My latest toy is a Proliphix NT10e IP Thermostat. It?s essentially a standard thermostat with an IP address and a web server. While a bit on the expensive side compared to your average thermostat, ($299) the ability to control your home heating and cooling system remotely is extremely useful. Traditional ?digital? thermostats never quite got the user interface simple enough to allow the common man to do daily scheduling. It was a little like the user interface nightmare that was VCR programming back in the day. With an IP enabled thermostat, the user interface can be a web browser which is significantly less constrained than the traditional thermostat sporting a 2-inch screen. That said, Proliphix still has done a brilliant user interface design job within the constraints of their 2-inch screen and 5 buttons. Of course it?s nice to be able to set my thermostat from work before I go home so my house is comfortable when I get there, but to me the most significant feature of the thermostat is its API. You can read the temperature from the thermostat (and other temperature sensors available from Proliphix) and set things like a new temperature target on the thermostat or turn on and off the heating and cooling systems. It would be fairly simple to generate graphs with rrdtool showing the temperature over the days. (I already graph temperature this way) You could colorize the graph showing when the heating or cooling systems are on effectively showing your energy usage. Add to that an external temperature sensor and you could show how much energy you expend given the temperature differential between inside and outside. As you can see, the possibilities are literally limitless, even for something as simple as a thermostat. To me, the sooner everything around me has an IP address, the better. Congratulations, Proliphix.

About a year before these thermostats were introduced, I traded several emails with Walter Dray, the President of Proliphix. He was initially focused on more of a commercial offering, but thankfully he has a product that hits the home market as well. I would guess that the typical homeowner with a vacation property will be very interested in this product as well. Given an Internet connection and an IP Thermostat, you could control cost much more effectively across any number of remote properties. Hotels, I would imagine, would also be a major market segment, but I guess that?s no longer ?home? use.

I thanked Mr. Dray for not making the IP connectivity wireless although people in the market were clamoring for that. In my opinion, something that sits on the wall for years and years and controls something that costs money is not worth the risk given the abundance of wireless exploits these days. I?ll endure the 10-minute wiring job for the years of security it will afford me. The convenience of wireless is just not worth the security risk. Then again, people type their passwords on wireless keyboards, so maybe I?m in a minority on this one.

The power for the Proliphix IP Thermostats is some version of Power over Ethernet, (PoE) but it wasn?t immediately evident that the flavor of PoE was a standard. Ideally the thermostats would use industry standard PoE so I could just get a PoE switch to power all the little devices like cameras and phones around my place. I already have 4 Cisco 7960 phones that use PoE, but then again they are Cisco proprietary PoE on those as well! Oh well, we?ll count it as yet another industry that blossomed before the industry specification did. You have to purchase a separate PoE adapter from Proliphix and wire that down to a punch block.

And for that matter, why aren?t the temperature sensors IP based? I understand that it?s a bit expensive, but what about making a temperature / humidity sensor that runs on PoE and has an IP address? That would be very handy in my basement to change a motorized damper setting or to exhaust the hot air in my attic to the outside. I guess it is still too expensive to make a tiny little self contained PoE Linux computer on a chip. Anybody want to help design one? If you could mass produce them in large quantity, they could become very attractive as little hardware web applications!

Proliphix publishes their API on their website. As you would imagine, its an HTTP based API that allows you to read and write just about every variable the thermostat has to offer. I have been working on a home control application that can talk to external devices such as these via a plugin architecture. I?ll be including support for the Proliphix product line as well as several other IP cameras and other devices (temperature / humidity sensors?) as they become available. Aside from simple graphing, creating a system that takes attic, basement and external temperatures into account before deciding to spend some energy making the house a particular temperature could be a money saver. For example, if its very hot outside and in the attic but not in the basement, I may want to only run the air conditioning downstairs because its not cost effective. It may not be worth diverting air upstairs until I run the attic fan for a while to cool down the air conditioning ducts. I think there are large savings to be had through the entire house by having all the little parts work together rather than independently.

The Proliphix Ip Thermostat gets me one solid step closer to the ultimate goal of total home automation. When we get to a point where every light and light switch is an IP device, then I will think we have arrived. Anyone want to work on a simple general IP enabled PoE device?

Picture of NT10e in Operation