[jvanloov]

We have a thermostat in our house that has a weekly programme: it turns the heat on in the morning, then off at 7:30 when everyone is at work/school, back on at 16:30 so that the house is heated when we get back home from work/school, and off again at 22:30 around bedtime. During weekends it heats during the day and is off during the night.

There was never any question on using this system; everyone I know has this, unless they live in a really old house or an apartment block with common heating. It's a standard for heating systems called OpenTherm.

Is this really that uncommon, or is this a European thing?

[pauly]

We have similar in the UK. I bought the Nest thermostat originally but could not see how to make it work for me. I like the shineyness and am a big home automation fan (I have mostly LightwaveRF 433mhz sockets and switches and some hand rolled code connected to google calendars https://github.com/pauly/lightwaverf) but am going to wait a while before buying into this.

[chadgeidel]

I'm in the same boat as you (Western US here). I've had a programmable digital thermostat for at least 10 years, and many newer apartments have them already installed.

I can't believe more people don't know about these things. They predate the Nest by 5-10 years.