The house in New Jersey came with a menagerie of control panels. Pallid little rectangles with fuzzy LCD screens, of varying brands and designs. Some were decades old, and there were six of them in total, dotted around various rooms. Joe Truncale, a customer engineer at Google, remembers trying to get his head around the system when he moved in two years ago. Each thermostat had a piece of paper sticky-taped to it, with a helpful scribble from the previous homeowner explaining how to operate the gadget. Not exactly an intuitive user experience. And it wasn't economical, either. In one area the heating was running constantly. Truncale balked at the idea of trying to fine-tune each of the fiddly little thermostats. "That's when I started to think … maybe I build my own," he says. So, in a quest for control, he ripped them all out. It wasn't long until he had built a smartphone app and hooked up a device to his gas furnace that allowed him to control the delivery of hot water to his heaters remotely. Temperature sensors replaced the old thermostats. These tracked the temperature in various rooms and sent that data along wires running inside the walls back to a central hub. With some programming and scheduling, Truncale soon had a system that managed the heating more or less automatically. Most people, no matter their skill set, know what it's like to do battle with a heating system, to wrestle with a thermostat. But even if you don't want to build your own, there are ways of mastering these gadgets. This is how to make your thermostat work for you—and not the other way round. | 
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