This month’s pet peeve is about thermostats. A good digital thermostat circuit costs only pennies to manufacture — yet companies still put TERRIBLE electro-mechanical knobs on house and window HVAC units. These things have so much hysteresis that they simply can’t easily handle switching between heat and AC themselves. I’d much prefer a SIMPLE circuit that understands I want the room between 21 and 23 degrees Celsius, and figures out what kind of air handling is necessary. Is that too much to ask?

Where does this rant come from? It’s from having to deal with a poorly made HVAC system in a hotel room this month, constantly getting up in the middle of the night to adjust the crappy thermostat. Death to rotary electromechanical devices! (Yeah, this rant flows over to rotary timers on dishwashers and washing machines. They seem to fail just as often, and are a pain in the ass to set accurately…)