By MARC WOLLIN
Those of us who live in the northern latitudes make numerous adjustments as summer turns to fall turns to winter. Outside, it’s time to drain garden hoses and put away the umbrella on the deck. Inside, it’s a rotation in your closet and dresser, as short sleeves and shorts are put away, and long sleeves and sweaters get pulled to the front. And because you woke up with a cold nose and couldn’t put on your robe fast enough, you went to the thermostat and put up the heat.
That meant that this morning was different as the beast came to life. Maybe it was the sound of your radiators or vents creaking and stretching as hot water or air started coursing through them. Or maybe it was the smell, one as distinctive as coffee, as the accumulated dust in the system gets a good roasting for the first time in half a year. Or maybe it was the feeling that the temperature imbalance from under the covers to outside your bed wasn’t so drastic. Regardless, it’s as much a sign of the seasons as the deer starting to eat your azaleas.
If you are like many, you have developed a routine that is designed for both comfort and economy, the better to supply warmth when you need it and save money when you don’t. You turn it up in the morning when you start moving around, cozying the place up for breakfast, showers and getting dressed. If the house is going to be empty for the day with work or school, perhaps you drop it down a few degrees rather than heat an empty space. Either way, it likely gets pushed up at dusk as the outside and inside cool down, and all in the household return for the evening. And come bedtime you knock it back down for the night when you’ll be snug as a bug under the covers. Rinse and repeat tomorrow.
Because it is rinse and repeat, it’s a task that can be easily automated. And so if you are like many you might have installed a setback thermostat that makes this all happen. Once set, all those ups and downs in temperature are programmed in, and your system takes on a life of its own. You might tweak it up a few degrees if you were out and come back chilled, or knock it back if you put too much pepper in the chili and are sweating it out. But by and large you just let it do its thing.
Or perhaps you have taken the next step and upgraded to a smart thermostat. Wi-Fi connected, Alexa or Google Home or Apple enabled, these do all the things that a traditional setback thermostat does, plus a few additional benefits. Since they are wired into the world you can see their status from anywhere, and control the system via an app on your phone. Out later than you thought? No problem: a few taps and the heat stays on in the bedroom later than your normal nighty-night time.
Like everything else that is connected and smart these days (including certain people), sometimes these things seem just a little too intelligent. Consider our old thermostat. When we were cold we turned it up. When we were too warm we turned it down. Even the setback version did the same thing, just hands off. But our new smart controller is like a 6-year-old who is just dying to strut its stuff. And so even though I told ours to turn on at 6 a.m. when we want to warm the house, I awoke to warm air blowing on us at 5:30 a.m. I checked to make sure I had programmed it correctly. (Yes, I know how to set a clock.) Either it was operating in a different time zone or something else was happening.
It took some digging to find out that it is indeed showing off. Turns out there is a built-in feature called “smart recovery” that starts the system sooner than needed, with the idea that it will be at the temperature we want when we ask for it. Over several days it will start at different times to see just how long it takes to heat our space, then settle on a start time that achieves its objective. That also means that I have to stop anticipating, and put in not the time I want the heat to start, but when I want it to be warm. In short, I have to give in and let my robot overlord take care of me
As with so many things these days, the intelligence and capabilities of these systems is amazing. You can use Siri or Gemini to check the weather, ask Alexa the best nearby place to pick apples, or query Microsoft’s Copilot as to the best side dishes to go with chicken cacciatore. But in this case, if I want my ecobee to better control my heat, and maybe save me a few bucks, I have to stand down and let it do what it does best. Put another way, I have to be dumber so it can be smarter. And maybe warmer.