Does anyone know if this could be used to "cap" the AC settings ? It could be useful in an airbnb place, where I want to limit the lowest (e.g. 18 degres Celsius) or hottest (e.g. 22 degres Celsius) the guest can set the AC.
To answer your question, yes you could certainly do that and override what ever the physical thermostat was set to. You could also set max hours per day (kWh)for usage or adjust for variable rate plans.
As with anything you'd need to test.
Edit:
Looking through the repo and the article I see nothing blocking you. You certainly won't break anything!
I don’t think they’re proposing remotely controlling it, just so that the guest would experience being unable to change the temperature to outside the allowed range.
Of course any guest is free to write in their review “can’t make temperature lower than 18°!” but the number of people choosing not to book for that reason in any given year is likely 0 or very close to it.
There are a lot of people who don’t “get” thermostats and their intuitive model of ACs is like that of getting a bath to a particular temperature by turning a faucet to full hot or cold to get what they want.
And if these people are out of the room when it reaches the actual temperature they want (and would change it), then the AC is left possibly for hours working full time, burning maximum energy and related wear and tear by trying to hopelessly achieve an unattainable temperature.
I understand, and I could make it clear in the description that AC is capped at 18 degres C minimum (65F), so people who like it very cold could skip my airbnb.
Some AC can go ridiculously low (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/3144803.stm). I do not want to change the temperature remotely, I just want to not have the AC used to extremely cold temperature. I am fine to advertise it to weed of people who like it very cold.
I should have bothered to do the conversion... when I read your post I was immediately reminded of the recent laws in Italy that capped AC in public spaces to a minimum of 25C... 18C is awfully cold for a residence!
Most programmable thermostats in the US do have built-in limits for device protection.
I've never met anyone who sets AC in a home to lower than 68F and that is an absolute extreme. Most central AC systems are designed for ~20 degree temperature differential so on really hot days you'd have trouble getting it that low anyway unless the system is oversized.
18C is not uncommon in the UK. They seem to like it colder. Italy is down south so 25C may already be getting cold for them. Then there's the Indians who like it closer to 30C...
Yeah, why set the upper limit to 22 and not like 24-25? It will save you even more power for those that don't sit in your airbnb in a 3 piece business suit...
Did you just post a link to a 23 year old news article with no sources on an http-only site as supporting evidence that your airbnb unit's AC unit can go dangerously low?
You really think your guests will get frostbite if you don't do them the favor of limiting the AC temperature (with the unintended side-effect of saving you some money)?
Lots of digital thermostats (both relatively dumb and very smart) allow for temperature adjustments to be locked within pre-set limits. If your customer disdain drives you to want that kind of thing, then just find one and install it.
Most likely the parent was relating this to revealing where you live and the privacy aspects.
Yes indeed one could figure out where I went for holidays by my OSM edits but then any FAAG or similar would know that already by any social media interaction I might have had during the holidays.
My bigger OSM edits are rarely during the actual holidays but rather before or after.
You might be onto something. Maybe the lack of central planning in US, and most reliance on private developers, prevents the introduction of denser housing.
Not to go full Hausmann (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Pari...) and eminent-domain the half of the city and rebuild a 1/5 of the city in higher density buildings, in 15 years. But we could ramp it up and start with the low hanging fruits, with empty buildings, parking lots, gas stations, etc. Show results. Show the building owners that they could building higher on their lot, do the math for them, stream line the permitting, help with financing.
Here is also pace to consider. We are biological creatures, and we only support change at a certain pace, without going fully stressed.
This would do a lot on its own. Remove parking minimums and pull out the parking lots. This is why transit is important, and single occupancy vehicles as the primary means of human transport in urban areas is just not sustainable nor is it efficient.
We waste so much space to parking that does absolutely nothing but act as property storage.
- more traffic: compare to now? or pre-COVID? because now it is already lower than pre-COVID, at least in SF. I have lived here for more than 20 years, and only now I see seeing empty parking spots around my house. I would never see this 10 years ago. So, if we double the population, yes there would be some additional traffic. But how would it compare to 10 years ago ?
- more noise: From traffic? electrification is making transportation quieter than before. From people in the streets? again the streets are way less busy compare to pre-COVID at least in SF. People either do not work, or work from home, get delivered everything from movies (Netflix), to food (UberEats) or shopping (Amazon), etc. foot traffic is WAY lower than pre-COVID. So if we double the population, yes there would be some additional foot traffic. But how would it compare to 10 years ago ?
- more pollution: From traffic? electrification is offsetting some of it. From trash, well those people were trashing elsewhere too.
- more anonymity, crime: That is cultural. Tokyo is fairly dense city, and with fairly low crime compare to US standards.
"The people who benefit most from higher density tend to be young professionals": Go visit a major city in Europe (Paris, Barcelona, etc) that has high density, and you would see lots of different generations, not only young professionals. It is possible to live from cradle to grave in those cities. It does not have to transition spot when you are young, professional and looking at dating. It could be where you go to kindergarten, up to university, work and retire.
I feel like the main thing that NIMBY fear is change, any change. Hausmann, where are you ?
NIMBYism isn't a fixed group of people; it's a policy position. Policy positions can be bad or good or all points in between. What they're not is analogous to religions, or even political parties. They do not need to be entertained.
It's valuable to know where people are coming from, so you can persuade them out of unproductive policy positions (or at least deactivate them so they're less in the way of change). It's important to be respectful of people. It's often counterproductive to be respectful of bad ideas.
Similarly, free public bath/shower disappeared in SF. Some wealthy person (forgot his name) built some free public showers in the 1900, but they eventually got all closed. Paris still have about ~20 free public bath/shower running. Wondering if we should also bring those back. This is a basic human need (after restrooms and food).
Yeah. Once in SF I was rejected by 5 businesses in a row to use their restrooms. The nearest public park had its restroom locked. I, a non-homeless person, was forced by nature to pee behind a building in a parking lot.
I had no choice. The businesses had a choice. The parks manager had a choice.
SF is still the only place I worked where I walked out to my car parked on the street and a homeless person was openly peeing on my tire as people walked by.
Oh memories of stacking those, and going to my friend's place to copy the latest games :)
Remember how we were drilling holes to doubled the disk's storage capacity (from 720 to 1440) https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=47247
Before the floppy disks we were using cassettes... with our TO7 (circa 1983). It was slow by our current measure, but as kids we had time, I guess. The TO7 had even a lightpen to point at the CRC screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_TO7
My parents attic has still some of my old floppy disks, and even maybe some cassettes.
I believe that us, Americans are pretty good at bending international food to our limited ingredients, our own favorite chemicals, sweeteners (corn syrup in everything), our flour and butter (good luck to make pastries like in Europe, with our poor flour and butter).
So I get it when Italians get offended by our poor rendering of carbonara... and feel that what we get here is off.
You are silly. In the US, if you choose to do so, you can get the same ingredient or higher quality ingredient or food stuff that you can get anywhere else in the world, barring a few banned items like the various European maggot cheeses.
No need for maggots, I cannot get unpasteurized cheese of less than 60 days old here in US. So, you cannot have a real raclette here in US because authentic Reblochon cheese is illegal to import to the US because it is not aged long enough. Sure, you can an older Reblochon cheese, but it does not taste the same.
The most basic ingredients in food are not the same in US. For instance, sugar, flour even butter are different in US from Europe. So yes, you would have to import those ingredients (flour, butter, etc.). If you want to get close to the "authentic/original" food you try to replicate here.
Around 2015, I was working for a company that processed coupons for large retail stores. We had lots of performance issues, mostly due to our centralized database at the time.
I was dreaming at the time to ship a mobile phone at every large store (e.g. Target) to process the data in-situ. It could hold its own database (partitioned for the tenant), it would have its own UPS (battery), and have enough CPU power to serve the POS requests of one store, even the largest ones.
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