Wow! Take a look at this gallery of photos, posted at a local TV station’s website. Quite a little storm blew through the Valley last night.
As usual, it bypassed the ’hood. We dwell in the rainshadow of the North Mountains, and so the Valley could have a 400-year flood and we’d barely notice. Literally: only a few drops of rain fell here, barely noticeable. A brief, brisk windstorm came through but nothing that could do any damage. We could hear the thunder to the south, like a nonstop cannonade. But that was about it.
My son just got in from Colorado and picked up Charley the Golden Retriever, who has resided here since last Thursday night. Don’t know whether his house has power or not — he thinks so, though, because his Nest thermostat responded to some communiqué that he sent to it today. Hope so, ’cause it’ll be mighty hot inside that little house if the AC has been off all day.
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Does your son like “the Nest”?….I’ve done some reading on it and for the life of me I don’t get it. These things are pricey and as I understand it….it is a thermostat that adapts to your habits…Not feeling it… Not so long ago I bought a seven day programmable stat for a rental for like $40. Am I missing something?
Yes, he likes it a lot.
In fact, he bought one for me.
Talking to a thermostat from afar escapes me…but that would be because I don’t have a smartphone and don’t haul my iPad around with me.
However, it does apparently save SOME money on air conditioning in extreme climates like ours. It has a feature (which you can disable, if need be) that causes it to shut off the AC cycle when it “thinks” you’re not home. If you don’t walk past it for awhile, this “Away” feature kicks in, and the AC can then be off for some time.
My thermostat is in a hallway, and because I spend most of my day in a back-room office, it often turns off the AC while I’m here. Temp gets up to 85 before I notice the unit has been laboring away.
I’m not nuts about that and have thought about turning it off (my son would have to do that because I can’t figure it out), because I think letting the temp get up to 85 and then cycling back down to 80 several times during the day has the opposite effect, to run up your bill. It’s effective to turn the unit off for, say, six or eight hours when you’re not there and then let it run an hour or so to recool the structure, but I think straining it several times a day is unwise.
What it will do is “remember” when you manually programmed what temps, and if you’re doing it regularly, will start setting the temperatures according to your habit. Or, like any programmable thermostat, you can set it to cool the house down before you go to bed (so you can get to sleep) and then start to let it warm back up (so you can suffer through the day after a decent night’s sleep) to barely tolerable around dawn.
Thanks…..just wanted to know what all the “fuss” was about. I installed the 7-day stat when I replaced a gas furnace in a unit, The tech explained to the tenant how to set it and set it so the heat would come on about 20 minutes before the gal was supposed to get up and shower. You’d a thought I gave her a car! She loved it….crazy….
That is so funny!
If you live where it’s both wet and cold, though, you didn’t just give her a car, you gave her a Jag. 😀