Setting up a thermostat for remote control

[Wowbagger]

I have a Honeywell Lyric T6R which has been controlling our central heating for several years. It was originally set up for our Virgin router, but we dispensed with Virgin's services almost two years ago and are with our second service provider since. Until today, it has never crossed my mind that we used to control it remotely, and now we can't. Jan and I have been away for a couple of days. We turned the heating off when we left, and of course it has been bitterly cold. The temperature was 8°C inside the house when we arrived back, according to that self-same thermostat.

Our internet service provider is now Vodafone, via Cityfibre. This evening, I seem to have succeeded, through following a manual and swearing quite a bit, to get the Vodafone router and the thermostat to talk to each other. This is good. What I don't understand is this: when I am out of reach of our home wifi, how does my phone, when operating 5G or logged into some remote wifi, know how to connect to the router / thermostat?

[grams]

The cloud!

Which means: Your phone's app sends your commands to the manufacturer's website. The thermostat checks in with the manufacturer's website to get the latest commands.

Anyway what you want is insulation.

[Wowbagger]

Aha! That's clever!

We have what I think is pretty decent insulation. I would like triple glazing in this room, as much for sound insulation since we live on a busy road, but that will have to wait until we get a round to getting the room decorated.

My rule of thumb when testing insulation is how cold the loft remains when the house is otherwise warm. On the rare occasions that we have snow that settles, our roof is one of the last houses hereabouts from which the snow has melted. Also, it isn't uncommon for the central heating's header tank in the loft to freeze if the outside temperature drops pretty low.

[Kim]

Aha! That's clever!

More of a bodge to work around a bodge really.

In an ideal world, your devices would have public IP addresses, and you could configure your app or web browser or whatever to connect to them directly (assuming suitable firewall rules and whatnot) from anywhere.

Dynamic IP addresses and NAT, which are cost-saving features of almost every post-2000 consumer-grade internet connection, broke this.  And then the IPv4 addresses ran out and made them compulsory.  (Enough people don't give a stuff about IPv6 to prevent it becoming a viable solution.)

So the standard workaround is for everything to talk to some pre-determined cloud service, which means your car or smart speaker or thermostat or whatever now relies on its manufacturer maintaining some service in perpetuity for it to work.  In practice, this tends to fall foul of capitalism within 5-10 years or so, leaving you with a gadget of reduced functionality, a major hacking project or a piece of e-waste, depending on how critical the cloud service was to its operation.  It also means your gadgets stop communicating when your internet connection goes down, which is more annoying for things like lightbulbs than it is for thermostats.