Feb. 17, 2023
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
My Orwellian eco-‘friendly’ thermostat was overstating the temperature in my home by 8-10 degrees Fahrenheit. And I’m not alone. Check your thermostats.
By Robert Romano
If you’re a married man you’ve probably occasionally heard your wife complain that she was cold and that the heat needed to be turned up during the winter. Given differences in biology between men and women, it might be easy to dismiss such concerns. But being good husbands, we just check the thermostat, report the current temperature to our wives, request her desired temperature and reset the thermostat and enjoy as the familial peace that ensues.
Unless the thermostat is broken. And then you could be left wondering for months or even years what’s going on. Did we need new insulation? Perhaps the windows are leaking air more than they used to? Did we need new adhesive door draft stoppers? Having had this problem at our home, we investigated all these options, tried a few, but still the house was freezing.
A few days ago, I discovered that my eco-“friendly” thermostat, an Ecobee, which I had used for a couple of years, was overstating the temperature in my home by about 8-10 degrees Fahrenheit by comparing it to one of those scientific, red alcohol thermometers. While the thermostat was assuring me it was 74 degrees in the house, the actual temperature in the room was closer to 65 degrees.
The impact was that in the winter, the house was too cold, as the heat would never allow the house to ever reach a comfortable temperature. And in the summer, it was also too cold, as the air conditioner would keep on cranking to maintain improbably cool temperatures. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at the thermostat.
Was the thermostat lying to me?
While we don’t normally perform product reviews here at Americans for Limited Government, this outcome piqued my curiosity, and so I began investigating to see if other customers were having the same problem online. Sure enough, after poking around Reddit and other message forums, I found reams of customers with similar complaints.
Webbie0225 on Reddit a year ago in a thread titled “Ecobee Thermostats always read wrong temperature,” stated, “Got two ecobee thermostats for my first and second stories this summer... and almost immediately noticed the house was much warmer than before. Wife and I went out and bought two little thermostats to put around to test what the temp actually was in the house. I set it not 3 feet away from the thermostat and the ecobee is reading 2-3 degrees cooler, so the a/c never kicks on and we all bake... same situation with the second story unit, even tried switching them around to see if one was reading more accurate than the other. I tried recalibrating, no changes. OK fine, I see that there is a temperature correction setting, so I bump everything up 2 degrees. Fine during the day, but then come nighttime when the temperature drops, now everything is 2 degrees off in the OTHER direction because of the correction settings...”
Various reasons for the hijinks were offered. Perhaps the unit was improperly installed. Maybe the batteries needed to be replaced. Perhaps the sensor was in a location that was warmer than the room itself, and so forth.
A few others posted some simple instructions to recalibrate the thermostat. Others still warned that because it was a “green” thermostat that it might be throttling the temperature in coordination with public utilities to reduce carbon emissions, and urged users to disconnect it from the internet, and so I tried both.
Following the instructions, I took the Ecobee off of my internet’s wifi, a feature to allow you to set your home’s temperature using your smartphone that I really didn’t need. What kind of thermostat requires an internet connection to determine the temperature, anyway? That’s weird.
And I lowered the temperature reading by 4 degrees.
After making the changes, the house heated up a bit but then I checked my readings with the scientific thermometer again and it was still off. So, I lowered it by 6 degrees. Still off. Finally, by going down by about 8 degrees, the house finally warmed up and seemed to stay there—for a while.
But then the next day it went from cold to warm outside. There is no shade on my home, so when it gets sunny in the spring and summer, the house can get really warm, especially on the upper floor, if the air conditioner isn’t on. So, it was time to close the vents in the basement and turn on the air conditioner, and then the same problem happened—this time only in reverse. Suddenly, the thermostat was understating the temperature, by about 6-8 degrees Fahrenheit!
In its original iteration, using no temperature reading corrections, the air conditioner had running too hard, resulting in lower than desired temperatures when it was hot outside, and after the modifications, it was running too soft, resulting in warmer than desired temperatures. So, disconnecting the unit from the internet and modifying the temperature reading — which allowed for a range -10 degrees Fahrenheit to +10 degrees Fahrenheit — was not fully fixing the problem. Also, what a range! Are thermostats supposed to be that finnicky?
The implication was that when the heat was on, I needed to lower the temperature thresholds, and when the air conditioner was on, I needed to increase the thresholds. That’s annoying! My thermostat was measuring something, but it clearly wasn’t the temperature. What a piece of junk!
Enough was enough. I called the company that had installed the HVAC and had removed the older thermostat— I wish I had kept it — to immediately come over and remove the Ecobee, describing that it was not correctly reading the actual temperature in the room, despite changing the temperature reading. “Give me something that actually, correctly measures the temperature in the room!” I angrily demanded. They got the message, and a technician arrived within an hour.
I also inquired if there were any incentives, corporate or government, in place to install these eco-“friendly” devices, but neither phone support nor the technician who arrived were aware of any. I noted that if these settings were designed to somehow reduce my carbon footprint, they clearly weren’t working. In the winter, my wife would just crank the heat up when she got cold and I wasn’t home until she was comfortable. And in the summer, because my thermostat in its default state with no temperature reading correction was overstating the temperature, the air conditioner would run entirely too much. Overworking the heating and cooling systems in this manner could not have possibly been energy or cost efficient.
The technician who came was immediately helpful and, anecdotally, he noted that this was the second Ecobee he had been sent to uninstall in as many weeks, for exactly the same reason. By then, I had already made a post on my personal Twitter, warning my few followers, “I just discovered that my so-called Ecobee thermostat, an eco-‘friendly’ system, was understating the temperature in my house by about 8-10 degrees F by comparing the temperature with a scientific air thermometer. Check your thermostats. Don't use one connected to the internet!” That was at 10:36 a.m. EST.
This is where it gets wild. Within 25 minutes, at 11:01 a.m. I received an uninvited Twitter direct message from the official Ecobee account, @ecobee, even though I had not even tagged them in my Twitter post. Must be an automated system, I thought. Maybe they had a Twitter bot account to detect whenever anybody mentions Ecobee, and were either using chatbot or real human techs to provide instant customer service by sending DMs to customers or something.
That was unsettling! Big Brother was watching. But as a civil libertarian on government and corporate big tech censorship and surveillance issues, the message itself was alarming.
The message read: “Hey Robert, I am sorry to hear about your experience with ecobee. I will be happy to take a closer look and see what could be the reason for such a difference between the ecobee and the other thermometer. Before we continue, can you please confirm the following information on your ecobee account: Full Name Registered Email Address of the Home Please also include a photo of the ecobee and other thermometer readings compared to each other. Kind Regards **** - ecobee Support.”
“This is Orwellian,” I commented aloud to the technician, who by that time had already finished installing my new Honeywell thermostat — if that one doesn’t work either I’m going to go on Ebay and find one from 2005 or something — and was calibrating it. He agreed with my concerns. I reported the DM to Twitter.
They wanted my full name, email and physical home address?! What the heck did they need my home address for? And why would I give it to a company I had no prior relationship with over a Twitter DM?
If I had wanted their help, I would have contacted them or I would have tagged them. I didn’t want their help. I had never set up an account with them, although my wife had installed the app to control the thermostat from her smartphone. I wanted that thing out of my home as soon as possible.
After I had been reminded that my thermostat had been connected to the internet, I disconnected it due to privacy concerns — were the utility companies monitoring and throttling energy usage because of green rationing or wartime rationing due to the supply shortages because of the war in Ukraine, I wondered? — and I certainly, absolutely didn’t want them in my Twitter DMs.
Did Ecobee even really read my tweet, where I had raised privacy concerns over these smart devices being connected to the internet? If it had, it might have been more cautious about how it proceeded. Must’ve been a bot.
In Oct. 2020, Ecobee published an article stating that “How eco+ is Maximizing Energy Efficiency In Over One Million Homes,” stating, “More than 1 million ecobee thermostat owners have enabled eco+ with a single tap in the ecobee app. In a year in which many families are spending more time than ever at home due to COVID-19, eco+ users averaged an additional 5% in savings on their cooling and heating costs compared to other ecobee users.† That’s in addition to the up to 23%* in energy savings that all ecobee thermostat owners enjoy.”
How does it know all that? In part, the article states that the non-eco+ customers’ data was “[b]ased on a study conducted by a third-party expert during summer 2020 across the US and Canada. Savings vary by season, climate zone, and rate structure.” Sure, okay. Congress or the Federal Trade Commission or the EPA or the Department of Energy might want to investigate that claim.
And how does it know how many customers use eco+? Simple. Because it’s connected to the internet. I had the eco+ setting turned off but I still experienced apparent throttling.
No thanks.
Finally, it turns out that there are incentives. In 2021, Ecobee announced that it was partnering with U.S. utilities companies to offer “free” thermostats in a press statement entitled, “ecobee partners with select utilities to offer a free smart thermostat to U.S. residents,” which stated importantly, “By enrolling in a demand response program, customers may experience slight temperature adjustments to their thermostat during periods of peak demand. [emphasis added]” So, by design, these devices are partnering with utilities companies to throttle customers’ thermostats because the company brags about it. The thermostat is lying! My wife was right.
How many senior citizens in the north are stuck in apartment buildings or low-income housing with slum lords looking to save a few bucks with these devices freezing the past few winters because of this? Or sweltering in the south during the summer? This was the Green New Deal, right in my face, and it appears to be affecting millions of American households. Congress may wish to launch an investigation. I have not personally noticed any “savings” on my utilities bills as inflation continues to run hot in the U.S.
What a terrible customer experience. A thermostat that cannot keep my home (and importantly, my wife) comfortable even when you adjust it, raises privacy concerns through its internet connection, might be throttled to “save” the planet and when you criticize the potential privacy invasion on Twitter, within 25 minutes a bot tracks you down demanding your full name and address. These so-called “smart” devices are not so smart, it seems.
Overall, I give Ecobee a -10 out of 10. I would have given them a zero, but I realized I could simply adjust my rating for what was a truly negative, Orwellian experience. No offense to George Orwell, he warned us this would happen!
Check your thermostats, folks.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Video: Artificial Intelligence THREATENS Man
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZco0TMz6yI
Increasing Wokeness and Class Division Threaten to Tear the Left Apart
By Rick Manning
Tensions are rising between those who profess to want to redefine the “soul” of America and those who have traditionally provided them the votes to win elections.
A new report from the Manhattan Institute warns that increasing tensions inside the Democratic Party between woke White elites and working class voters threaten to tear the party apart.
Sociologist Zach Goldberg warns that, “those with a college education tend to be wealthier and have higher socioeconomic status than those without, but they also tend to be more socially liberal and more likely to prioritize post-material moral concerns over kitchen-table issues.”
There is certainly no shortage of evidence that the Democratic Party abandoning the working class and going woke has sent a stampede of white non-college voters in the other direction.
The GOP won non-college Whites by 24 points in the 2018 midterms but upped that to 34 points in 2022. Democrats also lost 17 points with college-educated minorities and 15 points with non-college educated minorities between the two most recent midterm elections.
Minorities make up the replacement voters who these “masters of the universe” elites plan on consolidating to offset the rejection by white blue collar of their vision for America.
But, banking on minorities to fill the void is risky, because minorities largely do not share the same unbalanced views on social issues as the ivory-tower elites steering the Democratic Party.
Pew Research polling shows only a third of Black Democrats believe gender identity is detached from biological sex, while nearly three-quarters (72%) of White Democrats claim to believe it.
Pew’s data also shows Blacks are growing more conservative, not less. The share of Black Americans who believe gender is based on biology is up 11% since 2017. That’s not an easy gap to close, especially with the unnerving elevation of the transgender movement by the far left in just the past few years.
The Democratic party’s insane social agenda is starting to push men to the right in increasing numbers too. The GOP won men by 4 points in 2018, but won them by 14 points in 2022. Minority men are shifting toward the GOP at a rapid rate. Democrats lost 11 points with Black men between midterm elections, going from 76 points in 2018 to 65 points in 2022. With Latino men the shift was more substantial. Democrats went from winning Latino men by 29 points in 2018 to just 8 points in 2022.
Even men who identify as Democrats are increasingly critical of the radical left’s embrace of radical feminism and the transgender movement, and younger men are particularly critical.
A 2022 survey out of the Southern Poverty Law Center found nearly half of younger Democrat men say “gender ideology has corrupted American culture” while just 20% of older Democrat men say so.
Younger Democrats are also concerned the transgender movement is a threat to children, with 42% of younger Democrat men saying that the transgender movement is a threat to children and 40% saying it is “trying to indoctrinate children.”
Democrats have largely abandoned attempts to win back working-class Whites, and are counting on minorities continuing to support them in droves. However, they are in a very vulnerable position if they continue to beat working-class voters over the head with their reason-defying social ideology.
A standard analysis of why Democrats are losing minorities at the margins is that their handling of the economy has been nothing short of catastrophic. That is certainly true, but there’s more to the picture. Minority voters are not on-board with the radical direction the party is being steered.
As Democrat elites continue to preach an ideology which denies biology and genetics, they are losing their grip on those very voters they depend upon to hold power. The message to those on the right seeking to win at the polls is that supporting traditional views of biology and gender is a winner with minority voters, and those who argue that cultural issues should be abandoned would deny conservatives one of the long sought keys to breaking the left’s minority voter stranglehold.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2023/02/increasing-wokeness-and-class-division-threaten-to-tear-the-left-apart/
U.S. Rep. Boebert's legislation will reinvest in new oil production and refining
Feb. 17, 2023, Fairfax, Va.--Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning issued the following statement in favor of legislation being offered by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) that would increase new oil production and gasoline refineries production and construction:
“President Joe Biden urged energy companies to reinvest in new oil production and refining in his State of the Union address. Rep. Lauren Boebert has introduced legislation which will help accomplish his newfound interest in increased domestic oil and natural gas production. Boebert’s bill would increase federal government approvals of applications to drill and extend the time approved applications are valid from two to four years. Rep. Boebert is reaching across the partisan divide to give the President basic common sense legislation that he should be able to support in his recent quest for more oil and natural gas domestic development. Let’s see if Joe was just blowing smoke or if he has finally come to the realization that dependency on countries that may not like us very much for oil and natural gas is dangerous both economically and for our national security.”
To view online: https://getliberty.org/2023/02/u-s-rep-boeberts-legislation-will-reinvest-in-new-oil-production-and-refining/