Vent: My smart thermostat froze the AC in July because of one setting I didn't know about
So I'm standing in my kitchen in Austin at 11pm, it's 89 degrees inside, and my AC has been running nonstop for 6 hours. I call my buddy who does HVAC and he asks one thing: "did you mess with the schedule?" Turns out my thermostat had this "smart recovery" thing turned on, where it learns your routine and pre-cools the house before you get home. Except it decided my routine was getting home at 5pm, so it kicked the compressor on at 2pm during the hottest part of the day, and the thing just never caught up. I dug through the app for 20 minutes and found the setting buried three menus deep, labeled "eco pre-conditioning." Turned it off, and the house cooled down in 40 minutes flat. Here's the part that bugs me. Is it the thermostat's fault for being too clever, or my fault for never reading what I tapped "yes" to during setup? My buddy says he sees this exact thing every summer, people blaming the unit when it's the software doing too much. So now I want to know, has anyone else had a gadget outsmart itself and cost you a repair bill or a miserable night? I keep thinking about that "learning" feature and whether I should just buy a dumb one.