Your home’s thermostat is too easy to use: add the requirement of adding “fire logs” to it in order to keep your house warm!

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Background:

Modern technology is often extremely convenient. For example, in a house with some type of central heating, you can heat the entire house by just pushing a couple of buttons on a thermostat (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: The wall thermostat is a commonly seen method of controlling temperature in a house.

The Issue:

However, this system might just be too easy and convenient: there’s no sense of accomplishment in pressing a single button to heat a house, compared to the labor-intensive foraging-for-things-to-burn method of our ancestors.

Proposal:

Let’s come up with a compromise that provides both the convenience of a modern thermostat with the “sense of accomplishment” of tending a fire.

We don’t want to actually have to burn anything, but to give the feel of fire-tending, let’s create a thermostat with a new feature (Fig. 2): a funnel that toothpicks (or similar objects) can be loaded into. The thermostat then “consumes” these toothpicks (by slowly dropping them below, onto the floor), and will refuse to operate if there are no toothpicks loaded into the hopper.

Fig. 2: The updated thermostat (A) will refuse to operate unless there are toothpicks loaded into the plastic hopper (B), which it pretends to consume (C) to generate heat, and then it ejects the toothpicks (D) onto a pile on the floor. Although these toothpicks are metaphorically “burned,” they can also just be re-loaded into the top and used again, since nothing was actually done to them.

This system could also use pebbles, paper clips, or perhaps even a liquid (which would metaphorically indicate that oil was being burned to heat the house).

Conclusion:

In this way, a person can get the “natural” ancient experience of tending a fire, without all the inconvenience! Win/win.

PROS: Brings an interactive element to a previously entirely-automated system.

CONS: In cold areas, pipes might freeze if this thermostat isn’t tended for a couple of days.