• Registered (unregistered)

    If the old thermostat wasn't Internet-connected, it might have had problems automatically adjusting also if DST rules get changed.

  • COBOL Dilettante (unregistered)

    I remember trying to adjust a set of church clock chimes for daylight saving. The chimes were operated by an ultra-modern digital system that was supposed to correct and adjust itself over the Internet. Nevertheless, at a quarter past seven in the evening, the display on the console was still showing 2015.

    It took us a few minutes to work out that we were looking at the year ...

  • Coyote (unregistered) in reply to Registered

    It's quite possible the old thermostat was a first gen Nest or something that would have always gotten the correct time from the internet, but this new system requires its own brand of "communicating" thermostat. Those things are annoying because you can't use any 3rd party smart thermostat like Ecobee.

  • 516052 (unregistered)

    And that is why you newer buy mission critical systems that use proprietary vendor locked control mechanisms.

  • Brian (unregistered) in reply to Registered

    Many years ago, I bought a clock that had the cool feature to automatically adjust for DST. This was in the age of "dumb" devices when only computers were connected to the internet, so the time change was embedded in the firmware. Shortly after that, the government changed the DST schedule (so people would buy more candy on Halloween or something like that)... so the clock automatically changed itself on the wrong days, and I still had to manually change it for DST.

    I still have that clock, but now it lives in the guest room where no one cares that it's wrong for a few weeks.

    DST is TRWTF.

  • (nodebb)

    Stay hopeful Ellis! If they've done their job right, then "Eastern" might just take care of the time changes for you. It's not clear why they would have "EST" as an option, especially without a matching "EDT", but if "Eastern" is the equivalent of "ET" ("Eastern time")--and if they've programmed it correctly--then this could be one of those nice set-and-forget situations.

  • (nodebb)

    This post reminds me that I'm soon going to have to change the clock on my microwave oven that was made back in 2012... (No, it's not an IoT microwave. Geez. It's a microwave oven, so why does anyone think it might need to talk to anything except itself...)

  • matt (unregistered) in reply to jkshapiro
    Comment held for moderation.
  • (nodebb)

    It's entirely likely that you have to fix this in their app on your phone.

  • (nodebb)

    I have a very expensive gas range at home. One of the features it has is app connectivity (I did not buy this appliance because it had this feature, I bought it because we were hosting Thanksgiving that year and it has a good quality double-oven, and plenty of stovetop space). There are a few moderately neat things the app can do, like give me an alert when the oven comes up to the set temp.

    However, the most annoying thing is that the clock on the range has to be set manually. The device is connected to the Internet, so it should be trivial to do. Not only does the clock not set itself, but setting the clock isn't one of the features the app offers. So, my very expensive "smart appliance" still requires me to do a ridiculous button dance twice a year to keep the clock correct.

  • (nodebb)

    I think (hope?) @jkshapiro is right about "Eastern" -- covering both EST and EDT and handling the switching between them, with EST provided for anyone who needs to lock into EST. In Arizona, I have the opposite issue -- we don't do DST, we're MST all year round, which effectively means MST in the winter and PDT in the summer. Had a cheap digital alarm clock that set itself off the radio time broadcasts, and I had to manually change timezones between MT and PT. Most decent computer/appliance systems have an "Arizona" option. Newer clocks still just have the few timezones, but add a separate DST toggle, and that's good enough for me.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    For the most part I agree that most of my kitchen (and the rest of the house, for that matter) really doesn't need to be talking to anyone. On the flip side, a friend of mine had Gemini plan/organize Thanksgiving dinner and coordinate with Alexa to execute it, including controlling his oven and it worked out really well.

  • (nodebb)

    I once had a clock that did automatic DST adjustment. It would set the clock back one hour on the last Sunday in April and forward on the last Sunday in October.

    Then 2007 came. Then I had to change the time forward an hour on the last Sunday in October, then forward again on the first Sunday in November, then forward on the second Sunday in March, and back again on the first Sunday in April because the clock changed its time at the old days instead of the new days.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Llarry

    and coordinate with Alexa to execute it

    The only way my app can start the oven is if I set up the oven to "remote start" on the keypad first. Alexa integration would actually require slightly more work than simply using Alexa as a timer.

  • Infrastructure Decade (unregistered)

    I'm one of those people trying to 'do it right' when it comes to timezones and my pointy-haired-boss is like "Just hardcode a 5 hour offset from UTC. When winter rolls around, we'll update the software to be 6 hours. It's easy!" The correct fix using the tzdata would take, I dunno, maybe 7 days to implement and test.

    This project is a major piece of US transportation infrastructure. Sigh...

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