Apple design mold, good to know I won’t buy it. It’s great business to let people know where the creative force came from, like movies that advertise “By the producers of…” but I also now know to stear clear of the thing.

Just plain and simple don’t like their design philosophy or use philosophy with tech, and I don’t think I’m alone.

The thermal mass of a building’s structure is huge compared to the thermal mass of the air inside the building. The contact area between the air and the walls, etc. is also massive. Add to this that the building has fairly good insulation on the outside. It takes hours for the temperature of the building itself to change significantly. If the temperature of the building fabric is, say, fifty degrees, then the air will be subject to cooling at the same time that the heater is trying to heat the air, and the heater will just have to work that much harder. The situation is rather like trying to drag a large wood block with a rubber band. Fine control is illusory.

Now, of course there are special cases. For example, if you use a building only once a week, it may be economical to let the temperature float freely within the range of 50-90 degrees when unoccupied, and automatically bring the temperature to within 68-72 when you come within twenty miles of the place. You might save some energy doing that. Mind you, temperature swings are not good for information storage media, such as DVD disks, so you will need to build special heater-refrigerator cabinets for them to keep them within narrower limits. But unless you own multiple houses, this is not relevant to you.

Incidentally, if you live in an apartment, your apartment is likely to be much more closely thermally connected to the neighboring apartments than to the outside. Work out the respective areas of interior walls, floors, and ceilings, versus exterior walls, and make some allowance for the intentional insulation of exterior walls. A building of, say, 10,000-20,000 square feet usually has a fairly small ratio of exterior surface area to floor area and interior volume.

A general rule of thumb is that, barring extreme temperatures, ie. fire temperatures, fluid flow (convection) is the most effective means of heat transfer. Water is a much denser fluid than air. Your house probably takes in hundreds of gallons of water every day, generally at the outdoor temperature, and discharges them down the sewer, more or less at room temperature. This typically represents a significant amount of heat transfer. Your water heater has to work harder in winter, because it is receiving colder water. What you can do, practically speaking, is to add a solar water heater, and a sufficiently large tank to store the hot water.

Of course the Apple ubergeeks already have the things which an upscale California architect designs in as a matter of course, that is, geothermal heat pumps and solar water heaters, and probably photovoltaic cells as well. They are just playing around the edges to be “more green than thou.” In most of the United States, the average temperature, the ground-water temperature, is significantly below the comfort level, so the temperature-regulation problem, once you have a geothermal heat pump installed, is primarily a heating problem, which can be dealt with by circulating hot water from the tank supplied by the solar collector. A solar water heater is basically a metal sheet with pipes welded to it, inside a glass enclosure. It is fairly cheap to make. People have developed “vacuum-bottle solar heaters which eliminate losses due to convection, and therefore work even in extreme conditions, eg. under clouds, or in extreme cold.

There are sensible things you can do with electronics. For example, you can make a cheap little infrared imager that people can use to spot heat leaks in old buildings and plug them up up with caulk guns. Maybe a slight gap has developed between the window frame and the window assembly, and cold air is coming in. Squirt some goop in, and that solves the problem.

The problem about Ubergeeks is that they try to find examples of national problems in their own comfortable lifestyles, rather than addressing the actual problems of people who have much more modest incomes.

You mean there isn’t already an iPhone app to let you stick it on the wall and use it as a thermostat?