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.