Home thermostats: Big Brother's next target?
By Darren Murph 
posted January 13th 2008 11:53AM
posted January 13th 2008 11:53AM
It's not like we haven't heard of a higher power invading one's home before, but apparently, a proposal set to be considered at month's end could allow the state of California to "require that residents install remotely monitored temperature controls in their homes next year." The Programmable Communication Thermostat (PCT) would feature a "non-removable" FM receiver which could be controlled by Big Brother in "times of emergency" to drop load in order for "utilities to meet their supplies [when] the integrity of the grid is being jeopardized." Of course, we are hearing that adjustments would only be made ±4 degrees, but we aren't so keen on one thing leading to another, if you catch our drift.[Via Digg, image courtesy of Drexel, thanks yoshi]
By the way i live in Texas and they tried to get R I F D tags installed in our registration tags for our cars but it was voted down yet the DPS was caught with a huge order of these very tags ready for shipment to our dps offices now what do you call that? If they werent caught we would probably have these as we speak and might anyways!!
I actually work for a utility that is using these T-Stats for energy conservation. Its funny but you would think with all the problems that California has with rolling blackouts and shit, they would have had a plan like this in place. Or at the very least start looking at other utilities and copy the plans they have. It should have never got to this point to make it a requirement. These are kinda neat though, the utility will have a website that you can actually change the temp in your house when your not there.
Looks like we are going on a similar direction down here in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We are currlently suffering regular blackouts, and the goverment blames the A/C, so they are planning to monitor the type and amount of aircos everyone has at their homes.
Having this said, I think it is invasive to our privacy to have goverment know this kind of things. I pay for the power I consume, and the solution is not to control how many aircos I have, or let some agency control the temperature of my house remotely, but look for alternatives in their side.
I welcome this Orwellian nightmare for I will be the man who makes a million dollars selling custom built Faraday cages to fit over these things.
In all seriousness the first poster above is absolutely right. The answer is clean, reliable, and safe nuclear energy. The French have been using it safely for years and if those cheese eatin' surrender monkeys can do it, so can we.
Wow, you truly do live up to your name.
HEY! Insult the French all you want....lay off the cheese. I love my Sharp Whiskey Cheddar. :-P
G. Orwell was off by a few years, but his REALLY BIG mistake was calling them Big Brother. My brother wouldn't care what I do! I didn't care what my sibling did, either.
The term is Big Mother. Mother will keep baby cozy and warm.
That seems like a whole lot of money and effort for not much gain. There's gotta be much more effective ways at reducing power consumption in times of need.
FM receiver? I'm sure that'll be hard to jam (per FCC rules)
There are currently over 20 tokamak fusion reactors in operation worldwide, they are experimental, but they do exist..
Note that the only monitoring going on is the thermostat listening for commands - it is transmitting nothing. Not very Big Brother-like, at least not in the Orwellian sense intended.
What Stuart doesn't tell you is the article he references is from Dec. 2007. He did in fact have a house that consumed MUCH more energy than the average house and it was not "conservative radio show hosts" that said so. The Associated Press reported the story and (shock) the Gores admitted it.
It's a lot easier to be hypocritical and blame others for not doing their homework, eh Stuart? Maybe you should do a little thinking and follow up.
oh that'd be f'n great. my room is always at least a few degrees colder than the rest of the house. haven't measured specifically, but when the rest of the house is comfortable, my room is cold. so by all means, control my home temperature with no knowledge of the quirks of my house.
of course, you'll just have to turn off the electricity to my house to get me to stop running my little space heater. neener neener neeeener
I don't really see the problem with this as long as it isn't directly monitored by person, but by system.
I live in one of the two major systems in CA where there aren't water meters. This means that we pay the same rate owning a home where we don't even live (between renters) as a person does who fills up their pool once per week.
That doesn't seem fair either, but managing things directly from person to person is sometimes the only way to make people do what they should- manage their use of resources.
I can't wait for the first time there's a glitch in the system and it turns off, rather than lowers, the A/C for everyone who has one of these in the middle of a 100 degree heat wave. Or turns off the heat in the middle of a blizzard.
Or better, when someone figures out a way to hack the system (I imagine it will take all of 15 minutes) and thinks it's funny to play with his neighbors thermostat.
You know IF it was wanted and needed to have such a global control then it would still only require a RECEIVER to limit the heat/cooling during such a grid peak, there's no need for it to actually transmit the set/present temperature at all for limiting.
So if this story is true and it does transmit then the purpose is not quite what is claimed.
An interesting idea that could help in times of dire shortage, but easilly bypassed by anyone with a bit of knowledge on low voltage switching systems.
Only people who *want* this sort of thing are likely to allow it to do it's job. The "Get off my lawn" crowd will soon find ways around it if it's forced upon them, and will likely just crank their A/C down a few degrees in a fit of spite after the fact.
Yeah until it becomes illegal to do so and the Thought Police, led by Al Gore, recycle your house and family.
It's clear this is one of those amusing shows of daftness of someone that got the power to submit proposals, but I doubt it even gets 2 votes.
On the other hand.. texas and alabama have outlawed dildos, for instance, so some daft proposals do get voted for in the land of the f***.
Perhaps everyone in CA should be required to use bicycle-powered generators for their home-energy use.
Wait and see the crazy things California will come up with after they ban personal firearms in the state. This is just the tip of the iceburg, say goodbye to freedom and liberty and say hello to an overtaxed nanny state.
Yep thats how they get you. They take your gun and then bam, suspend habeas corpus. No wait, the gun nuts in charge right now already did beat habeas into a coma, but still let people have guns.
So what happens to Grandma when they cut her AC and now she has breathing difficulties because of the increased stress due to the heat? +/- 4 degrees F can be pretty major for someone with severe health problems. Does the State of Kalifornia pick up the cost of her medical bills/death?
Besides all their power issues are their ( the state's ) own making. It's a total crock of bullshit.
Marxist state is right. The former soviet block use to do this kind of thing and people actually did die from cold.
$10 says your exempted if you use alternative energy...
Apparently you don't know what Marxism is. You (and the other ill informed right wingers on this board who've used it) get it confused with totalitarianism. Totalitarianism can be left or right, it is an earmark of a country ruled by a dictator (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, Ayatolla, etc.). Marxism is SOCIALISM (not communism, read a book on political theory to understand the difference). Socialism (and even communism) doesn't have to be forced upon the people. And even if it is, it need not control every facet of their lives. In fact true socialism is all about personal rights. While dictators, be they secular or religious, right or left, are never about personal rights. Thats why things like habeas corpus and requiring court orders for wire taps are important. They deter would be dictators.
Also everyone who thinks because 1984 was about a communist government Orwell was pro capitalist (and all the rah-rah bs that goes with it) realize he was a socialist. He hated dictatorships, no matter what their leaning. As any thinking person should.
btw my spelling is probably way off since I haven't slept, so please ingore my spelling and grammar mistakes
Proving once again that the environmental nut jobs in the government of Cali know that their population can be easily bent over. Seriously... I've been to California numerous times. They have more worthless desert out there than just about any state in the US. Build a nuclear plant or two out in that worthless, uninhabitable desert, and your problems go away. Even if they do melt down, who cares... the sand? People scared of nuclear are uninformed (or have seen too many movies). The other thing people forget is that nuclear power is not just plentiful, but cheap. Currently I pay just 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity that is largely generated by nuclear. All that aside, the big brother step is clearly in the wrong direction. It fixes the symptom but not the problem (population expansion requires more electricity). I don't understand how a state can expect to add millions of residents every couple years without an upgrade to the electrical grid and power pipeline. It's idiotic.
And where do you put all the spent, radioactive fuel?
This is the problem people like you always forget about nuclear power. The plant is only part of what's required. The other part is an endlessly-growing field of radioactivity somewhere.
Where are you gonna put that? You know, even in the desert, people own that land. Is your solution to kick those people out? Or just ask them to live next to a giant ball of radioactivity as they watch their land values plummet? All in the name of "less government control"?
Sounds pretty hypocritical to me.
Installing TWO thermostats, the monitored one unconnected to anything useful, would be about as easy a workaround as one could get. And probably would be one of the most common workarounds.
The answer is simple bring our troops home from iraq and the trillions of dollars that is being spent. then spend it on research for cleaner forms of energy! Wow some redneck from texas is smarter than the whole us government! O sorry i forgot im not smarter they know all of this its our citezens who are to dam lazy to stand up and do something about it! the elected government is owned by the oil companies and our current president sleeps with the saudi government!Sure is funny that oil prices have rose so much since our oil president has been in office ,also oil companies say they had to raise prices for many reasons like supply and demand,refineries lost in hurricane,many other excuses yet their profit margins rose the exact same percentage that prices went up hmm were is our government at when we really need some protection from domestic terrorsist!
By the way 4 color coded wire thermostats are not that hard to bypass even my 5 year old could put the red wire to the yellow wire and wow we have airconditiong!
O NOES!!!11! TEH CORRUPT GOVERNMENT IS CONTROLLING MAH THERMOSTAT!!111!! B1G BR0TH3R!111
Get over this, people. There is a very distinct line between a utopia and a dystopia, and the line is when the actions of the government cease to be for the common good. When the government starts to cross that line, that is when we need to start taking action, not as they are actually doing things to make our lives better. Definitely, there is a point where things go too far, but it's only once it reaches that point that we should be concerned. Trying to make everything the government does out to be some grand conspiracy only makes our lives all the worse, and then we start to miss the line between the good things the government does and the bad.
The common good would have been extending the run of the existing power plants until they had other means to produce the increasing power needs of the state.
Does that make it a dystopia?
The difference between this and what I eat is that what I eat doesn't adversely affect everyone around me. But if I'm cooling my mansion to 60 degrees and its threatening to kill the grid, possibly affecting millions of people, then a little government oversight might be required. But this is not the way to do it.
The way to fix this problem is requiring the electrical companies to make the grids stronger and more redundent. I (along with every single liberal I've ever met) would rather have the government regulate business more closely than regulate individuals (SG warning appeared on smokes decades before any smoking bans were put in place, for example).
Two words - faraday cage
I can't believe that people would put this spin on things. Would you rather have no power then a slightly warmer/cooler house??! This kind of device is intended to be used only when failure to do so would overload power plants kill cut power to all your appliances/gadgets.
I failing to see how turning your thermostat down 4 degrees makes the state Nazi Germany, or communist. Surely its a good way to round off peak loads and reduced the need for expensive underutilized peaking plants?
Instead of the cost of all the bureacracy and repairs and updates and equipment and aggravation to install, monitor, etc all the thermostats, how about giving people tax credits (or other incentive) to install solar power or to add insulation in their roofs (and walls) or better windows to reduce the overall electricity use?
What the hell is this?
Russia
Before we go extolling the praises of nuclear power, take a look at this article:
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0708&article=070810
Ridiculous! Someone above had it right, you in California have to stop electing the far left wing liberal crazies that come up with this stuff! Come on!
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&G) has been offering free digital thermostats to California customers for several months now. They'll even install it free. The catch being-- twice a year, they can lower your thermostat remotely during an energy crisis.
It's an intriging idea, but I'm not sure everyone would be welcome to have their temperature lowered without their involvement. As far as a law goes, I don't see this getting passed, even in California. Having someone else control your house or apt is just plain freaky. Imagine if the system got hacked and messed with the environmental controls for everyone.
Thank you, but no. I don't want my house connected to Skynet.
Not sure where all the nuclear talk comes from but...
I (until just recently) worked for a company that makes thermostats exactly like these (in fact, we were working with a metering company in California, so for all I know, this could be related).
This really isn't a big brother kind of thing. No one is monitoring your actions. This kind of system would be in place so that lets say on a hot day when everyone cranks their AC and overloads the grid, instead of a sudden blackout (meaning NO AC for a lot of people), the grid can automatically set back everyone's temperature by one or two degrees, and keep power going. Or it can be done in segments - rolling back temperatures in certain areas for a few hours then switching to another to balance the load.
This is a GOOD thing. It's intelligently controlling power, it's not invasive in any way (certainly less so than cutting off your power or a rolling brownout would be). And much better than building another polluting power plant.
"So what happens to Grandma when they cut her AC and now she has breathing difficulties because of the increased stress due to the heat?"
Um. What happens to her if there's a blackout in her neighborhood for 12 hours because the grid got overloaded when everyone around her (or, if you want to be a silly hating-the-man type - the big rich jerks in their huge mansions) turn all their thermostats up?
Isn't this the BETTER option??
what happened to wind?
And I'm so sure that our friends at the power company will keep track of those folks that have a MEDICAL NEED for a specific temp.
It's the suede/denim secret police!
They have come for your uncool niece!
Wow, so now Al only uses seven times more than an average home instead of twelve times. If he wants to impress me he could try living in a normal sized home instead of a freakin' mansion.
There is simply no excuse for the U.S. or the U.K.
They both have massive coastline....How about wind turbines on the ocean?
What about hydroelectric...yeah....no excuse.
We also have Alaska to store nuclear waste
We have installed in our new house, all they do is drop or increase the temperature by 1 degree when energy consumption is heavy. I mean its only 1 degree and it saves you a little cash.
We're in ur base, changin' ur temp.
Line from the upcoming movie: 2008: A Space Heater Oddity
"I can't allow that increase in temperature, Dave. You're already quite comfortable."
As people have said this is a small patch on a big disease.
The fact remains that California has a woefully inadequate energy infrastructure. It does not have enough generation or the means to transfer it where it is needed (high capacity transmission lines). The energy crisis in 2000 proves this. Minimal changes to the infrastructure have not changed the root cause. The politicians blamed Enron, and somehow they believe that Enron's demise saved their electricity system.
Until the environmental zealots that run the state understand that, they will just cross their fingers that their state's meager generation assets along with imported hydro power form the Northwest and coal/nuclear from AZ, NV, UT, and NM will save them.
The best solution to not increase carbon release, reduce dependance on foreign hydrocarbons, and increase supply is nuclear. What about the spent fuel rods? Why not do something that Calironia knows all about? Recycle! That may be the one thing the French have right. Incidentally, the US, Australia, and South Africa have the richest uranium deposits in the world, and I, for one, would rather send my energry dollars there than Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Russia.