I've long been frustrated with heating and cooling at our house. The thermostat has trouble dealing with Portland weather (need heating one day, cooling the next). Also, with our house being a super-insulated new build, the house doesn't naturally cool down at night. I know we could install a smart thermostat with remote sensors to help with some of the issues, but I still suspect I would want to be able to re-program it for more control. Things I would like to do:
Program a single preferred temperature (the thermostat won't let us set heat to and cool to temperatures closer than 3 degrees - I understand that is necessary to keep the system from over heating so it has to turn on air conditioning only to over cool, and turn heat back on.). With programing I could have it not turn on cooling if the temperature is slightly high IF the system had just been heating and visa versa. Programming could easily handle turning on AC for a while to cool down for night time. Heck, a super smart program could also take other inputs and determine when we are heading to bed. Additionally, I could program smart use of multiple sensors to maintain a reasonable temperature on the top floor (which tends to be too hot year round). At a minimum, use upstairs sensors for night time and downstairs ones for daytime. It would be super cool, but probably impossible to link it to the security system so putting the security system into "away" mode would automatically set the thermostat to vacation mode. If not, we could manually switch over. If we have remote, we can even set it back from vacation mode when we're on our way home so the temperature is reasonable when we get home no matter the season. I'm sure there's other clever things I'd decide to do if I could program it by writing code. I'm not quite clever enough to build my own. Thanks Frank
