I should not need a friggin PHD to set a home heating and air conditioning unit thermostat. I DO NOT need, or even want, Wi-Fi capability or infinite programmability for different AC and heating schedules. Just give me an old Mercury switch thermostat and let me set it and forget it.
Wheels
Sorry @Wheels, the world laughs at your sensibility! Our overlords in Beijing need to know everything about you. You do NOT want to anger them. Get the Nest!
I went through that last year when we had a new HVAC system installed. 
Technology should simplify our lives , not make us want to pull (all three of) our hairs out !
Thereâs ways around that, unfortunately not very well known.
Now that I know what happened with my last PC, Iâll throw some other old hard drives Iâve got laying around into it and turn it into a server, and combined with some other old toys from Undergrad, Iâve started plotting out how to slowly start automating some of the things around the house.
As for HVAC, are there any third-party interfaces or apps you can look at to manage that?
How about grumpy old nerds? Nest is reasonably easy to set up. Honeywell and others, not so much.
Your mantra should beâŠ
Put all IoT devices on a guest network/DMZ.
Maybe we should make a separate home automation thread, I feel really uncomfortable suggesting a Home Automation platform as a 27-year old in the grumpy old man threadâŠ
But @Navynuke99 , you should really consider Home Assistant. It is the ultimate local private home automation solution with tons of integrations and a very good and long track record. Open source as well.
Unlike other home automation solutions, it does not require devices to integrate with their API but rather asks them to make an open source Python package so any tinkerer can interface with that device also without home assistant. Then they write an integration around that public, device-specific API.
I have the ones that came with my AC. They offer rudimentary programming for days of the week and vacation and stuff, but you have to stand there to do it all.
No WIFI. No phone home. If you arenât willing to stand there and do it, it wonât be done.
Iâm reminded of when VCRâs came out; so over-simplified no one could program it.
My biggest beef with ânew stuffâ: it doesnât last very long. Planned-obsolescence at work - again. Detroit (USA) learned the hard way 50 years ago.
âTheyâ plan on no one remembering, or dying off (end result is same).
Once that stuff gets momentum you canât fight it. Applies to lots of things. To get a quality vehicle for my wife, that I feel will last 20 years (my non-made in the USA truck will be twenty next year), I had to spend nearly what my first house cost. My '70 Dodge, bought slightly used for $500, is likely still running, somewhere.
An elderly lady (likely my age now but in my twenties she was old) said to me that"âŠeach generation gets smarter (more like: has access to more info) yet gets weakerâŠ" She was looking, sternly, at me then. 
Oh, and those Progressive Insurance company ads, "donât be [like] your parentsâ, kind of pizz me off. Especially when the âsuspectâ is doing the right thing(s)!
âŠand reading Submarine booksâŠhey, whatâs wrong with that!!!
Now,
The minority Scottish nationalists that pretend are running Scotland offered me a free wall mounted car charger. I took it but discovered it had a sim card in it and phoned my electricity consumption to a SNP monitoring office. Not once the sim card was removed it didnt. Plus pulling out the three pin plug. (I dont have an electric car).
Puts on hat for resetting the clock on the VCR
So, speaking to the question of car chargers, weâre still learning how and when people charge them, and it makes a massive difference for calculating and forecasting load demand profiles- especially in areas with heavy reliance on renewable energy sources, such as Scotland. Additionally, there is a lot of interest in EVs being used as auxiliary batteries and power sources at some point in the future during high demand times.
To the issue of notification, I have no clue what current UK policy is, but for the EU there are requirements for notifying what it does with data it collects and transmits- it was poaaibly hidden in the documentation somewhere.
Finally, Iâd highly advise against using it without the original grounded plug- thatâs how fires happen. 
Difficult to use if it is not plugged in.
The Scottish regional authority has a record of gathering inappropriate data and misusing it. EG sexual behaviour of school children, even asking eight year olds upwards about varieties of sex acts they engage in