In the dark with sweating cheese

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Elspode

What the hell is a city-controlled thermostat, and why would you put up with such a thing?

The thermostat, provided/installed/maintained-for-free by the city, is connected via some type of network to the power plant. They have the ability to shut my A/C off if the city (or area, I guess) as a whole is using too much power and the power plant is approaching overload capacity. Cutting a couple thousand people off for ten minutes at a time each is apparently enough to keep the system from overloading.

I put up with it because having a programmable thermostat means that we save at least $50-$75 a month on our electric bill, because we can program it to a much higher (or lower, in the winter) temperature during the day when we're not home, and program it to start cooling again an hour before we get home. I could have purchased and installed a programmable thermostat on my own, of course, but that would have cost around $250 all told.

And like I said, it hasn't ever been a nuisance. Before we signed up I talked to several other people who were already part of the program and they were all happy with it. It could always turn into a slippery slope like glatt said, but I could also always just pay to replace their special thermostat.

[lookout123]

silly, if it really did start to slide down said slippery slope, someone can certainly say, "self, i see it's time to skedaddle."


if it turns into enough of a problem, the area would be less than desireable for those looking to live and cities are always trying to encourage growth.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The thermostat can be bypassed like any other gadget.

Awhile back they made a deal at work, with the electric company, at the end of Summer. They could shut us down with 4 hrs notice when demand was up and supply short. In return they would knock a million bucks off the yearly electric bill.

So a contract was immediately made to install 3 gas turbine generators, to be operational before the next Summer season, in order to keep the basics running in the event of a shutdown. Life is good.

Well, it was a bad winter…..a very bad winter…very cold and snowy. About February the Electric Company exercised their option….. for 4 days.
They shut down the plant and brought in as many portable generators as they could find but one of the 2 huge steam boilers went down and almost lost the second.
Pipes froze and burst, the mainframe computers gave up and the maintenance people worked feverishly by flashlight.
It was a very expensive mistake.