FYI- I received an email the other day that sonos officially added voice control for Spotify!

I never thought I’d be the kind of person to use voice commands, but it is so nice to tell it to turn on the radio while I’m cooking dinner!

Can confirm timer works - set a 5 minute timer for playing music in the family room).

Spotify does work with Sonos now (I don’t use it but I have my account set up with it), but voice control does not work with Spotify.

Ok - agree to disagree! Just wanted to share my experience with the community on a quality local voice control that’s available today while the home assistant community works on these exciting developments.

I think an important correction here is that they say they will only commit to a minimum of 5 years of software updates after they stop selling a particular model.

Even then, there is no reason the speaker wouldn’t still work. To me, that sounds perfectly reasonable. There’s posts about a 15 year old play 5 speaker getting a firmware update within the last year even, so I think Sonos deserves credit where credit is due. They have a proven track record so far, but no doubt it’s something to keep an eye on going forward.

I don’t think Sonos gets enough credit for their local voice control capability. It can’t be integrated into home assistant to do anything beyond controlling the Sonos speakers, but I have been ABSOLUTELY blown away by how responsive the voice commands have been. Literally a 100% success rate after using it for a couple months now. It correctly interprets if you want to start/stop playing, can find music by the artist I want from Apple Music (not sure about other streaming services), and will correctly adjust playing status for a specific speaker if you say to adjust music on that speaker only - even if you command it from another room.

The best part - no bullshit worst responses about “by the way….” Like on Alexa. At most, you get a short response like “good choice” or “ok”.

Sonos isn’t cheap, but I would 100% buy them again every time because it just works.

I see those types of coffee packets in almost all hotels across the us, so they’re around but I’ve definitely never seen them outside of that.

I’m on mobile and tbh don’t have time to dig into this too much, but I think you would do well to calculate the point of optimum efficiency for your specific scenario. I am in a similar scenario and hope to put together a spreadsheet that I could share if it doesn’t already exist elsewhere, but here is what I would do:

1. Find out if your heat pump IOM specifies the minimum ambient temperature before electric auxiliary heat kicks in (sometimes called “em heat” or emergen heat). Electric heat will always be the most expensive source of heat, so you should use oil heat when temperatures drop below that.

2. Look up the peak electric rate (in $/kW-hr) for your utility company. Use this to calculate the cost, per hour, to run your heat pump in all temperatures tabulated in your link. This will tell you how expensive it is to run your heat pump in a worst-case scenario.

3. Calculate the cost to run your boiler, per hour. This is where you will have to do your own homework on efficiency of your boiler, rate of consumption, and cost of oil in your location. Hard to say if the boiler will run at full capacity or part load, but most are capable of running between 20-100% of nameplate capacity (5:1 turn-down). Summarize your findings into a coat to run your boiler per hour.

4. When the answer for #2 exceeds the answer for #3, you’ve identified your switch point! Note that this relies on a number of assumptions, like that the heat pump is running full capacity.