Way back when all this was fields, and I still lived in a house in which our computer connected to BBSs, we had central heating and on the wall in our lounge was a thermostat. It was an analogue device consisting of a bimetallic strip that would turn the heating on and off.
Turn it hotter, on goes the heating, turn it lower, off it goes… it was accompanied by a little timer on the boiler that would turn it off at night and on during the day.
Now in our shiny new house with it’s shiny new boiler we have individually controlled radiators which run off a controller that’s wireless so we can sit it wherever we want in the house.
And it broadcasts its little messages to the boiler ‘Turn on’, it says.
And on goes the boiler.
‘Turn off’, it says.
And the boiler just happily ignores it and tries to turn our house into a boiling furnace of heat such that it can melt down the copper from the heating pipes and sell it for scrap, after, of course, we’ve all been roasted alive.
