I have to be honest and say that I’ve never paid much attention to thermostats.
I usually like things cool, and once I get to a place and set the temperature—usually after a bit of fiddling—that’s good enough for me.
If I feel a little chilly on a cool-ish day, I usually just grab a blanket. So I’ve been insulated, no pun intended, from many of the advances in heating and cooling and HVAC more generally. I was pleasantly surprised recently, however, when I was renting a house in the Midwest and found that the temperature inside the house was simply too cold for my liking. That’s a rare thing for me, but it happened. I made my way into a room that I’d been told beforehand contained the thermostat, but once I came face-to-face with it, I felt dread. It was very newfangled-looking, very digital, and very button-rich, to say the least. I have no idea how to work it, but I know I had to dive right in if I wanted to warm up. I was very, very surprised by how easy the system was to operate. The buttons were intuitive, the responses were immediate, the interface was bright and easy to see, and all I had to do in the end was hold one button “up” and then push another to “set.” And that was it. In my mind, I was ready to extol the virtues of old-fashioned thermostats with a single lever and a difficult-to-read, inexact temperature gauge, but that didn’t prove necessary at all. The digital system was wonderful, user-friendly, and highly-efficient. The HVAC industry, it seems, has been heavily-influenced by the user-friendliness of so many other burgeoning technologies, and it’s clear that it’s all the better for it.