Old Glaswegian joke:
‘Put your hat and coat on, lassie, I’m off to the pub.’
‘That’s nice — are you taking me with you?’
‘No, I’m just switching the central heating off while I’m oot.’
Late last year we bought a little holiday flat on the Kent coast. After I had furnished it with all the essentials — fibre-optic broadband, a large television, a Nespresso machine and a couple of random chairs — I looked for an excuse to buy some new gadgetry which I hadn’t tried before.
Given that the place is often empty during the week and was always chilly in the winter for a few hours after we arrived, I thought I would try one of the internet-controllable central heating thermostats you will have seen lavishly advertised recently. Google recently paid about £2 billion for Nest Labs, one of the firms developing this technology.
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