works with its special thermostat.
@Kenny W. Ashton The heat pump stuff seems weird to me. They certainly do have a floor where they stop working, surely it shouldn't be hitting that this early in the year. It should be like, once in a while on very very cold days. I only spent one winter with mine in my old house but there wasn't a single day it was too cold for the heat pump, in maritime Canada.
@alex lacey It sounds like Linus wants as much moved away from the American Standard thermostats as he can, and only has them since the A/C apparently has to go through them due to propriety communication issues (whatever those are).
As a heating tech this hurt to see how your controls were designed. Separate thermostat for heating and cooling instead of one common, thermostats not directly powering the zone valves. In my opinion the "wireless" zone relays are redundant and serve no purpose other than needless complexity and I doubt that this will provide better integration between the thermostats. But hey at least it makes for content! Still love the channel and that IBC boiler is a beaut ;) PS - You may not know this but Tekmar is based out of Vernon, it would have been nice to show them some love! Consider replacing the ecobee's, zone relays and american standard stats with some of their stuff. If you need some advise reach out!
My problem with Home Assistant is all the automation logic is done with YAML config files, which is like trying to write e-mail with a mouse and a virtual keyboard. Just look how a simple oneliner if statement looks like in the HA's Automation UI (14:54)
You can use other stuff as well of course, but then youre adding even more parts to fail. Node red is kind of awesome, I'm trying not to use it though...
I had this same setup using ecobee as a simple thermostat. Eventually switched to just using a thermostat on homeassistant and having a tablet on the wall with a custom home assistant dashboard. I stopped using the ecobee since I kept having weird bugs/disconnection issues. Great setup now with homeassistant! Thanks for the video.
You got that right Jake, thank you Apple! I love my homekit smart home and I'm only waiting on the new wave of devices with matter before buying another device. I can confidently say that my smart home has been much more reliable than Linus'.
If smart home stuff was about 10x more streamlined and everything integrated easily, it'd be worth it. As someone who tried to smart home all the things, found it was more like having a second job. Getting things integrated was a pain, but thought it'd be a one-off thing. But I'm kind of amazed at how frequently simple things break with home-assistant. I get it's free and open-source and community managed so of course it's going to have some jank. But the benefits aren't worth the effort.
I love Mqtt - It's great for situations in which multiple publishers need to broadcast to multiple subscribers (something like thermostats (pub) to an AC (sub) or heater (sub) .
If anything, what all these videos about Linus his house have taught me, is that I don't want a smart home. It's just WAY more trouble than it's worth.
They are WAY over-complicating things for the standing user - imo to a fault. Smart home stuff should be simple, reliable, and maintainable. Having the whole system based on a local server with open-source, community maintains plugins and such just isn’t the way to go (unless you love tinkering with it, or making videos). Something like Apple’s HomeKit keeps everything local, is very secure, and is so much easier to setup for a normal user. Quinn from SnazzyLabs did a really good video about his smart home based on these principals, and because of those, he has had a much better experience.
Just as I had plans to setup my smart home, I threw them off the window. Don't get me wrong, I'll setup a Pi based security camera, or even tasmota with tasmoadmin for some iot development and ota updates (still haven't found a good way to update them). But subjecting all of your house for this seems kinda weird. My friend has a smart home setup, that works, but that includes continuous maintenance, and even though their "ongoing cost" of heating/cooling is lower, I doubt that the constant 1-2kW of servers running constantly doesn't turn that on it's head. I have a simple gas heating box (lost the word for it, sry) that does radiators and hot water with 60L tank capacity that it can re-heat, shall it get too cold. And a single AC strategically positioned between two floors on the stairs. It helps with the run-up run-down between summer and winter with hot air heating and in summer with cold air. Investing all of this money into proper house isolation inside out in the first place, would go miles by itself.
I love these smart home videos, I work in the IoT smart building industry on the commercial end and we have been implementing our solution for AGES. So cool to see this being done by a UAclipsr. p.s. MQTT is sweet! we implement thing kind of tech to thousands of sites allowing control from a single platform (our own ;) ) to hundreds of sites. This wasn’t meant to be a shameless plug but here we are… #t-macTechnologies
There's a configurable temperature reading offset for the ecobee that'll solve your American standard radiant heat issue. Assuming it's always off by a roughly constant temperature difference
I never really considered needing several blankets that big of a deal but now that I think of it I guess most people have good enough heating that they usually don't need more than 1
Yeah, those thermostats should be side by side to stop them from interfering with each other. Thermostats are not heavy enough to need to be stud mounted.
Now you have local control! If your relay board ever goes out and you need heat before you can fix it, you can manually turn on zones by pushing that silver lever all the way to the right. There's spring tension you are working against when the zone valve is not powered. But if you just push the silver lever with more force you can run the zone. There is a little metal hook on the bottom that you can get the lever to rest in, thereby holding it open without power.
Repent and believe in Jesus. John 3:16 KJV - For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Luke 13:3 KJV - I tell you nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. John 3:3 KJV - “Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Theres a setting in ecobees to adjust the thermostat reading. Just figure out how much hotter the other thermostat is making the reading and adjust it the other way
You really should have went with a bosch heat pump that can run off of any thermostat and are more efficient than any traditional heat pump. You might have been even capable of running it off of your Zwave system. The bosch heat pump is also variable in that it adjusts the compressor capacity by itself as the load changes.
I'm an IT guy and I'd RUN from this house if I saw it on the open market. Jake will never be able to take a vacation more than an hour's drive away! To need a phone AND A LAPTOP to turn on the heat... 😂 😂 😂
@muyoso probably going to have to find a different channel for that, sure there’s a niche home improvement channel centered around tech with 3k subscribers that makes quality content. Keep digging in that search bar.
What I am finding with my Ecobee is that it seems to have IR based temp sensing on the front. And if you point the thermostat and something hot (or cold) it will throw it off. For example, mine is in the hallways where the return is... BUT it faces into the laundry room. So if dryer is going, it thinks the rest of the house is hotter than it actually. is...
One could just use a smart thermostat with a temp probe for underfloor heating to solve all of linuses problems. They have an effective smart fuzzylogic processor to track temp changes as a function of heating effort /time. You could spend just 40$ to do the work on autopilot.
I love how these smart AC/Heater controls can be overridden by city/state authorizes with a simple signed order and call to utility company. All in an effort to reduce strain on the grid and fight climate change theory!
"Dad, my room is cold!" "Okay, let me just quickly reboot the house." From the wireless speakers to all of the thermostats everywhere to the light switches that don't work, this house is absolutely hilarious.
The funny thing is he could have just bought normal temperature sensors that interfaced with a network over wire. And then write yourself a simply webpage that can be accessed from anywhere on the network on any device. This is some weird ass blend between DIY and someone else doing it for you. Thats his problem. He should have gone mainstream or done actual DIY.
@Koots I feel like this home was just too early for Matter devices, which should eliminate most of the interconnection problems. These Home Assistant add-ons are admittedly hacky ways to get proprietary systems to work together.... Compared to Matter, which is designed to work together from the start.
@Michael If you're really desperate for heat and the smart thermostat isn't working you could just pull it off the wall and short the heat wire like an analog thermostat does.
i reccomend heated blankets for when you dont have heat. its a game changer and you just need that and a blanket for on top of the heated blanket to trap the heat. 10/10
I love how it's been over a year now and Linus STILL doesn't have a functioning home HVAC system. His wife must be *miles* more patient and understanding than mine.
I’m sure it’s already in the comments but you should checkout esphome for your esp based devices, it kicks ass over tasmota … you basically write similar YAML to home assistant, but it’s like 10x more configurable
It's more reliable to control in-floor heating based on the temperature in the zone loop (water temperature sensore). This creates a baseline temperature in the room that the heat pumps can be used to bring the rest of the way up to the comfortable setpoint without having to work as hard. This also allows the in-floor heating to run at a more stable setting rather than being subject to the fast changes an air sensing thermometer can be exposed to.
Just use a single thermostat, it's making it all to complicated. And hey, my living room is 18 degrees and comfortable :) And the bedroom is like 14 degrees.
@Willian Souza I live near the equator, We're used to temps around 30C it's hot to us when the weather app says "feels like 41C" from 11PM to about 2PM. I pretty much stay shirtless all day when at home. Nights are around 20C, sometimes a bit lower. I did and do use a thin blanket when sleeping. Out of habit I stayed shirtless even in the december in previous years. But in this year after I've lost some weight, I feel cold and want to put a tshirt as soon as the sun sets
It would have been way way simpler if he hired an professional for installing this system. These systems are complicated and always have small things that need to be done in a certain way to make it work perfectly. A good professional would not have to go through this try and learn process which people watching this video will put against having smart home.
I learned one important lesson watching Linus's house problems, absolutely never go full high-tech on home stuff, causes nothing but problems for a slight increase in comfort
Indeed. For heating in particular just get yourself a heat pump with weather compensation and once you set it up you never touch it again. No thermostats needed.
I can't even imagine what a pain in the ass this would be for someone who wasn't getting paid making content for this. And if you were relying on a proprietary system from a professional installer... god, imagine losing heat because the cloud service controlling your baseboards went offline, or needing to wait three days for a certified smart home tech to come by and fix a network issue.
I never thought that my tech hobby and plumbing day job would clash on this channel. This was the last place I thought I'd have zone valves and zone controllers explained to me, lol. Also, you can totally just hardwire the ecobee to a zone controller. The boiler system should be set on a reset heating curve, which combats overshoot by lowering the water temp entering the floor as the air temperature warms up outside plus the ecobee stats have a setting for boiler heating, which anticipates the heat. Another solution to the inaccurate temp readings is to adjust the temp offset in the settings on each ecobee. You can adjust + or - however many degrees off the thermostat is. Just set up a thermometer in the room and adjust the temp offset in the ecobee stats to match.
Yea, no thank you. A simple digital, non-cloud thermostat for me with weekday/weekend schedules. Plus, if the power goes out, I can run my heater off a 1200 watt inverter hooked to my car for days on end, because I've done it.
My friend setup a smart home too and its dumb. Some lights turn on when you walk into the room or certain lights switch on when the sun goes down. He spent all this time and money trying to make his home into something futuristic, but there’s no real noticeable benefit to any of it
So I think its best to say don't piss off Jake, He has done so much for help with all of these projects. Jake is the go to for all things when answers are lost.
Another great niche for tons and tons of cash to be made) The 'smarter/dumber' and more complicated the tech gets, the better off the tech-savvy guys will be, and Jake could legit call it quits and fire up another 'big business' right away, no sweat;)
@Travis Ash Truth. However it is/was the only way to meet Linus's goal of having smart home control and automation without being reliant on a cloud service that might not exist tomorrow.
I have a Nest thermostat (which I do NOT recommend) and I had to get an external sensor because I figured out air is flowing from the attic through the wall to the thermostat through the wiring hole, throwing off the temp reading.
I can definitely see Linus turning 40 and gutting out all the smart sht, replacing everything with mercury tilt switches he bought on the black market.
Honestly, check out how Nordic manufacturer Nibe has done this, it works very well for heating. Basically the idea is to measure *outside* temperature and automatically adjust the heat input to the floor. Their system even allows adjusting the delay for the system so it can react sensibly to temperature changes. For our house, we have 2 hour delay for the system reaction time to changes in outside temperature and heat curve that matches the power needs for the house for each outside temperature (the system allows setting target temperature point on the curve for each 5 °C outdoors temperature change and it will linearly interpolate the missing values between the points). After that, you simply balance the amount water pushed though the loops in the concrete in each room and you run the system all thermostats fully open all the time. We still have a thermostat in each room but that's intented to cut the heating if e.g. Sun is shining in and heating the room too much. This also results in very low water temperature in the heating loops which reduces energy demands for heating the water. If I remember correctly, the system is pumping about 35 °C water into the loop if outside temperature is around -30 °C and that's enough to allow me to walk around barefoot in a t-shirt.
These videos are great for reinforcing how fragmented, unreliable and problematic smart home technology can be. It's great when it works, but it's a nightmare when it doesn't. They're time & money sinks for your house because there's too many moving parts and the hardware & software creators don't always stay updated with patches or communicate with each other. Overall, the smart home industry is a mess.
Because he bought the worst kind. He is half assing DIY. If you get a proper setup that handles it for you. You have no problems. If you get a real networked thermostat and lower your ego enough to connect a network cable to it, you can control everything through a webpage you get to write yourself anywhere on your network on any device and have NONE of these problems. They problems exist because this system doesn't work by itself. But he also isn't the one making the system. You cannot best of both worlds that shit. You either let the smart home tech control your house for you, or you do every bit of it yourself.
Yep. Linus even talked about this when they installed the switches/thermostats/etc - They all try to go this proprietary route, and it leads to each of them having painfully horrible flaws that could be fixed by allowing each to follow the same standard. If we ever reach that point, I'd look into doing it myself, but right now the tech is too closed off and prone to issues for me to consider even replacing more than a room of light switches.
Not just the smart home stuff, but commercial solutions aren't really much better, and they cost a lot more. We're constantly running into issues with stuff because they have a bad implementation of a standard such as BACnet. It's an open standard but quite complex, and it's not uncommon for different manufacturers stuff to not work together despite both using that standard, because one or both implemented it stupid. Or when the manufacturer decided to roll their own standard, usually this is specifically to vendor lock an install meaning unless you fork out to replace the whole system, you have to go back to them for any revisions.
@LEGO Apocalypse Those relay boards have a manual feature where you can move a jumper over to force them on, off, or in automatic. It would be a good idea to have those wired into some switches you can operate easily so you can take manual control to isolate a part of the system if it's leaky for example, or force the heating on if the software becomes unresponsive for any reason.
only poorly done low end stuff. There are millions of homes that use real home automation hardware that dont have any problems for decades. Crestron is the largest, and their stuff just works when installed by a competent dealer. Control 4 is the next and then thereare some little bit players out there as well. But all require competent installers.
Hey Linus, how many WiFi networks do you have to split all the smart devices (lamps, A/C, etc..) and separate them from user devices (phones, tablets, etc...) ? ...or do you have them all in the same network ?!
Nah. Just have an easy to use system that handles itself or do a real DIY setup with normal thermostats that hook up via network cables. Then you can just write your own webpage that can be accessed from anywhere on your network on any device to control it. It sucks because he's half assing DIY. Go properly mainstream and let the company handle this for you. Or do real DIY. Half assed DIY sucks in all contexts.
@Jason Todd Save the headache and use KNX, a global building automation standard with 500+ vendors and 100.000+ partners to choose from. I have it in my house and it is used to manage Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport among other large intallations
@Daniel Katai my guess is their are experts/consultants you can hire to tell you what systems to pick and choose because they know what works well/together.
Smart homes seem like a nightmare to me. I mean, good luck to the next house owner navigating and configuring this stuff. Especially if the server one day dies. 😅
@attentionaddicts He doesn't have to sell the server. He just has to move the OS (or just the config) to some other device (like raspberry pie or some mini PC) and sell that with the house.
@FD FD I've done design work on banks whose HVAC system can only be modified on the 20 year old laptop running some edition of DOS. If that laptop ever craps out, they're boned. It's kind of baffling how much the top brass refuses to invest in a company's physical infrastructure. "It works, what's the problem?"
ps. We know that the Ecobees can actually be wired into the zone valves directly, but this setup gives us much greater flexibility with full HomeAssistant control, and the potential for configuring the Ecobees and American Standard thermostats to work together better.
Qhy not ise the Generic Thermostat integration in HA? It lets you keep it all in HA and not have to write a whole big automation for each one. you just set it to read the sensor from the ecobee and turn on/off the relay. If you want to keep the ecobee scheduling you could even read the set point from the ecobee, or maybe even the hvac action. There should be a state attribute for the Hvac action and the thermostat should set it properly.
Maybe an air baffle of some kind would keep the american non-standard thermostats from roasting the ecobees so much.
@Debodeep Chowdhury Aaa.... I can understand a little bit but I can't speak..... 😅😅😅😅😅
@KRUTIBASH Pattnaik Can you speakBengali?
Jai Jagganaath🙏🏼
Odisha Is progressing With Grace of God even too much vulnerable for cyclones😖
@Debodeep Chowdhury and from INDIA 🇮🇳, ODISHA also 😉
I remember working in HVAC and we had a house that we installed AC in and The homeowner complained that it would freeze her out in the afternoon. We asked her what time and she said around 3:00 so made an appointment to be there the next day at 3:00. The light would come in from the window and hit a mirror and get reflected onto the thermostat like it was Indiana Jones finding the room where the ark of the covenant is held. We just tilted that mirror bit, problem solved
Reminds me of problem at work, when camera on one machine stopped working randomly. It was happening for about three days at relatively same time, so one day I came in sooner. There was square of sunlight, sized about 5x5 centimeters traveling thru whole plant and that one machine. And somehow it traveled exactly over camera lens! Solution? I just grabbed some sticker and placed it on plexiglass cover on machine :D
That's hilarious.
lol, I'm happy that I live in tropical country so we doesn't really need to control my room temp, just my lovely fan is enough. well a lot of people using AC too here, I just can't afford it and can't really stand cold
Totally different type of problem, but I recall a satellite Internet connection that would go down like clockwork in the morning. The problem was reported for a few weeks. Finally, we were able to check it while it was offline rather than getting to the location after it had come back online. Turned out that dew was getting into the coax shorting it out, but later in the morning it was evaporated fixing the connection. A little application of dielectric grease to prevent the moisture ingress solved that problem. It's funny how things you'd never normally think of being related to a problem can absolutely be the specific issue.
Lol, people forget the actual thermostat unit is what's reading the whole house's temp.
If Linus ever sells this house, they're going to have to write a massive technical manual for the new owners and be on call for tech support just to turn the heat on.
"they're going to have to write a massive technical manual for the new owners" reminds me of Mr.Bean in Man vs Bee when they gave him a manual for their over complicated house XD uaclips.com/video/PDTgmRdODQY/відео.html
No one would buy it after seeing that mech room, so no prob!
I recently sold my house and i took everything with me to our new build house. everything still worked manually so i also destroyed the technical manual and am writing a new one ;)
It will basically be impossible to sell a house like this without ripping all the tech out. It's all super niche to Linus' needs. Very unlikely he will ever want to sell though.
Thats why thay made the videos never mind the next owner but him in 5 years like what the hell was the plan with this or how did I rig this thing up and make it work years ago
I feel like the amount of effort that goes into fully setting up this system so that you never have to touch the thermostat again is equal to the amount of effort you'd spend over a lifetime adjusting the temperature valve on your radiators manually.
@FuckedUpGenius Yeah I set a schedule on my boiler in 1999 and I think I might have changed it once. The radiator in each room has a thermostat on it, technology from the 50s.
Smart homes are very dumb.
I have a smart heater that allows me to set a program and never look at it again. It took about 15 minutes to set up, it has a tablet-like controller in the living room and works with an app. Easy as can be.
I've only manually adjusted temperatures a couple of times in the past few years, mainly when my mom was visiting and complaining about the cold 😂
It’s definitely more of a hobbyist thing than average consumer. That’s _starting_ to change but it’s still stupidly complicated if you’re inexperienced.
@Tyler Hauth I would not be bold enough to claim that much. I don't know Linus that well. But I have known people who would futz with their thermostat something like a dozen times a day.
To be clear, that was due to them attempting to be energy conscientious with an old thermostat and not much sense of finesse.
So they'd get up in the morning, run to the thermostat, jack it all the way up, run back to bed to get under the covers where it's warm, then wait until it was too warm under the covers. Then they get up, shower, get dressed, decide it's far too warm, so drop the thermostat all the way down.
That would probably last until time to go to work, at which point they'd set it up to 50 to keep the pipes from freezing.
When they came home, they'd go into the same kind of routine, doing the work the thermostat would have automated had they any sense.
I'm not sure if they continued doing that. I haven't seen them in decades. But when I went over to visit, after they'd turn the thermostat all the way down, I took to moving it up to about 5 degrees less than where it happened to be just then, and they'd enjoy a night of not messing with the thermostat all the time.
I'd like to think that Linus has more sense than they were demonstrating. But then he suggested that *this* was going to be a net time saver, so I do have to wonder just how much was he futzing with the thermostat.
However much it was, it would've been less effort than what this took. I think if he messed with his thermostat about the normal amount, that 5000 factor might be about right. I just don't feel like it could've been accurate for him, unless the real purpose behind all of this was to just get another video out.
Equal? EQUAL? How about 5000x more?
All of these smart home videos Linus makes just reinforces my desire to keep my manual mercury heat pump termostat
You can offset the temperature sensor in the ecobee thermostat by looking for an option called thresholds in the installation settings and offset the temperature accordingly. I had a similar issue with my thermostat incorrectly reporting the temperature.
After watching this, my conclusion is that "smart homes" and "home assistant/homekit" are all so insanely complicated that it only works if have Jake come over to your house to install it.
really, more worth your money to invest into passive solutions. like energy saving houses.
@chieffw you can do building automation properly (KNX), or do a hack, i.e., the Linus way
They work fine just don't be stupidly picky.
Or. Don't adopt the brand new stuff and stick to lightbulbs and power plugs for now.
Better do manually no need for smarthome, it is better for your physical health
@John Gelnaw my stability issues are more than just Z-Wave. The integration in home assistant broke for me at one point (don't upgrade to a x.x.1 home assistant version) and I have a few switches on a circuit with a motion flood light. When that light turns on, the other lights dim for a moment. I suspect that effect is happening in the switches as well, so the switches are getting errors that cause them to fudge up the mesh. Way better than ADT's implementation, though. If the mesh gets messed up for ADT, you lose all your devices for months.
My take on smart home systems is that they should always only help automate or more easily control things, but not be the only way to control things. That's the downside of these fancier systems vs aftermarket add-ons, you don't have still the manual controls in place in case things stop working. Most everything in my house I can now control from my phone, yet my wife who can't be bothered can still do things the old school way.
I think this is the wisest way to go about creating your smart home systems.
I love how much tech your house has, and I enjoy that you know enough to keep the interface communication well in-house.
Thanks for making this a YT series by the way, I'll never own my own home so it's cool to see what a fellow tech nerd would be able to do.
I'll still never understand why people want everything in there house to have a screen and twenty times more prone to failure.
The same reason a dog licks his balls
some people are technologists who love technnology, that's why. Making a smart-home is kinda like having those project cars you used to work on everyday in the 90s
Running physical wire from the thermostat to the zone valves would have been sooo much easier and more reliable.
Linus's smart home series is the best ad against smart home lmao
To be fair, they're highlighting problems for content. Not much good content in "I plugged in X and it seamlessly controlled Y". Plus, he's using more fiddly solutions that are kind of fringe like Home Assistant. Those allow much more configurability, but at increased complexity most people who just throw in an Amazon/Google/Apple/Samsung solution would never see. Not saying the HA market doesn't have a LONG way to go. It does.
@Halcyonyou can just not build a Frankensteins monster of a smart home, use one providers system, and you don’t have most of his issues
I have a semi-smart home, all devices run on my local network and only 1 thing, the heater, has it's own seperate controller that can't be accessed by any smart home app or hub. But it's fine, it was easy to set up and has been running smooth for years. I've saved so much money since I've had these smart devices, so I understand why someone would want a smart home.
I just don't get why anyone would want this complicated system, it's expensive and hard to control.
I know people who installed heat pumps in Alberta. They are suffering on the -35C days. House is 13C as it can’t keep up. And they don’t have a server room.
Yeah pretty much the definition of overly complicated and over engineered. But i'm sure these things will lead to better solutions and innovations we can't predict.
Hey Linus; Christmas gift tip: A few years ago someone gave us a bed cover that heats the bed. Not an electric blanket, this goes on over the mattress and under the sheets. Has a control for each side of the bed so I can have a cold bed and the fiancé has a nice warm bed.
I bet you can even get one with Zigbee / Tasmota or HomeKit support.
i love the fact that every video linus does on smart home shows the lack of knowledge he has and thus solidifies how little he knows
You need a thermostat on each floor to keep the heat even throughout the entire home.
This seems way way more complicated than it needs to be. 😂
The dual thermostats with neither actually doing a full job is killing me 😂
@Kenny W. Ashton in another video they installed a weird AC unit that has one compressor unit outside and air handlers in each room... which is proprietary and only works with its special thermostat.
Ya its a big issue with smart home stuff.
@Andy Brice The wonders of too much tech in a house.
@Kenny W. Ashton The heat pump stuff seems weird to me. They certainly do have a floor where they stop working, surely it shouldn't be hitting that this early in the year. It should be like, once in a while on very very cold days. I only spent one winter with mine in my old house but there wasn't a single day it was too cold for the heat pump, in maritime Canada.
@alex lacey It sounds like Linus wants as much moved away from the American Standard thermostats as he can, and only has them since the A/C apparently has to go through them due to propriety communication issues (whatever those are).
As a heating tech this hurt to see how your controls were designed. Separate thermostat for heating and cooling instead of one common, thermostats not directly powering the zone valves. In my opinion the "wireless" zone relays are redundant and serve no purpose other than needless complexity and I doubt that this will provide better integration between the thermostats. But hey at least it makes for content! Still love the channel and that IBC boiler is a beaut ;)
PS - You may not know this but Tekmar is based out of Vernon, it would have been nice to show them some love! Consider replacing the ecobee's, zone relays and american standard stats with some of their stuff. If you need some advise reach out!
My problem with Home Assistant is all the automation logic is done with YAML config files, which is like trying to write e-mail with a mouse and a virtual keyboard. Just look how a simple oneliner if statement looks like in the HA's Automation UI (14:54)
You can use other stuff as well of course, but then youre adding even more parts to fail. Node red is kind of awesome, I'm trying not to use it though...
I had this same setup using ecobee as a simple thermostat. Eventually switched to just using a thermostat on homeassistant and having a tablet on the wall with a custom home assistant dashboard. I stopped using the ecobee since I kept having weird bugs/disconnection issues. Great setup now with homeassistant! Thanks for the video.
You got that right Jake, thank you Apple! I love my homekit smart home and I'm only waiting on the new wave of devices with matter before buying another device. I can confidently say that my smart home has been much more reliable than Linus'.
12:07 You can adjust / offset the temperature on the screen on an ecobee! You can display higher or lower depending on preferences.
If smart home stuff was about 10x more streamlined and everything integrated easily, it'd be worth it. As someone who tried to smart home all the things, found it was more like having a second job. Getting things integrated was a pain, but thought it'd be a one-off thing. But I'm kind of amazed at how frequently simple things break with home-assistant. I get it's free and open-source and community managed so of course it's going to have some jank. But the benefits aren't worth the effort.
This just shows how much smart homes can be easily beaten by a simple mechanical solution
I love Mqtt - It's great for situations in which multiple publishers need to broadcast to multiple subscribers (something like thermostats (pub) to an AC (sub) or heater (sub) .
If anything, what all these videos about Linus his house have taught me, is that I don't want a smart home. It's just WAY more trouble than it's worth.
@RobbidyRob But how long would it take to recoup those costs from utility savings?
Smart home isn't the issue. He has a gigantic house with complicated systems that the average person doesn't have to deal with.
It taught me that a professional home automation system like knx or loxone is worth the extra cost.
SAME!
They are WAY over-complicating things for the standing user - imo to a fault. Smart home stuff should be simple, reliable, and maintainable. Having the whole system based on a local server with open-source, community maintains plugins and such just isn’t the way to go (unless you love tinkering with it, or making videos). Something like Apple’s HomeKit keeps everything local, is very secure, and is so much easier to setup for a normal user. Quinn from SnazzyLabs did a really good video about his smart home based on these principals, and because of those, he has had a much better experience.
Just as I had plans to setup my smart home, I threw them off the window. Don't get me wrong, I'll setup a Pi based security camera, or even tasmota with tasmoadmin for some iot development and ota updates (still haven't found a good way to update them). But subjecting all of your house for this seems kinda weird. My friend has a smart home setup, that works, but that includes continuous maintenance, and even though their "ongoing cost" of heating/cooling is lower, I doubt that the constant 1-2kW of servers running constantly doesn't turn that on it's head. I have a simple gas heating box (lost the word for it, sry) that does radiators and hot water with 60L tank capacity that it can re-heat, shall it get too cold. And a single AC strategically positioned between two floors on the stairs. It helps with the run-up run-down between summer and winter with hot air heating and in summer with cold air. Investing all of this money into proper house isolation inside out in the first place, would go miles by itself.
I love these smart home videos, I work in the IoT smart building industry on the commercial end and we have been implementing our solution for AGES. So cool to see this being done by a UAclipsr. p.s. MQTT is sweet! we implement thing kind of tech to thousands of sites allowing control from a single platform (our own ;) ) to hundreds of sites. This wasn’t meant to be a shameless plug but here we are… #t-macTechnologies
There's a configurable temperature reading offset for the ecobee that'll solve your American standard radiant heat issue. Assuming it's always off by a roughly constant temperature difference
I never really considered needing several blankets that big of a deal but now that I think of it I guess most people have good enough heating that they usually don't need more than 1
Just this week bumped my blanket count up to 4. Still have 2 spares ready lol.
What's wrong with using more blankets anyway? XD
Don't forget to balance your radiators in the system as well. I could make a big difference👍
Yeah, those thermostats should be side by side to stop them from interfering with each other.
Thermostats are not heavy enough to need to be stud mounted.
Now you have local control! If your relay board ever goes out and you need heat before you can fix it, you can manually turn on zones by pushing that silver lever all the way to the right. There's spring tension you are working against when the zone valve is not powered. But if you just push the silver lever with more force you can run the zone.
There is a little metal hook on the bottom that you can get the lever to rest in, thereby holding it open without power.
ecobee has remote sensors that could be paired. you could put the remote sensor in a good suitable location and disable the thermostat reading.
Blaming Jake, always a good way to go.
Blame Jake, fire Colton.
Repent and believe in Jesus. John 3:16 KJV - For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Luke 13:3 KJV - I tell you nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.
John 3:3 KJV - “Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Jake should blame his weight 🥱
Jake is the only one to blame I don’t blame him
Colton must be sleeping better, someone is temporarily most likely to be fired
Theres a setting in ecobees to adjust the thermostat reading. Just figure out how much hotter the other thermostat is making the reading and adjust it the other way
Dang, the boiler is capable of outdoor reset, isn't it? I think using that and keeping basic thermostats would've been more cost-effective
Or get an open therm controller and control the water temp. Plus a pid controller through home assistant with a cycle set at 30 mins
You really should have went with a bosch heat pump that can run off of any thermostat and are more efficient than any traditional heat pump. You might have been even capable of running it off of your Zwave system. The bosch heat pump is also variable in that it adjusts the compressor capacity by itself as the load changes.
As a former plumber, I cannot fathom why anyone would willingly do this to themselves.
Cuz it got millions of.views throughout all the Videos
@TheAkashicTraveller I assume they'd leave the home assistant installation when selling the house.
I'm an IT guy and I'd RUN from this house if I saw it on the open market. Jake will never be able to take a vacation more than an hour's drive away! To need a phone AND A LAPTOP to turn on the heat... 😂 😂 😂
@muyoso probably going to have to find a different channel for that, sure there’s a niche home improvement channel centered around tech with 3k subscribers that makes quality content. Keep digging in that search bar.
@TheAkashicTraveller Selling a smart home should be considered fraud lmao.
What I am finding with my Ecobee is that it seems to have IR based temp sensing on the front. And if you point the thermostat and something hot (or cold) it will throw it off. For example, mine is in the hallways where the return is... BUT it faces into the laundry room. So if dryer is going, it thinks the rest of the house is hotter than it actually. is...
I could totally set this up myself...my dad has an awesome set of tools. ~ Spicoli
One could just use a smart thermostat with a temp probe for underfloor heating to solve all of linuses problems. They have an effective smart fuzzylogic processor to track temp changes as a function of heating effort /time. You could spend just 40$ to do the work on autopilot.
Also, don't put thermostats above other electronics like security panels. They output heat as well causing issues with the thermostats.
Can't wait for the video of Jake explaining to the next home owners how everything works.
After the sell you will have to subscribe Jake on a monthly fee to keep it all running... Finally, your home as a service.
"Here's a UAclips playlist"
They'll revert back to dumb mercury switches.
I love how these smart AC/Heater controls can be overridden by city/state authorizes with a simple signed order and call to utility company. All in an effort to reduce strain on the grid and fight climate change theory!
The more you overtake the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the drain!
Ecobee has room sensors that connect via Bluetooth/wifi to the thermostat so you can read the temp of the room from somewhere else
3:01 his look says it all.. Linus would never be able to figure that out on his own lmao
"Dad, my room is cold!"
"Okay, let me just quickly reboot the house."
From the wireless speakers to all of the thermostats everywhere to the light switches that don't work, this house is absolutely hilarious.
The funny thing is he could have just bought normal temperature sensors that interfaced with a network over wire. And then write yourself a simply webpage that can be accessed from anywhere on the network on any device.
This is some weird ass blend between DIY and someone else doing it for you. Thats his problem. He should have gone mainstream or done actual DIY.
@Koots Yeah I feel like the HVAC in the mechanical room should be wired, to avoid all the wifi issues they've been having...
@Koots I feel like this home was just too early for Matter devices, which should eliminate most of the interconnection problems.
These Home Assistant add-ons are admittedly hacky ways to get proprietary systems to work together.... Compared to Matter, which is designed to work together from the start.
@Michael If you're really desperate for heat and the smart thermostat isn't working you could just pull it off the wall and short the heat wire like an analog thermostat does.
Just put the server in the kid room and it will heat it up just nice..... in winter. You need to move it elsewhere in Summer sadly.
Jake has job security for the rest of their time at that house lol
Just add a few wireless temperature sensors that double as presence sensors and turn off the thermostat sensor.
Linus consider a 3D printed shield to protect the Ecobee from the extra heat.
i reccomend heated blankets for when you dont have heat. its a game changer and you just need that and a blanket for on top of the heated blanket to trap the heat. 10/10
I love how it's been over a year now and Linus STILL doesn't have a functioning home HVAC system. His wife must be *miles* more patient and understanding than mine.
@TabMaster I figured but remembered Americans abbreviate regions online and that Lamborghinis are not comfortable places in Canadian winters.
IT prolly taking longer cause they trying to monetize everything they can about the house,
@WorldTravel1518 that was my point lol idk what you're getting at
@TabMaster Obviously, and the person who corrected them was being an idiot.
I would agree with that however with the context it's obvious he's not talking about California lol
I’m sure it’s already in the comments but you should checkout esphome for your esp based devices, it kicks ass over tasmota … you basically write similar YAML to home assistant, but it’s like 10x more configurable
It's more reliable to control in-floor heating based on the temperature in the zone loop (water temperature sensore). This creates a baseline temperature in the room that the heat pumps can be used to bring the rest of the way up to the comfortable setpoint without having to work as hard. This also allows the in-floor heating to run at a more stable setting rather than being subject to the fast changes an air sensing thermometer can be exposed to.
I love how linus has grown so much throughout the years
He's still small though
Just use a single thermostat, it's making it all to complicated.
And hey, my living room is 18 degrees and comfortable :) And the bedroom is like 14 degrees.
I love Linus going on about how cold it is in his house and Jake is casually standing in the background wearing shorts and t-shirt
@TheFather I'll t-shirt while shoveling in a storm, so long as it's not too windy. And I'll still be sweating.
@armanke1366 no shit. Fat warms up body. I used to shorts and t-shirt when it was snowing outside. I don't do that now. Cold as fk now
I felt that when the floorheat pipes started to warm up. floor was 11c That's the temp I have to change from shorts to trousers :D
@Willian Souza I live near the equator, We're used to temps around 30C
it's hot to us when the weather app says "feels like 41C" from 11PM to about 2PM. I pretty much stay shirtless all day when at home.
Nights are around 20C, sometimes a bit lower. I did and do use a thin blanket when sleeping.
Out of habit I stayed shirtless even in the december in previous years. But in this year after I've lost some weight, I feel cold and want to put a tshirt as soon as the sun sets
@Shwalamazula always love to see things about the body explained scientifically
It would have been way way simpler if he hired an professional for installing this system.
These systems are complicated and always have small things that need to be done in a certain way to make it work perfectly.
A good professional would not have to go through this try and learn process which people watching this video will put against having smart home.
Man jake's laugh at the intro is killing me, it's perfect hahaha!
Jake's smart, the longer stuff doesn't work at the house, the longer he gets to basically live there fixing things. *taps forehead*
For the life of me I will never know why he’s doing this. Must not be too busy at LTT
I learned one important lesson watching Linus's house problems, absolutely never go full high-tech on home stuff, causes nothing but problems for a slight increase in comfort
To get comfy we gotta get right uncomfy
Indeed. For heating in particular just get yourself a heat pump with weather compensation and once you set it up you never touch it again. No thermostats needed.
for a house that you completely rebuild, you still seem to add to added. a lot of the new stuff could have been installed before in the walls
With the thermometers reading too hot bc of the ac controllers..can’t you just adjust the heat to a few degrees warmer to compensate?
@Linus Tech Tips you can do temperature correction on the ecobee thermostat itself where you don’t have to move it.
I can't even imagine what a pain in the ass this would be for someone who wasn't getting paid making content for this. And if you were relying on a proprietary system from a professional installer... god, imagine losing heat because the cloud service controlling your baseboards went offline, or needing to wait three days for a certified smart home tech to come by and fix a network issue.
I never thought that my tech hobby and plumbing day job would clash on this channel. This was the last place I thought I'd have zone valves and zone controllers explained to me, lol. Also, you can totally just hardwire the ecobee to a zone controller. The boiler system should be set on a reset heating curve, which combats overshoot by lowering the water temp entering the floor as the air temperature warms up outside plus the ecobee stats have a setting for boiler heating, which anticipates the heat. Another solution to the inaccurate temp readings is to adjust the temp offset in the settings on each ecobee. You can adjust + or - however many degrees off the thermostat is. Just set up a thermometer in the room and adjust the temp offset in the ecobee stats to match.
Tech god advice
good advice
This should be sticky
Yea, no thank you. A simple digital, non-cloud thermostat for me with weekday/weekend schedules. Plus, if the power goes out, I can run my heater off a 1200 watt inverter hooked to my car for days on end, because I've done it.
My friend setup a smart home too and its dumb. Some lights turn on when you walk into the room or certain lights switch on when the sun goes down. He spent all this time and money trying to make his home into something futuristic, but there’s no real noticeable benefit to any of it
So I think its best to say don't piss off Jake, He has done so much for help with all of these projects. Jake is the go to for all things when answers are lost.
This is why I prefer esphome to tasmota, it just pops up in home assistant vs having to configure each device
Linus: "House, set temperature to ..."
House: "I'm sorry Linus. I cannot let you do that."
House: "Daisy, Daisy ..."
Hoff9000, you son of a gun
nice!
Wait until the system says something like, "I'll disconnect your life support systems", or "Auto-destruct activated. 10 - 9 - 8 - 7..."
@crimsonlightbinder and cutting internet access ...
House: Ok Linus, setting temperature to 40c and locking all doors. 😅
Another great niche for tons and tons of cash to be made) The 'smarter/dumber' and more complicated the tech gets, the better off the tech-savvy guys will be, and Jake could legit call it quits and fire up another 'big business' right away, no sweat;)
2 thermostats per zone to control 1 set of heat pump valves. Absolutely ridiculous. Jankiest solution EVER 🤣
oh god.. with all of this gadgety stuff. I can't imagine what kind of tracking software he finna have for when his kids are teenagers
TI makes a nice sensor for temperature that is both accurate and precise. How you mount it though is another story.
Jake is a very smart and hard working guy, and yet does not take himself seriously. Class act.
@Travis Ash Truth.
However it is/was the only way to meet Linus's goal of having smart home control and automation without being reliant on a cloud service that might not exist tomorrow.
@Travis Ash exactly - but it is content ;)
The heating system is an over complicated mess.
I have a Nest thermostat (which I do NOT recommend) and I had to get an external sensor because I figured out air is flowing from the attic through the wall to the thermostat through the wiring hole, throwing off the temp reading.
I can definitely see Linus turning 40 and gutting out all the smart sht, replacing everything with mercury tilt switches he bought on the black market.
Honestly, check out how Nordic manufacturer Nibe has done this, it works very well for heating. Basically the idea is to measure *outside* temperature and automatically adjust the heat input to the floor. Their system even allows adjusting the delay for the system so it can react sensibly to temperature changes. For our house, we have 2 hour delay for the system reaction time to changes in outside temperature and heat curve that matches the power needs for the house for each outside temperature (the system allows setting target temperature point on the curve for each 5 °C outdoors temperature change and it will linearly interpolate the missing values between the points).
After that, you simply balance the amount water pushed though the loops in the concrete in each room and you run the system all thermostats fully open all the time.
We still have a thermostat in each room but that's intented to cut the heating if e.g. Sun is shining in and heating the room too much.
This also results in very low water temperature in the heating loops which reduces energy demands for heating the water. If I remember correctly, the system is pumping about 35 °C water into the loop if outside temperature is around -30 °C and that's enough to allow me to walk around barefoot in a t-shirt.
Don't ever piss Jake off. He knows everything about everything in Linus' house. LOL!!!!
These videos are great for reinforcing how fragmented, unreliable and problematic smart home technology can be. It's great when it works, but it's a nightmare when it doesn't. They're time & money sinks for your house because there's too many moving parts and the hardware & software creators don't always stay updated with patches or communicate with each other.
Overall, the smart home industry is a mess.
Because he bought the worst kind.
He is half assing DIY. If you get a proper setup that handles it for you. You have no problems. If you get a real networked thermostat and lower your ego enough to connect a network cable to it, you can control everything through a webpage you get to write yourself anywhere on your network on any device and have NONE of these problems.
They problems exist because this system doesn't work by itself. But he also isn't the one making the system. You cannot best of both worlds that shit. You either let the smart home tech control your house for you, or you do every bit of it yourself.
Yep. Linus even talked about this when they installed the switches/thermostats/etc - They all try to go this proprietary route, and it leads to each of them having painfully horrible flaws that could be fixed by allowing each to follow the same standard. If we ever reach that point, I'd look into doing it myself, but right now the tech is too closed off and prone to issues for me to consider even replacing more than a room of light switches.
Not just the smart home stuff, but commercial solutions aren't really much better, and they cost a lot more.
We're constantly running into issues with stuff because they have a bad implementation of a standard such as BACnet. It's an open standard but quite complex, and it's not uncommon for different manufacturers stuff to not work together despite both using that standard, because one or both implemented it stupid.
Or when the manufacturer decided to roll their own standard, usually this is specifically to vendor lock an install meaning unless you fork out to replace the whole system, you have to go back to them for any revisions.
@LEGO Apocalypse Those relay boards have a manual feature where you can move a jumper over to force them on, off, or in automatic. It would be a good idea to have those wired into some switches you can operate easily so you can take manual control to isolate a part of the system if it's leaky for example, or force the heating on if the software becomes unresponsive for any reason.
only poorly done low end stuff. There are millions of homes that use real home automation hardware that dont have any problems for decades. Crestron is the largest, and their stuff just works when installed by a competent dealer. Control 4 is the next and then thereare some little bit players out there as well. But all require competent installers.
HomeKit integration on ecobees is also a lot faster than the regular integration into HA.
Hey Linus, how many WiFi networks do you have to split all the smart devices (lamps, A/C, etc..) and separate them from user devices (phones, tablets, etc...) ? ...or do you have them all in the same network ?!
Why not just put an angled bit of metal over the unit to deflect the heat from the ecovees? Wouldn't that be easier?
Thanks anyway. I appreciate my smart thermostat and a couple smart outlets but this is ridiculous.
I like how every new episode of this series is a new argument against smart homes.
Nah. Just have an easy to use system that handles itself or do a real DIY setup with normal thermostats that hook up via network cables. Then you can just write your own webpage that can be accessed from anywhere on your network on any device to control it.
It sucks because he's half assing DIY. Go properly mainstream and let the company handle this for you. Or do real DIY. Half assed DIY sucks in all contexts.
I like how they set it up but throw away the millions they would make by selling a pre-configured system, lol...engineers..
@Jason Todd Save the headache and use KNX, a global building automation standard with 500+ vendors and 100.000+ partners to choose from. I have it in my house and it is used to manage Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport among other large intallations
@Daniel Katai my guess is their are experts/consultants you can hire to tell you what systems to pick and choose because they know what works well/together.
@Crimin4L I hope you’re joking lmao
I feel like this whole think could have been solved much more eligantly but I'm no expert. It just seems to be a bit overly complex.
couldn't you just put a heat deflector on top of the thermostats that pump heat into the ecobees so that it just deflects the heat out into the room?
Ecobee let’s you set an offset on the temperature to compensate for stuff like warm walls or heat sources close by.
Imagine having a server for your heating system. Talk about overkill
You've just convinced me, that IOT and home assistant are a nightmare and should be avoided. :)
Hobbyist open source software sucks and there might be a reason 99% of people around the world prefer real software instead? *surprised pikachu face*
Linus if an old couple buys your house as is, they would be a deer in head lights 😂
Linus's kids be like: Daaaaaad, I'm freezing
Linus: That's gonna be a great video (already thinking about the video's sponsor)
I’m curious as to what the benefit of having a setup like this verses my current setup with my iPhone and using HomeKit compatible devices would be?
Does Linus not realize they sell portable radiant heaters?
Smart homes seem like a nightmare to me. I mean, good luck to the next house owner navigating and configuring this stuff. Especially if the server one day dies. 😅
@attentionaddicts He doesn't have to sell the server. He just has to move the OS (or just the config) to some other device (like raspberry pie or some mini PC) and sell that with the house.
@Carl Gunderson because there's no heating or lights without the server
@FD FD I've done design work on banks whose HVAC system can only be modified on the 20 year old laptop running some edition of DOS. If that laptop ever craps out, they're boned. It's kind of baffling how much the top brass refuses to invest in a company's physical infrastructure. "It works, what's the problem?"
you mean when the server dies.
They are a mess, done commerial and residential smart homes, they are nightmare to get working and keep working.