| Short summary here so people can understand why this is massive in France: * (super summarized), France developped nuclear electricity back in the 70s. As a counterpart, Electric heaters were massively deployed * Electric heaters were deployed with a technology named "fil pilote": when you change the phase, you can drive the target temperature https://www.vitahabitat.fr/blog/qu-est-ce-que-le-fil-pilote-... * Unfortunatly, to drive the temperature, you need... something to drive it which was not deployed: you cannot plug a NEST and plugin in in a thermostat is complex * In recent years, DIY based solutions based on Home Automation or Shelly were deployed by DIY communities but hey this require high skills & dedicated server (synology like), and sometime soldering. There is no plug and play solution on the market * Heatzy.com proposed a wifi based solution but you can only do On/Off, not select a target temperature (so this is useless) So having a single wifi small box to plug on the heater to drive the target temperature is a game changer --> Since i'm looking at this market every years since 2013, it has not evolved until this post on hcknews! Very happy to see this solution coming! you made my day! (unfortunatly we're at the end of winter :)) |
"fil pilote" was probably useful in the 90s but it sounds outdated to me.