BigTech stole my heating.

Quite a few years ago my inner geek was on the lookout for anything I could connect to, and operate from my smart phone. Yes I know that probably sounds shallow, but when your inner geek calls, you have to act.

One of my favourite purchases was a nest smart thermostat. I love the industrial design of the device, the app worked well, easy to use, functional. Great when we arrived back to a warm home with our then two baby daughters, after a long drive back from visiting family.

Google bought nest some years back, and apart from the annoying reminders to create a Google account to use the app, all was well, until recently.

Beginning of the end

A few weeks back I got an email telling me that at the end of October 2025, Google are discontinuing support for my perfectly functional, albeit by current tech standards ancient thermostat. They did offer me a discount on the latest state of the art device, thank you.

The thermostat still works, in the same way the old (dumb?) thermostat worked. I walk up to it, turn the outer ring until the desired temperature is reached, hopefully our boiler fires, and the display turns orange and off we go. Can I still do this with my app, remotely? Nope.

This got me thinking

A lot of my current day job is working with the likes of James Lovegrove and the many supporters at OpenForum Europe and supporting posts from the likes of Frank Karlitschek the CEO of Nextcloud on #DigitalSovereignty. The digital sovereignty conversations started maybe four years or more ago. The #EU and other European countries concerned with how much of their critical IT infrastructure was delivered by North American based hyperscalers on Chinese hardware, and vowed to do something about it.

In the early days I felt the conversations centred around where is the data being stored? And who has or could gain access to it? Potentially violating privacy laws in a number of countries. Fast forward to today and there are multiple conversations covering topics such as; is there back door access? Kill switches? And can we ensure uninterrupted access to software to maintain operations?

It's all about control

I have on premise heating, because that's where it needs to be. However, I've outsourced part of the control of that service to a third party, in this case Google. Google has decided to discontinue that service to my device, because it can, because it's their service. Even if I take up their offer of a new thermostat, I create a piece of eWaste, beautiful as it might be, it's still eWaste. My inner sustainability geek won't let this happen.

Comparing the heating requirements of a family of four with running the various ministries and agencies of a national government, supporting tens of millions of citizens might not seem like-for-like, but at its core is control. Once you ceed control it's very difficult and costly to get it back.

Thanks for reading. I'm off to see if any of the many clever people Home Assistant can help.

And you?

How do you keep the lights (and heating and all the other critical IT elements on) in your business while still maintaining control?