Borderdog

This is my first post on AppleInsider. I have been lurking for years. Been a Mac user since 1984. I have 3 Macs, 3 iPhones, an iPad, and an apple TV. So take all that with a grain of salt. 

I'm semi-retired now from the construction business; I was a custom home-builder for 40 years. I've built some incredible homes, which included some really complex heating/cooling systems and, complex electrical and lighting systems. I was also deeply involved in energy conservation within the home. 

What I have learned is: keep your winter-time thermostat at 68º and your summertime at 75º. We used Honeywell's programmable thermostats, but they don't really save you money. The best thing is to leave your thermostat alone at a set temperature; 68 in winter and 74-76 in the summer. When you turn your thermostat down at night in the winter, and then program it to ramp back up at 5:00 AM, you're not saving anything. There is a lot of mass within a house...furniture, interior wall, floors, etc. When that programmable  thermostat sets back the temps for the night or while your gone for the day, it has to expend an inordinate amount of energy to reheat the air plus the mass within your house.
No reason for any type of smart thermostat. 
It takes less time to manually reset your thermostat than it does to pull out your iPhone or tablet to regulate your home's temperature. Sheesh!

Now the same goes for lights. A properly wired house has two switches for a hallway; one switch at either end (that's called a 3-way because of the way it's wired, 3 switches controlling the same lights is called a 4-way). So what is so hard about when you enter or exit a room or hallway to just flip the fuckin' switches. It takes less effort than grabbing you iPhone.

We are turning into a bunch of techno couch potatoes, without even realizing we would expend less energy by manually turning lights off or on and manually adjusting the thermostat. Home automation is a joke!

The only place I use any automation is for my home theater/listening room. I can click one button and my system turns on and then after a few seconds, the lights will dim or turn off. 

I can program any of this stuff, but I still think it's a joke.

More Levity.
It's amazing when my wife of 36 years; all 5'2" of her gets pissed off. I run...out of sheer terror!

neilm said:

Borderdog said:

My main question; will the RAM be upgradable with aftermarket?
I know with the iMac Pro you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do an aftermarket memory upgrade. If I remember correctly, the regular 27' iMac was easily upgradeable.

And it still is.

Does that mean I could get the basic 8 GB of Ram, add 16 GB for a total of 24 GB?
I know you could do that with the last generation.

maestro64 said:

Borderdog said:

This is my first post on AppleInsider. I have been lurking for years. Been a Mac user since 1984. I have 3 Macs, 3 iPhones, an iPad, and an apple TV. So take all that with a grain of salt. 

I'm semi-retired now from the construction business; I was a custom home-builder for 40 years. I've built some incredible homes, which included some really complex heating/cooling systems and, complex electrical and lighting systems. I was also deeply involved in energy conservation within the home. 

What I have learned is: keep your winter-time thermostat at 68º and your summertime at 75º. We used Honeywell's programmable thermostats, but they don't really save you money. The best thing is to leave your thermostat alone at a set temperature; 68 in winter and 74-76 in the summer. When you turn your thermostat down at night in the winter, and then program it to ramp back up at 5:00 AM, you're not saving anything. There is a lot of mass within a house...furniture, interior wall, floors, etc. When that programmable  thermostat sets back the temps for the night or while your gone for the day, it has to expend an inordinate amount of energy to reheat the air plus the mass within your house.
No reason for any type of smart thermostat. 
It takes less time to manually reset your thermostat than it does to pull out your iPhone or tablet to regulate your home's temperature. Sheesh!

Now the same goes for lights. A properly wired house has two switches for a hallway; one switch at either end (that's called a 3-way because of the way it's wired, 3 switches controlling the same lights is called a 4-way). So what is so hard about when you enter or exit a room or hallway to just flip the fuckin' switches. It takes less effort than grabbing you iPhone.

We are turning into a bunch of techno couch potatoes, without even realizing we would expend less energy by manually turning lights off or on and manually adjusting the thermostat. Home automation is a joke!

The only place I use any automation is for my home theater/listening room. I can click one button and my system turns on and then after a few seconds, the lights will dim or turn off. 

I can program any of this stuff, but I still think it's a joke.

Can not agree with that statement more, this is the part that most people do not understand, they need to take a thermodynamic class or do to understand this. It take less energy to maintain the internal temp of your home than it take to keep reheating each day. Now if you going to be gone for a while going to lower temp does save energy over that people of time.

That was the whole premise of of my statement. Majority of people don't understand the laws of thermodynamics. You have the internal mass of your house (walls, furniture, floors. etc., etc.). You keep a constant temp, and your furnace or cooling system will actually work less. 
The most important thing to say to your children or spouse is: close the fuckin' door!..LOL.

Now, when we travel for extended periods, I do turn down the thermostat, or up in cooling season. When we get back home, I do expect a day of the house reaching equilibrium again. Oh the horror, for being slight colder or warmer for 24 hours. We have things called sweaters.

Oh, I need Siri to tell me to put on a sweater, or you need to take off your shirt. LOL

I occasionally have sex with my wife of 36 years and occasionally have sex with my hand...Does that make me bisexual?

I have three Apple computers, an iPad, and two iPhones in my house...Does that make me LGBT?