I bought a smart thermostat for ~ $20 a while ago. It's got settings for wakeup/leave/return/sleep and those are different for weekdays and weekends. It's also got a lock mode for when someone's home on a weekday.

What's this got that will save 5% for me?

Our house has eight or nine thermostats - that could get expensive!

I wonder if they would all talk to each other.

What about? The weather?

If they're internet-enabled they could talk about all kinds of interesting things. Maybe they could even post on the Cellar.

They have parts from Skynet. They'll be talking about taking over.

I'm in IT. Tech is my life. But I just don't want my home's infrastructure accessible via the web. I don't want my fridge to be smart. I certainly don't want a smart meter for power usage either. Sometimes more is not better....

I agree with the thought.
We have the saying: "Just because you can doesn't mean you have to"

Meanwhile, while you did not notice, it was already implemented. Many electric companies no longer have meter readers. Smart meters have long since eliminated that need.

The thermostat is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem to solve. All innovations occur either because a solution is looking for a problem, or a problem is looking for a solution.

... and the meter readers are out of work.

Not yet...
 

This is an interesting article I read last month... tinfoil hats anyone?

When they make one that can hack into the NYSE and grab the money to pay my heating bills, call me.

glatt, that's not a hockey puck. that's a shuffleboard puck. yeah.. tha's been botherin me since your OP. other than that, kewl.

Here's a video of it.

This thermostat has made it into it's own article in the NY Times:

NY Times
By DAVID POGUE
Published: November 30, 2011
A Thermostat That’s Clever, Not Clunky
.

Oh, hey. I should have updated this thread.

I got a Nest thermostat as a present for my birthday back in April, and installed it just as the heating season was ending, and the open window season was beginning. But now it's AC season.

I don't know if you noticed, but it's been pretty damn hot lately. This week is a bit better, but last week was insane. Anyway, we were on vacation at a lake in Pennsylvania. We had set the Nest to "away" mode, which for us and the way we programmed the Nest meant that it wasn't going to cool the house at all.

It was Saturday up in Pennsylvania, and we saw on the news that it was 106 in Arlington. So my wife pulled out her Android phone, connected with the Nest, and turned on our AC from 3 states away. The AC worked all night on an empty house, slowly getting the temperature lowered, and when we walked in the front door in the early afternoon on Sunday, the house was cool.

Without the Nest, we either would have left the AC running the entire time we were away on vacation, which is stupid, or we would have come home to a sweltering house and would have been very uncomfortable for a full day or so as the AC slowly brought the temperature down over the course of a 24 hour period. (Our central AC was retrofitted into our old house and isn't really sized properly. It just takes forever to cool the place down.)

So for this feature alone, I LOVE the Nest.