Properly set up home automation can reduce your energy usage. Track temperature throughout your house and open blinds, only direct heat/cooling to rooms that need it, etc. Sure a thermostat is programmable but it's limited by the ability to just turn on/off heat and a few temperature sensors. You can drastically expand what your thermostat can do (ie motorized blinds) and information it has access to (temperature outside, current weather, etc).

Or maybe someone is the type to have panic attacks about forgetting to turn the oven off. Having the ability to see oven status on the go is nice.

Or maybe someone has a larger house than you and the journey to the thermostat is more arduous than yours. Or the journey to the dishwasher or clothes dryer to see if it's done is arduous.

Or maybe someone has a disability and having quick access to various things is a huge time saver.

Maybe someone has a sensory issue and loud buzzing from a dryer finishing is problematic, so they want to disable the "finished" alert from the device and just receive a notification on their phone.

but if youre gathering that much data and making decisions with it, then from the OP "no internet connected thermostats" is a must. None of your smart home stuff should be able to phone home. Basically the openWRT argument but also for smart home. Use zigbee or zwave so devices can't just directly phone home and must simply connect through a hub (that you should control).

tl;dr - plenty of reasons to want these things, they just may not apply to you.

[–] silasmariner@programming.dev 7 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Getting back from holiday in a few hours and the weather is cold? Turn the heating on from your app before you get back. Wow. Life changing. Don't have a use case for most things being connected but thermostat really isn't that crazy IMO.

[–] Lemmee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Door locks and garage door openers are sweet to automate. My instance knows if I left by car/bike/foot, and welcomes me home with the proper unlocking/opening.

Also, never having to worry about if I left the door unlocked or garage door open is nice.

[–] bisby@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I've never gotten any automated locks because I've always been concerned about security around them, but also, Ive had too many warped doors in my life where I have to lean on the door to get the deadbolt to properly set. Which means that there is no way an automated lock would be able to automatically set itself.

Is the answer here: "there are just some doors this won't work on" or do the smart locks have some way of working around that?

[–] Lemmee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 14 minutes ago

I think you gotta fix the door before you can have complete confidence.

My automated deadbolt can ‘force’ its way shut when it has full battery. But when it gets low on juice, the door needs to be ‘fully shut’

So your best bet is to better align your strike plate so the door doesn’t need shimmied to close fully.

[–] bisby@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

"Set and forget" time based thermostat programming only works if your daily routine doesn't change daily or weekly or have outliers. The ability to change manually, or add other factors (is anyone home? let it get a bit colder, since it doesn't matter) is pretty great.

But I would still advocate for no internet connected thermostats from the OP. Your thermostat should be isolated to your home network (via zigbee/zwave or a quality VLAN) connecting to a server/hub you control. And your app should be communicating to your server/hub. Your thermostat shouldn't be able to report back to google whether or not you are home.