Futurehome Smarthub, WeMo, & Nest Gen 1.

[morqthana]

What do all these have in common?

The manufacturers have decided to make them stop working, or to only continue to work if you now pay a regular subscription fee which was not part of the deal when you bought the product.

Futurehome Smarthub Mandatory Subscription Fee

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Belkin Wemo discontinuation of service

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Google disables smart features of old Nest thermostats

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[omega015]

Yup, and theres devices like from Govee that you cannot disable firmware updates for so they could pull this same move if they wanted. Best bet is to only buy devices with local API as Lewis says and block access to the internet where possible to prevent them updating on their own. Always going to be a game of cat and mouse with tech and cannot see it getting any better anytime soon. Well unless the EU start to get involved and impose some rules?

 

[morqthana]

Yup, and theres devices like from Govee that you cannot disable firmware updates for

Firewall?

 

[morqthana]

The new Futurehome company is no longer providing support to people who don't pay for a subscription, has shut down the user forum, and the CEO is making threats that reverse-engineering the firmware to use a local server and get back the functionality customers paid for and they deliberately broke is illegal, and the police will take action against people who do that. I doubt that either of those are true, and in the UK at least, making false legal threats is in itself an offence.

 

[omega015]

Apparently what futurehome have done is potentially illegal in their own country so watch this space. Although I doubt that anything will change and their threats will amount to nothing. Hopefully someone does find a way to enable local integration for all those users but we shall see.

 

[morqthana]

Apparently what futurehome have done is potentially illegal in their own country so watch this space.

Or subscribe to notifications from Louis Rossmanns channel.

Although I doubt that anything will change and their threats will amount to nothing.

Yeah - pretty sure it's all bluster.

Hopefully someone does find a way to enable local integration for all those users but we shall see.

There would have been people fired up enough to do it for free, just on principle. The reward being offered will spur them on to be faster.

I see he's now offering a $20K bounty for unbricking Echelon exercise machines.

 

[morqthana]

Anyway - it's taught me one thing - if ever I decide to go down the home automation route, I should stay well clear of any devices which "need" to connect to servers over the internet.

 

[ericmark]

Because there are some useless "Smart" products, does not mean they are all useless. I got caught out with Nest Gen 3, the internet hunt told me they worked with Energenie MiHome TRV heads, of which I already had four, I found one two of the three cores of the control cable main house to flat where the boiler is located, was open circuit, so looking for a method to control both DHW and CH with two wires, and not rely on one set of batteries for all the heating, and Nest seemed to fit the criteria.

However, the Energenie software could control both Nest and Energenie, but not in any useful way, and it seemed the whole idea even if it had worked, was back to front, the Nest thermostat telling the TRV what to do, where what is wanted is the reverse.

In the USA they released remote thermostats, sold in a group of three, so you could sample home temperature from four points, but this was never released for the European version. Other Google-Nest products seem to work well, but the thermostat was only any good if the whole house could be controlled from one point, so with an open-plan house maybe it would work, or a very small house, but my three-story five-bedroom house was clearly not going to work well with a single Nest thermostat.

But in the main, the problem is, my house was never designed to be heated with a modern central heating system, the Nest problem was not the only problem.

To control a room with a TRV, we don't want the TRV to get cold, before the whole room gets cold, so we want the radiator on an internal wall, once running it does not matter, but you don't want the heating to fire up before required, but years ago, the idea was to heat the cold part of the room, we see diagrams which look really good, showing what should not be done, but it fails to take into account that modern double glazed windows are far better, and to put the radiator under the window means the TRV is colder than most of the room, until the heating is running, so turns on the heating too early.

So we try and fit what is claimed as a super system, but it was not designed for existing homes, not so sure even designed for new homes, when we were house hunting, we came across so many homes where the heating was split into two with on/off zone valves, this house 10 rooms not includings bathrooms and halls, and we do not use all up stairs rooms as just bedrooms, one is a craft room, one is an office, and middle floor, the dinning room not used much, so we want to set the heating room by room, not floor by floor, so we have 10 programmable TRV heads, we started with 9, non linked to the boiler.

It did not work, the hall (Nest) thermostat was warm enough, but the rooms were not, cure was three devices monitoring the room temperture which can fire the boiler, the method was to use Drayton Wiser, which can have multi-thermostats fire the boiler, either wall or the TRV heads.

 

[morqthana]

Because there are some useless "Smart" products, does not mean they are all useless.

Indeed not, but the problems above are products which were useful, and then all of a sudden the makers decided to render them not useful.

You mentioned the Nest Gen 3, so not the ones which Google are breaking, they're the Gen 1, and Gen 2. In a deliberate act, Google will be making this happen:

After October 25, 2025:

• Remote control via the Nest or Google Home app won't work
• Integration w/ Google Assistant & connected features such as Home/Away Assist will stop functioning.
• Emergency shut-off and Nest Protect integrations will no longer work.

Local manual control—such as adjusting temperature or editing schedules on the device itself will still work, but all cloud-based and voice assistant features will be disabled. No options will be provided for continuing use with open-source integrations or third-party tools.

 

[morqthana]

Yup, and theres devices like from Govee that you cannot disable firmware updates for so they could pull this same move if they wanted. Best bet is to only buy devices with local API as Lewis says and block access to the internet where possible to prevent them updating on their own.

This is supposition, as I'm not into HA, but I bet there's a thriving community of people writing code to allow users to hand-crochet solutions using Raspberry Pi/Arduino/Zigbee/Shelly/and loads I've never heard of, which never go anywhere near manufacturer servers or cloud services.