15 ms·

Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

217 points by protomyth 11y ago

newday 11y ago
Considering how cold it gets up here in Canada, this is scary.
- tcdent 11y ago
  Scary enough to have redundancy? edit: I'm talking about redundant systems. A wood fireplace, for example. You should have a backup of any form of technology you rely on to maintain your life. We regularly do it with far less critical applications.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Can you have redundant thermostats? Though I'd note that traditional thermostats and even simple programmable ones are very reliable.
    - tomkinstinch 11y ago
      Sure, at least for traditional two-wire thermostats that turn on when the circuit is closed: connect them in parallel. The Nest is so obviously a product designed in warm California—not anywhere that sees truly hard winter. If it were designed well, it would fail safe (furnace on). I'd rather have a hefty heating bill from my furnace running 24/7 than have all of the pipes in my house freeze and break. If I ever install a Nest or other smart thermostat, it will be in parallel to the bimetallic-strip-and-mercury-switch from forty years ago.
      - schwap 11y ago
        I don't think it would be as simple as a high heating bill. A residential furnace is certainly not made to run 24/7. No big deal if you're at work but if you're out of town for a while...
        msandford 11y ago
        The thermostat doesn't actually control the plant directly. It requests heat or AC by closing a connection. The HVAC controller responds to those requests as it is able to as per its programmed parameters. You're absolutely right that furnaces aren't designed to run 24/7. But your thermostat can request heat 24/7 and unless the furnace control board is broken, it'll the cycle the system as necessary to keep up with the requests. Most people never learn this because the systems are designed for peak needs and most days don't get anywhere near peak.
        scoates 11y ago
        > But your thermostat can request heat 24/7 and unless the furnace control board is broken, it'll the cycle the system as necessary to keep up with the requests. I have a hot water boiler. Even when constantly calling for heat, I can hear the element relays click on and off to avoid over-pressuring. The recirculation pump stays on the whole time. (I'm agreeing with you; just pointing out that my system does cut out under normal operation, while calling for heat.)
      - ghaff 11y ago
        Thanks. A failsafe with a fallback to a sensible default would seem to have been a pretty basic feature. But as you say... CA.
      - revelation 11y ago
        I'm pretty sure the fail safe for a furnace should not be on and blasting. In a well insulated house (well, not CA either) you could easily get the temperature into dangerous areas with a constantly on furnace, and you don't want that happening when asleep.
        tomkinstinch 11y ago
        The risk is the boiler remaining off when you are not around; that's the condition where massive property damage would occur (pipes freezing). If you're present, presumably you would notice a failed-safe boiler running often and address the issue. The boiler controller would preserve the safety of the system itself even if the thermostat calls for heat constantly. In the event the house is too hot, you could open windows, leave, or if it is above freezing outside simply turn off the boiler directly. If it gets too hot while you're asleep, it's not "dangerous": you would wake up sweating. Granted, infants or the infirm may have issues, but in general they face a multitude of dangers that need special consideration or supervision. What Nest should have really done is include an old-school analog control mechanism as the fail safe (reed switch, magnet, and a bimetallic strip?) that would maintain a safe baseline (say, 50ºF) if the "smart" controller fails.
    - schwap 11y ago
      Maybe you could have a thermostat in parallel that's normally set to a minimum temperature? Thermostat -> furnace communication is pretty dead simple.
      - soneil 11y ago
        I'm curious why the nest can't do exactly that. Have a simple microcontroller running a thermostat, with hard low, soft low, hard high, soft high. Then let the brain twiddle the soft low/high all it likes. If the brain goes missing, the micro just carries on brainless with the previous settings. If the brain really screws the pooch, at least the hard low can kick in somewhere before pipes burst. It seems like a safety-net would be high-school easy, and at least let them claim they've learnt from their mistakes.
  - mhurron 11y ago
    Think about what you just said. Redundancy for a thermostat. You know, that thing that before the Nest you never even had to think about.
    - nulltype 11y ago
      The thermostat at my place works great. That wasn't enough to keep the heater from breaking for about a week around Thanksgiving.
    - bcook 11y ago
      Perhaps not, but I have lost power for a week during a blizzard and it was nice to have a fire-place (redundancy). Disregarding the power-loss scenerio, if my any part of my HVAC system fails, I have space-heaters.
    - cjensen 11y ago
      tcdent didn't say redundancy for a thermostat. For example, a fireplace and some wood is redundancy that covers both thermostat failures and power failures. If you live in dangerous weather as mentioned in the original comment, it would be stupid not to have a Plan B.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - CamperBob2 11y ago
      Redundancy is already built into many home heating systems. My heat pump has a backup furnace for emergency heat (which is also used if it's too cold outside for the heat pump to work efficiently.) So the hardware is solid enough -- it's just up to the thermostat to not drop the ball.
  - rubiquity 11y ago
    I tried to put my original thermostat on top of my Nest but it doesn't fit. Do you have any tips?
  - dogecoinbase 11y ago
    Not before Nest, no. I guess so now?
hijinks 11y ago
Wow this happened to my family. We didn't have heat for I think 5 hours. Now we are in the SF Bay so it didn't get crazy cold but I had a wife telling me to fix it and the stupid thing wouldn't come online. I chalked it up to one of the kids pulled the unit from the base plate and the battery drained. It seems like a GIANT bug to me that the Nest won't come back online till the battery is almost fully charged. I "fixed" it by putting our old thermostat back in then I put the nest back a few days later.
- Jack000 11y ago
  happened to me too. I thought it was a problem with the heating system itself (why wouldn't the nest be getting a charge?) but now it all makes sense.
- pm24601 11y ago
  Ahhh but you still haven't learned, have you :-)? The repair ended after you replace the Nest.
ghaff 11y ago
I've also been told by people I know About Nests crashing and turning off. [edit: yes, anecdotal but it's not an unknown event] This is completely unacceptable in a Northern climate. No, it's not the only failure mode for a heating system but I have zero interest in adding another point of failure for the sake of having a cool device. Frozen pipes is a serious business.
- taternuts 11y ago
  That was my first thought; if I owned a Nest and it stopped working for 2-3 days right now where I live, I'd be in big trouble especially if I weren't home to get a space-heater to temporarily offset the issue
- pm24601 11y ago
  And don't forget those Terms of Service prevent you from getting the damage to your house fixed. And most house insurance does not cover flooding / water damage.
FireBeyond 11y ago
"It also happened recently with Fitbit, the maker of wearable activity trackers. The company was hit with a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco asserting that the wristbands failed to “consistently and accurately record wearers’ heart rates,” which is vital for those with certain medical conditions." Apropos of anything else - I don't think Fitbit has ever tried to market itself as a medical device.
- rubidium 11y ago
  It turns out even if a company markets its products with big bold "not for diagnostic/medical use", and its customers use the products for diagnostic or medical use, the company can still be on the hook. It depends on a number of things, not least of which is the company's knowledge of the actual use of their devices.
  - sparky_z 11y ago
    That doesn't seem fair. What's a company supposed to do in that situation? Just close up shop? Makes me wonder if it would be possible to intentionally drive a company out of business by convincing a bunch of people to use their products incorrectly.
    - craigching 11y ago
      I don't know about Fitbit per se, but there are cases where a company says one thing in it's legal interface, but does another with it's sales interface. IOW (pure speculation on my part), Fitbit could say "don't use this for such and such" and the sales people say "yeah, we say that (wink, wink), but we don't really mean it." To be clear, I am not saying Fitbit does that, but I am familiar with other companies that have done such and gotten in trouble for it.
      - cowsandmilk 11y ago
        GNC Pill Pushers
      - 11y ago
endgame 11y ago
And to close the citation loop: https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit is fun for people who want to roll their eyes at misbehaving smart devices.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
brudgers 11y ago
Two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7019617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7019617
twothamendment 11y ago
It isn't a smart/learning thermostat, but I've been very happy with my http://www.radiothermostat.com/ http://www.radiothermostat.com/ CT30 - and it hasn't left me in the cold. There is a newer model now, but you can get them with a Wifi or z-wave module. It has a json API and of course that means there are free apps too. I easily added a few controls to my own home automation system and now I can control it from anywhere and I don't need a 3rd party (other than the internet) involved. What do I like the most? Since I've set it up I haven't had to physically touch it. Programming it through json or an app is easier than the buttons on it. Now if you want a smart/learning t-stat, you'll want something else.
bsder 11y ago
Again? This smells like class action for negligence is coming at them this time.
imh 11y ago
At least among the engineers and data scientists here, are any of us really surprised? Smart devices, especially ones that learn, can certainly do better on average, but complexity adds edge cases and those worst cases can really matter. Simple things fail simply (when they fail at all).
atom_enger 11y ago
We have two nest thermostats installed at work. I rotate the WiFi keys for our APs quarterly and these things are the biggest pain in the ass to reconnect to the WiFi. The furnace turns off almost immediately after changing the WiFi key once the Nest loses connectivity. At first I thought it was coincidence but now that I rotate on a strict schedule it's a joke in our office. However, what's not a joke is what happens when the internet goes down. So does our heat. What the hell, Nest? Relevant: https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit
- jack-r-abbit 11y ago
  Really? The Nest Thermostat should still be able to control your heaters even without internet. https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest
  - epistasis 11y ago
    >“We had a bug that was introduced in the software update that didn’t show up for about two weeks,” Mr. Rogers said apologetically. In January, devices went offline, and “that’s when things started to heat up.”
    - jack-r-abbit 11y ago
      I don't think "offline" in this context means that the problem was because the device couldn't connect to the internet. It sounds like the bug drained the battery which prevented it from functioning.
      - kordless 11y ago
        The bug probably affect the Nest's ability to do low power charging using the fan wire. Evidently, as long as the fan runs, the Nest will charge at a lower rate than you get with the common wire hooked up. That is, unless you release some bad code and didn't do a full CI/CD run on a test unit and wait 2 weeks for the battery to go dead to figure out there was a bug. Which hit me on the 8th at exactly 9:29AM. It was FREEZING in the house. Dead nest. Took me about 10 minutes to look up the issue and 5 to hook up common. Any code that touches battery or recharge methods should throw a red flag immediately and have a 1 month wait time slapped on them. Also, there should be a dedicated Test Nest for each release known to be "in production".
spdustin 11y ago
Mine (Gen 2) died a month ago. I charged it up and reset it, and called Nest support. They sent me a replacement even though mine was working again, and included a prepaid return label. First problem I had with mine, and it was a great support experience. Anecdata and all. But combined with this story, makes me wonder if they replaced it because they knew it was likely to happen again.
josinalvo 11y ago
> Buried deep in Nest’s 8,000-word service agreement is a section called “Disputes and Arbitration,” which prohibits customers from suing the company or joining a class-action suit. Though I have no need for a thermostat whatsoever, I kinda like nest. However, I'd love if people went to court with a class action suit against them. These 'no class action' and 'arbitration' clauses are becoming increasingly common, but I think they probably don't hold up in court - and nor should they, given how much power they put in the hands of the company.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  Judges dismissing cases based on arbitration clauses seems pretty common. NYT has been on the case recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitration-everywhere-stacking-the-deck-of-justice.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitrat... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/business/dealbook/in-arbitration-a-privatization-of-the-justice-system.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/business/dealbook/in-arbit... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-religious-arbitration-scripture-is-the-rule-of-law.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-relig... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/business/dealbook/sued-over-old-debt-and-blocked-from-suing-back.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/business/dealbook/sued-ove...
  - Animats 11y ago
    Despite arbitration clauses in the EULA, there are people who can sue. The buyer of the device may be barred from suing, but other parties who suffered damages can still use. Roommates, guests, family members, people who live downstairs below pipes broken due to a Nest failure - they can all sue. They didn't agree to the EULA. Regular negligence standards apply. If you can show that a lot of the things failed all at once, that's a pretty good case for negligence. This can also come up in landlord/tenant situations. If the landlord put in a Nest, and its failure caused the tenant problems, like having to spend the night in a hotel, the tenant can probably sue Nest.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  They do usually hold up in court. Some judges have been ruling that the customer must be given more notice on the "contracts" they're supposedly "entering" before they can be entered, however (Nguyen v. Barnes and Noble).
stcredzero 11y ago
If you watch the unhappy early adopter YouTube videos of Nest thermostats, this outcome is pretty predictable. There's a level of quality control you need to put up a web app, which won't physically affect anyone if it happens to crash for awhile. Then there's a much higher level required when you're controlling things in the real world. This outcome was predictable from the experience of those early adopters. EDIT: Why couldn't Nest fall back to being a dumb thermostat? Lots of smart device makers should consider having such a fallback.
- mattbee 11y ago
  The Nest comes in two parts - the "smart" bit with the USB charger & battery & wifi, and the Heat Link - the actual radio control for your boiler. The Heat Link has a big button on which lets you turn the heating on and off, overriding what the Nest is telling it. That's not as economical as a regular thermostat, but it means you won't freeze: https://nest.com/uk/support/article/How-do-I-turn-the-heat-on-if-the-Nest-Thermostat-isn-t-working https://nest.com/uk/support/article/How-do-I-turn-the-heat-o...
  - mattbee 11y ago
    Oh, OK, you don't have that in the US apparently. Why's it necessary?
    - HillRat 11y ago
      Almost all US central heat and air systems are "forced air" -- gas or electric heaters (furnaces) that blow conditioned air through ducting. Boiler-radiator systems wouldn't work with the standard US thermostat, not least because US thermostats use low-voltage signaling.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        I don't claim to be an expert but I have a forced hot water system (converted at some point from steam) and AFAIK it uses a "standard" thermostat. At least when I upgraded to a Honeywell programmable thermostat 15 years or so ago, I don't remember it being anything unusual. I bought a thermostat at the home improvement store and an electrician who was doing some other work installed it.
ams6110 11y ago
I have a manual thermostat, no batteries required. It has worked flawlessly for over 30 years. It has a simple intuitive interface: a switch for "heat" or "cool" and a dial with a pointer to set the desired temperature. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
- djcapelis 11y ago
  Because people derive value from it. It's that simple. You don't have to, and that's fine, but having the temperature settings for the house happen on a schedule that makes sense and depends on the time and day of the week can be quite useful. And having the ability to change the temperature from my bed is nice too.
  - thrownaway2424 11y ago
    Sure, but we've had that level of automation for decades. My Honeywell programmable thermostat has time/day scheduling with several phases per day, and different phases for the weekend. It runs off a 9V battery and I can't tell you how long the battery lasts but I _can_ tell you that it's at least 15 years.
    - greenyoda 11y ago
      It would be pretty rare for a 9V battery to last for 15 years of continuous operation. In my thermostat, which has features similar to yours, the battery is just for backup in case the power goes out, and the thermostat normally runs off the 24V power from the furnace circuit (it works fine if you remove the battery). It's possible that your thermostat works the same way and your battery has been dead for many years.
      - thrownaway2424 11y ago
        That could be, but even if the battery is dead or leaking the thing trucks along and works fine.
- 11y ago
zitterbewegung 11y ago
Why have I only heard horror stories about the Nest? I see their reviews on Amazon and I see huge problems with this product .
- acdha 11y ago
  Because happy users don't feel motivated to tell people everything is okay. It's a common bias which you have to constantly remind yourself to correct for.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    That would make sense if there weren't plenty of other product reviews in which people are gushing about how awesome they are.
    - acdha 11y ago
      What's the ratio of happy to unhappy users? If 80% of Nest users are happy you could see twice as many positive reviews as negative and still overstate the percentage of unhappy customers.
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      They're usually astroturfed. Some vendors will go as far as offering a small rebate to customers who leave a positive review of the product. I would guess that probably 85% of "user-generated content" on mainstream outlets like Amazon is the result of astroturfing or other paid schemes. It's practically impossible to compete in any online marketplace without turfing the crap out of every slightly relevant outlet. Your competitors are doing it constantly, and the disadvantage will be really big if you don't play ball too. One example: our objectively superior product with a great design and great functional foundation was substantially less popular than the dirty rip off that had their site built with cheap oDesk labor and designed with cheesy stock photos, but spent ridiculous amounts of money on SEO and fake Facebook comments. We were substantially cheaper too. There was literally no reason to ever use the other person's offering, and there was no reason for them to show up ahead of us on searches, but they did. Don't believe Google's line of BS that to get to the top you just need to put out good content. It's total nonsense. What you need are backlinks, which are bought and laundered into a network of sites controlled by the same SEO group, and social media clout, which is bought by paying third-world contractors $1.50/hr to make fake Facebook and Twitter profiles and talk about your company.
grayje 11y ago
"At the point of desire, you want more, but at the point of daily use, you want less." -John Maeda, on complexity in product design
wstrange 11y ago
Why don't they build in a simple fail safe on the Nest? That is, have a user settable manual switch that fails to "heat on" if there is no response from the main unit. The house would be quite hot - but probably much less damaging than frozen pipes. The liability costs for frozen pipes could be staggering.
nrjames 11y ago
I've had a Nest for ~ 3 years now. It was a mistake. The "learning" on it is not intelligent enough to understand the idiosyncrasies of our 60 yr old house. I have to manually adjust it every day to make sure my kids are roasting/freezing in their bedrooms. I really should just switch it back to a manual thermostat.
- atom_enger 11y ago
  > to make sure my kids are roasting/freezing in their bedrooms. I'm sure it's just a grammatical mistake, but I lol'ed. We have a lot of problems with the Nest thermostats at work. I've got a 10 year old basic thermostat at home that works exactly as it should. Follows its schedule perfectly. No "learning" necessary.
- knz 11y ago
  Disable the autoaway settings and you have a conventional thermostat with the advantage of being able to remotely adjust the temperature.
  - ecopoesis 11y ago
    And use something like Skylark to set home or away based on geofencing your phone.
pdkl95 11y ago
So how many people will use this lesson about common mode failure to re-evaluate their risk assessment of technology with a central point of failure?
grandalf 11y ago
I had been thinking of buying a Nest, now I think I'll attempt to build my own using a Raspberry Pi. There are some very inexpensive bluetooth beacons that support temperature measurement... Does anyone have ideas for cool hardware or algorithms for something like this?
- elliottcarlson 11y ago
  http://makezine.com/2014/02/03/nest-thermostat-inspires-diy-open-source-versions/ http://makezine.com/2014/02/03/nest-thermostat-inspires-diy-...
- brandmeyer 11y ago
  Digi-Key is your friend. Build yourself a daughter card with a bunch of relay driver IC's and 24VAC relays. Bare minimum is three, but there are several different arragements for home HVAC, and more doesn't hurt. Some high-SEER rating HVAC units also have multiple speeds. Say, 6-8 relays for some flexibility. Check behind your existing thermostat and see how many wires it gets to be sure. Most units just use bang-bang control around some known limits. Something I've always wanted to try is to have a "periodic recirculation" mode for the times that I'm relying on passive solar heating, just to turn over the stratified air.
  - grandalf 11y ago
    Great ideas. > Something I've always wanted to try is to have a "periodic recirculation" mode Yes! That is one thing I want to try too. I did an experiment in an office setting during summer where I found that if set on "auto" someone would inevitably turn the thermostat down to 65 to cool some spot that was in the sun or where the air had gotten too warm. When I switched the fan to "always on" I would set the thermostat to 70 and nobody would feel the need to adjust it. I suppose depending on the cost of running the compressor vs the fan my approach may not have saved money, but it was interesting to see the difference in comfort offered by both.
  - jsight 11y ago
    The Ecobee3 can be programmed to run the fans for a configurable amount of time every hour.
insaneirish 11y ago
It was never great, and it's been worse and worse since Google bought them. Examples of some issues with mine: 1. It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration [1]. It will happily keep using its IP without renewing its lease. I've had situations where it's gone long enough without a lease renewal that another device has received its old IP and caused a conflict. 2. It constantly disassociates from the AP, and decides to come back on the network when it feels like it, not when there is traffic for it. And note, this is with a constantly powered device, so there should be no power saving causing it to power down. Also, the AP is about 6 feet away and there are zero other WiFi issues. Manually kicking the device off the AP causes it to come back immediately. 3. Their backend goes down all the time, usually for 1-2 hours. 4. They had a perfectly working method for turning heating on in advance of your setpoint with the goal of reaching your desired temperature at that time rather than just turning on at that time. Then they broke it [2]. This led to nice surprises like waking up to a completely cold house. Instead of rolling back the broken code, they refused to respond on the aforementioned thread for well over a month. It's really inexplicable. They have nice industrial design, good brand recognition, no shortage of money behind them, and they screw up at every conceivable turn. I'm going to try out the ecobee thermostat because I very much appreciate the convenience of being able to remotely adjust the temperature. [1]: https://community.nest.com/thread/10316 https://community.nest.com/thread/10316 [2]: https://community.nest.com/thread/11438 https://community.nest.com/thread/11438
- rsync 11y ago
  "It's really inexplicable. They have nice industrial design, good brand recognition, no shortage of money behind them, and they screw up at every conceivable turn." Ipso Facto. They can't not screw it up. A critical component of infrastructure should not be IP addressable. It should not be "on your wifi". It should not have a login or a password. It should be as dumb as possible and as simple as possible - and as anti-fragile to all of these events as possible. It's not possible to have this "feature set" and not have this pain. It's a fools errand to pursue it.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Yes, it is possible: Have a microcontroller that stores the time table for when to set which temperature, and applies it. Have a second processor, with internet access, that updates this table. Simple as that.
rdtsc 11y ago
In line with this is the classic "It Can't Be Hushed Here" Nest bug video, by Brad Fitzpatrick from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY [Warning: contains extremely annoying Nest smoke detectors beeping. So prepare to lower your volume] Brad looks very annoyed and it was no fun for him, but on an artistic level it is really well done, it is an epic battle between human and machine.
euske 11y ago
I find these companies deeply deceptive and disingenuous which advertise IoT things (or anything that contains more than 100k lines of code) so reliable as not to warn possible consequences or offer solid fallback mechanisms.
meesterdude 11y ago
This offers an interesting insight into the Internet of Things. Take something simple, and tack on a bunch of new technology that is subject to failure. Don't be surprised if it fails. To be fair, the issue isn't that there was software involved; digital thermostats have that. I think more telling was the level of complexity, which allows for a lot more to go wrong. Combined with a poor process behind update validation, this is what happens. Keep it Simple. If you're going to use new technology, keep the old stuff around, ideally working in parallel as a failsafe. And generally, anything you can do to distribute the failure points and allow for overlap (such as backup spaceheaters that don't normally kick on) should be considered if someone's life is on the line, or property is at risk. Stuff can always go wrong, but the more you can do to reduce risk the better. This applies to any system dependency; mechanical thermostat or nest.
- kuschku 11y ago
  In general, the way IoT is treated is wrong. Startups try to treat IoT devices as a standard arm or x86 processor with some additional GPIO pins where they read info, deal with it, and write info. No real-time guarantee, a level of QA similar to websites or consumer software, etc. And here is what previous companies building smart devices (say, SIEMENS) treated them like: As extended microcontrollers. Put all the critical software on one tiny microcontroller, do static verification that that microcontroller is always acting correct. If you need Internet access, add a second chip that does that, and provides the results of that data to the first microcontroller — but don't depend on it. There is a large divide between the Engineers designing these devices in the past, and today's crowd.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Another angle to that problem is that a lot of IoT today is basically making something equivalent to a weekend hardware hack, tweaking it a bit, and then calling for investors and marketing the living shit out of the device. Popular IoT products are toys, not tools.
    - jerf 11y ago
noneTheHacker 11y ago
My house didn't play nicely with my Nest. I got a new Furnace and AC and had them install a Nest. It started acting weird. We replaced it with a low-tech Honeywell while trying to get it figured out. I then replaced the Nest thinking maybe it was faulty. I took a photo of the wire layout for the Honeywell and made sure I did the proper layout for the new Nest. It worked fine for a few days and then one day I came home to a 110 degree house! The Nest reported that things were 70-whatever. I then replaced it with a Wi-Fi Honeywell (not their Nest competitor) and that one has worked fine since. It was a very scary experience. I won't be trying a Nest again.
- tacos 11y ago
  Identical experience here. Installed Honeywell RedLINK and finally my problems went away. Ditto Honeywell wireless security, also works great. There's SO MUCH crap out there, and the wave hasn't even started yet.
CrowFly 11y ago
It's one thing when your thermostat has trouble. But would you trust a Nest Smoke Alarm? http://www.amazon.com/Nest-Protect-Carbon-Monoxide-Battery/dp/B00XV1RCRY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452740432&sr=8-1&keywords=nest+protect+smoke+alarm http://www.amazon.com/Nest-Protect-Carbon-Monoxide-Battery/d...
UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
This is why I purchased the Honeywell 9000 WiFi Color Touchscreen Thermostat[0] instead. The nice thing about the Honeywell is that you can use it completely offline if you so choose. It also has a REAL interface, so an app is an optional extra not a required component. Both the Nest and Honeywell require the infamous C wire, both are similar installation, and both cost around $200. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-RTH9580WF-Touchscreen-Thermostat-Premier/dp/B00FLZEQH2 http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-RTH9580WF-Touchscreen-Thermo... PS - And, yes, the Nest has a theoretical setup without the C wire, but you'll lose key things like fan control, or if the boiler doesn't run enough the entire thing can die. On both it is ultimately C wire or don't waste your time.
- manyxcxi 11y ago
  100% on the same page as you. I didn't get the Honeywell, I actually got a relatively cheap z-wave thermostat that acts like a regular ol' dumb programmable thermostat that can also be controlled by ANY z-wave compatible home automation hub (I use the Wink hub, to my sometimes chagrin). Pretty sure my thermostat was sub $75 on Amazon.
cameldrv 11y ago
If the software fails this often, they really should have some sort of reversion mode with multiple watchdogs that runs on a tiny microcontroller and just keeps the temperature at 70 degrees. If they can't get that right, maybe just a hard switch that wires in a calibrated bimetalic strip to keep the wheels on until the software is fixed.
feld 11y ago
I had a Nest and sold it to my brother after Google bought them and it was clear they were never going to release the rumored remote sensors. I got an ecobee instead. The ecobee is much smarter, mostly because of the remote sensors. My house is far more comfortable. It's also nice that ecobee has an API and IFTTT support. It has no issues running normally when the internet goes down. (My internet was down completely the other night and there was -25F windchill. It followed schedule just fine.) I'm guessing ecobee coming from Canada they know the value of a functional thermostat...
upofadown 11y ago
I have a mercury thermostat in the basement set to 12C directly across the thermostat leads. I live in a cold place, if the heat goes off things get damaged. You can't beat simplicity.
ilurkedhere 11y ago
Dude, did you try rebooting your thermostat?
Rasell 11y ago
Kite Festivals in the USA http://goo.gl/QYJJ4Z http://goo.gl/QYJJ4Z
legulere 11y ago
> Although I had set the thermostat to 70 degrees overnight, my wife and I were woken by a crying baby at 4 a.m. The thermometer in his room read 64 degrees, and the Nest was off. This seems quite strange to me. Here in Germany it's extremely common to (automatically) turn of heating all together in the night (called Nachtabsenkung). One reason is to save energy, but lower temperatures also help sleep: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/health/04real.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/health/04real.html The article says between 60°F (15.5°C) to 68°F (20°) is best.
- pqs 11y ago
  Sleeping with heating on seems a waste of energy to me. At least in Spain. I have a dumb thermostat. It doesn't even have a clock. It just has two buttons, one two increase temperature, the other to decrease it. In winter, during the day, I put it at 20C. At night, I put it at 15C or lower (which stops heating, as the house temperature decreases to about 17 or 18 degrees during the night, without heating). It works like a charm. We are not cold at night as we use pyjamas and duvet. We also have a baby. In fact, if I forget to turn off the heating at night, I can't sleep well and I often get up to turn it off.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - osi 11y ago
    You should get a simple programmable thermostat that just lets you put temperature at given times. Will automate away what you forget to do.
    - pqs 11y ago
      Yest, it would be better. But this happens once or twice in a year. It's really not worth it.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  I sleep with all windows open even in -20 C. You get really refreshed, you sleep much deeper and you learn to ignore all street noise.
ricksplat 11y ago
I looked into this, but I quickly realised I never use my Thermostat. My heating is controlled by a time-switch that directly enables the boiler in the morning and at night, and as far as I know this is how most people I know operate. We do have thermostats but they are largely ignored boxes that sit in the hallway and/or landing. Is this just something to do with living in a cold country? I would have thought a nest equivalent that directly operates the boiler would have been a better device ...
- stevep98 11y ago
  Sounds like you have a water-pipe central heating system. You probably have thermostatic valves on each radiator, which control the flow to each radiator. That's why the main thermostat doesn't do much.
  - ricksplat 11y ago
    Yep exactly! It's pretty much standard here. So I guess the Nest is targeting people with electric heating only? Sounds like taking a "quick win" while ignoring a potentially larger market!
DataJunkie 11y ago
I love Nest, but this is the exact reason why I have not installed one in my mountain home. I have to keep the heater set at 55 so the pipes won't freeze and burst. A bug like this would be financially catastrophic.
ck2 11y ago
Now think about all the people installing "smart" smoke detectors.
shallowpedantic 11y ago
this is what happens when people want to keep advancing and be looked at as "superior". "wow you still have that old LG ac box, why don't you go get a nest man" if it isn't broke, don't fix it. now you get screwed. hahaha.
unclebucknasty 11y ago
Nest is arrogant and obnoxious as a product. It is overrated and unnecessary. So ridiculous when you stop and think about it. If you ever scroll through the settings, it's completely laughable that this is all for a thermostat. And all for some supposed improvement that is marginal at best. At worst, it simply doesn't work; taking over and setting some uncomfortable temperature that you never requested. My old thermostat worked just fine. Set it on exactly what I liked, so there was no need for it to "learn". I literally gave it a specific number. Don't really get the concept of wanting it to second guess me. When I Googled and found others with similar issues, they seemed to be largely insulted on forums, as if the users were somehow unworthy of the wonderful Nest. They just hadn't invested enough time in understanding what the Nest wants. The whole thing seems like a hoax--an elaborate parody of the times.
rlpb 11y ago
Perhaps we need to start looking at arbitration clauses the same as we see doing business with some company is some distant country. Fine when everything goes smoothly, but expect to lose your money if it doesn't. The way to look at it is that a company with an arbitration clause might as well not be in the US.
phkahler 11y ago
Failure for a product to perform its primary function is totally unacceptable. Let me repeat: totally unacceptable. From the comments it seems they fail if they lose network connectivity? That's got to be the stupidest thing I ever heard. Apparently some "smart" TVs suffer from similar problems. Remember, there are plenty of thermostats that have NO software - just a stupid little mercury switch - and they are more reliable than this. When any product fails at it's primary function I next it. But hey it's the Internet of THINGS! woot!
pfarnsworth 11y ago
I've had the Nest for 2 years. To be honest I've had zero problems. The only problem I have is that once Google bought them, there has been little to no improvements in anything. They only give 10 days worth of data which is functionally useless. Why should I care about last week for energy use? I want to compare against last year. They haven't made any significant improvements so it's just another case of an innovator getting bought and then getting the innovation sucked out of it. The same thing happened with Dropcam. Once they were bought by Nest/Google they stopped making any real changes for the last 2 years. It's sad and infuriating as a customer.
- gduffy 11y ago
  Believe it or not, it wasn't really Google's fault. Agreed that it is sad and infuriating, though.
rrauenza 11y ago
After seeing this article, I noticed my Nest hadn't been "online" since December 26th. It could not see any wifi ssid's: not mine, not my neighbors', nor my iPhone's hotspot held right next to it. It was fully charged, not sluggish -- none of the problems listed as 'typical problems'. I went through the menu system and did a reset. I think that was a soft reboot. Still no success. Then I found you could reset it by pushing it in for 10 seconds until it turns off. It seemed more like a hard reset, and voila -- network back up. It's anecdotal, but this firmware update doesn't seem to be just about the charging. They seem to have messed up the wireless capabilities until a hard reset is performed.
CurtHagenlocher 11y ago
Interesting. This happened to me on the fifth and I assumed it had been an isolated glitch. The steps I had to take to make the thermostat work again were quite nonintuitive, and it was frustrating at how little help there was to be found in the available documentation.

217 points by protomyth 11y ago

newday 11y ago

Considering how cold it gets up here in Canada, this is scary.

tcdent 11y ago
Scary enough to have redundancy? edit: I'm talking about redundant systems. A wood fireplace, for example. You should have a backup of any form of technology you rely on to maintain your life. We regularly do it with far less critical applications.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Can you have redundant thermostats? Though I'd note that traditional thermostats and even simple programmable ones are very reliable.
  - tomkinstinch 11y ago
    Sure, at least for traditional two-wire thermostats that turn on when the circuit is closed: connect them in parallel. The Nest is so obviously a product designed in warm California—not anywhere that sees truly hard winter. If it were designed well, it would fail safe (furnace on). I'd rather have a hefty heating bill from my furnace running 24/7 than have all of the pipes in my house freeze and break. If I ever install a Nest or other smart thermostat, it will be in parallel to the bimetallic-strip-and-mercury-switch from forty years ago.
    - schwap 11y ago
      I don't think it would be as simple as a high heating bill. A residential furnace is certainly not made to run 24/7. No big deal if you're at work but if you're out of town for a while...
      - msandford 11y ago
        The thermostat doesn't actually control the plant directly. It requests heat or AC by closing a connection. The HVAC controller responds to those requests as it is able to as per its programmed parameters. You're absolutely right that furnaces aren't designed to run 24/7. But your thermostat can request heat 24/7 and unless the furnace control board is broken, it'll the cycle the system as necessary to keep up with the requests. Most people never learn this because the systems are designed for peak needs and most days don't get anywhere near peak.
        scoates 11y ago
        > But your thermostat can request heat 24/7 and unless the furnace control board is broken, it'll the cycle the system as necessary to keep up with the requests. I have a hot water boiler. Even when constantly calling for heat, I can hear the element relays click on and off to avoid over-pressuring. The recirculation pump stays on the whole time. (I'm agreeing with you; just pointing out that my system does cut out under normal operation, while calling for heat.)
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Thanks. A failsafe with a fallback to a sensible default would seem to have been a pretty basic feature. But as you say... CA.
    - revelation 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure the fail safe for a furnace should not be on and blasting. In a well insulated house (well, not CA either) you could easily get the temperature into dangerous areas with a constantly on furnace, and you don't want that happening when asleep.
      - tomkinstinch 11y ago
        The risk is the boiler remaining off when you are not around; that's the condition where massive property damage would occur (pipes freezing). If you're present, presumably you would notice a failed-safe boiler running often and address the issue. The boiler controller would preserve the safety of the system itself even if the thermostat calls for heat constantly. In the event the house is too hot, you could open windows, leave, or if it is above freezing outside simply turn off the boiler directly. If it gets too hot while you're asleep, it's not "dangerous": you would wake up sweating. Granted, infants or the infirm may have issues, but in general they face a multitude of dangers that need special consideration or supervision. What Nest should have really done is include an old-school analog control mechanism as the fail safe (reed switch, magnet, and a bimetallic strip?) that would maintain a safe baseline (say, 50ºF) if the "smart" controller fails.
  - schwap 11y ago
    Maybe you could have a thermostat in parallel that's normally set to a minimum temperature? Thermostat -> furnace communication is pretty dead simple.
    - soneil 11y ago
      I'm curious why the nest can't do exactly that. Have a simple microcontroller running a thermostat, with hard low, soft low, hard high, soft high. Then let the brain twiddle the soft low/high all it likes. If the brain goes missing, the micro just carries on brainless with the previous settings. If the brain really screws the pooch, at least the hard low can kick in somewhere before pipes burst. It seems like a safety-net would be high-school easy, and at least let them claim they've learnt from their mistakes.
- mhurron 11y ago
  Think about what you just said. Redundancy for a thermostat. You know, that thing that before the Nest you never even had to think about.
  - nulltype 11y ago
    The thermostat at my place works great. That wasn't enough to keep the heater from breaking for about a week around Thanksgiving.
  - bcook 11y ago
    Perhaps not, but I have lost power for a week during a blizzard and it was nice to have a fire-place (redundancy). Disregarding the power-loss scenerio, if my any part of my HVAC system fails, I have space-heaters.
  - cjensen 11y ago
    tcdent didn't say redundancy for a thermostat. For example, a fireplace and some wood is redundancy that covers both thermostat failures and power failures. If you live in dangerous weather as mentioned in the original comment, it would be stupid not to have a Plan B.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    Redundancy is already built into many home heating systems. My heat pump has a backup furnace for emergency heat (which is also used if it's too cold outside for the heat pump to work efficiently.) So the hardware is solid enough -- it's just up to the thermostat to not drop the ball.
- rubiquity 11y ago
  I tried to put my original thermostat on top of my Nest but it doesn't fit. Do you have any tips?
- dogecoinbase 11y ago
  Not before Nest, no. I guess so now?

hijinks 11y ago

Wow this happened to my family. We didn't have heat for I think 5 hours. Now we are in the SF Bay so it didn't get crazy cold but I had a wife telling me to fix it and the stupid thing wouldn't come online. I chalked it up to one of the kids pulled the unit from the base plate and the battery drained. It seems like a GIANT bug to me that the Nest won't come back online till the battery is almost fully charged. I "fixed" it by putting our old thermostat back in then I put the nest back a few days later.

Jack000 11y ago
happened to me too. I thought it was a problem with the heating system itself (why wouldn't the nest be getting a charge?) but now it all makes sense.
pm24601 11y ago
Ahhh but you still haven't learned, have you :-)? The repair ended after you replace the Nest.

ghaff 11y ago

I've also been told by people I know About Nests crashing and turning off. [edit: yes, anecdotal but it's not an unknown event] This is completely unacceptable in a Northern climate. No, it's not the only failure mode for a heating system but I have zero interest in adding another point of failure for the sake of having a cool device. Frozen pipes is a serious business.

taternuts 11y ago
That was my first thought; if I owned a Nest and it stopped working for 2-3 days right now where I live, I'd be in big trouble especially if I weren't home to get a space-heater to temporarily offset the issue
pm24601 11y ago
And don't forget those Terms of Service prevent you from getting the damage to your house fixed. And most house insurance does not cover flooding / water damage.

FireBeyond 11y ago

"It also happened recently with Fitbit, the maker of wearable activity trackers. The company was hit with a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco asserting that the wristbands failed to “consistently and accurately record wearers’ heart rates,” which is vital for those with certain medical conditions." Apropos of anything else - I don't think Fitbit has ever tried to market itself as a medical device.

rubidium 11y ago
It turns out even if a company markets its products with big bold "not for diagnostic/medical use", and its customers use the products for diagnostic or medical use, the company can still be on the hook. It depends on a number of things, not least of which is the company's knowledge of the actual use of their devices.
- sparky_z 11y ago
  That doesn't seem fair. What's a company supposed to do in that situation? Just close up shop? Makes me wonder if it would be possible to intentionally drive a company out of business by convincing a bunch of people to use their products incorrectly.
  - craigching 11y ago
    I don't know about Fitbit per se, but there are cases where a company says one thing in it's legal interface, but does another with it's sales interface. IOW (pure speculation on my part), Fitbit could say "don't use this for such and such" and the sales people say "yeah, we say that (wink, wink), but we don't really mean it." To be clear, I am not saying Fitbit does that, but I am familiar with other companies that have done such and gotten in trouble for it.
    - cowsandmilk 11y ago
      GNC Pill Pushers
    - 11y ago

endgame 11y ago

And to close the citation loop: https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit is fun for people who want to roll their eyes at misbehaving smart devices.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

brudgers 11y ago

Two years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7019617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7019617

twothamendment 11y ago

It isn't a smart/learning thermostat, but I've been very happy with my http://www.radiothermostat.com/ http://www.radiothermostat.com/ CT30 - and it hasn't left me in the cold. There is a newer model now, but you can get them with a Wifi or z-wave module. It has a json API and of course that means there are free apps too. I easily added a few controls to my own home automation system and now I can control it from anywhere and I don't need a 3rd party (other than the internet) involved. What do I like the most? Since I've set it up I haven't had to physically touch it. Programming it through json or an app is easier than the buttons on it. Now if you want a smart/learning t-stat, you'll want something else.

bsder 11y ago

Again? This smells like class action for negligence is coming at them this time.

imh 11y ago

At least among the engineers and data scientists here, are any of us really surprised? Smart devices, especially ones that learn, can certainly do better on average, but complexity adds edge cases and those worst cases can really matter. Simple things fail simply (when they fail at all).

atom_enger 11y ago

We have two nest thermostats installed at work. I rotate the WiFi keys for our APs quarterly and these things are the biggest pain in the ass to reconnect to the WiFi. The furnace turns off almost immediately after changing the WiFi key once the Nest loses connectivity. At first I thought it was coincidence but now that I rotate on a strict schedule it's a joke in our office. However, what's not a joke is what happens when the internet goes down. So does our heat. What the hell, Nest? Relevant: https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit

jack-r-abbit 11y ago
Really? The Nest Thermostat should still be able to control your heaters even without internet. https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest
- epistasis 11y ago
  >“We had a bug that was introduced in the software update that didn’t show up for about two weeks,” Mr. Rogers said apologetically. In January, devices went offline, and “that’s when things started to heat up.”
  - jack-r-abbit 11y ago
    I don't think "offline" in this context means that the problem was because the device couldn't connect to the internet. It sounds like the bug drained the battery which prevented it from functioning.
    - kordless 11y ago
      The bug probably affect the Nest's ability to do low power charging using the fan wire. Evidently, as long as the fan runs, the Nest will charge at a lower rate than you get with the common wire hooked up. That is, unless you release some bad code and didn't do a full CI/CD run on a test unit and wait 2 weeks for the battery to go dead to figure out there was a bug. Which hit me on the 8th at exactly 9:29AM. It was FREEZING in the house. Dead nest. Took me about 10 minutes to look up the issue and 5 to hook up common. Any code that touches battery or recharge methods should throw a red flag immediately and have a 1 month wait time slapped on them. Also, there should be a dedicated Test Nest for each release known to be "in production".

spdustin 11y ago

Mine (Gen 2) died a month ago. I charged it up and reset it, and called Nest support. They sent me a replacement even though mine was working again, and included a prepaid return label. First problem I had with mine, and it was a great support experience. Anecdata and all. But combined with this story, makes me wonder if they replaced it because they knew it was likely to happen again.

josinalvo 11y ago

> Buried deep in Nest’s 8,000-word service agreement is a section called “Disputes and Arbitration,” which prohibits customers from suing the company or joining a class-action suit. Though I have no need for a thermostat whatsoever, I kinda like nest. However, I'd love if people went to court with a class action suit against them. These 'no class action' and 'arbitration' clauses are becoming increasingly common, but I think they probably don't hold up in court - and nor should they, given how much power they put in the hands of the company.

jacobolus 11y ago
Judges dismissing cases based on arbitration clauses seems pretty common. NYT has been on the case recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitration-everywhere-stacking-the-deck-of-justice.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitrat... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/business/dealbook/in-arbitration-a-privatization-of-the-justice-system.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/business/dealbook/in-arbit... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-religious-arbitration-scripture-is-the-rule-of-law.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-relig... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/business/dealbook/sued-over-old-debt-and-blocked-from-suing-back.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/business/dealbook/sued-ove...
- Animats 11y ago
  Despite arbitration clauses in the EULA, there are people who can sue. The buyer of the device may be barred from suing, but other parties who suffered damages can still use. Roommates, guests, family members, people who live downstairs below pipes broken due to a Nest failure - they can all sue. They didn't agree to the EULA. Regular negligence standards apply. If you can show that a lot of the things failed all at once, that's a pretty good case for negligence. This can also come up in landlord/tenant situations. If the landlord put in a Nest, and its failure caused the tenant problems, like having to spend the night in a hotel, the tenant can probably sue Nest.
cookiecaper 11y ago
They do usually hold up in court. Some judges have been ruling that the customer must be given more notice on the "contracts" they're supposedly "entering" before they can be entered, however (Nguyen v. Barnes and Noble).

stcredzero 11y ago

If you watch the unhappy early adopter YouTube videos of Nest thermostats, this outcome is pretty predictable. There's a level of quality control you need to put up a web app, which won't physically affect anyone if it happens to crash for awhile. Then there's a much higher level required when you're controlling things in the real world. This outcome was predictable from the experience of those early adopters. EDIT: Why couldn't Nest fall back to being a dumb thermostat? Lots of smart device makers should consider having such a fallback.

mattbee 11y ago
The Nest comes in two parts - the "smart" bit with the USB charger & battery & wifi, and the Heat Link - the actual radio control for your boiler. The Heat Link has a big button on which lets you turn the heating on and off, overriding what the Nest is telling it. That's not as economical as a regular thermostat, but it means you won't freeze: https://nest.com/uk/support/article/How-do-I-turn-the-heat-on-if-the-Nest-Thermostat-isn-t-working https://nest.com/uk/support/article/How-do-I-turn-the-heat-o...
- mattbee 11y ago
  Oh, OK, you don't have that in the US apparently. Why's it necessary?
  - HillRat 11y ago
    Almost all US central heat and air systems are "forced air" -- gas or electric heaters (furnaces) that blow conditioned air through ducting. Boiler-radiator systems wouldn't work with the standard US thermostat, not least because US thermostats use low-voltage signaling.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      I don't claim to be an expert but I have a forced hot water system (converted at some point from steam) and AFAIK it uses a "standard" thermostat. At least when I upgraded to a Honeywell programmable thermostat 15 years or so ago, I don't remember it being anything unusual. I bought a thermostat at the home improvement store and an electrician who was doing some other work installed it.

ams6110 11y ago

I have a manual thermostat, no batteries required. It has worked flawlessly for over 30 years. It has a simple intuitive interface: a switch for "heat" or "cool" and a dial with a pointer to set the desired temperature. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?

djcapelis 11y ago
Because people derive value from it. It's that simple. You don't have to, and that's fine, but having the temperature settings for the house happen on a schedule that makes sense and depends on the time and day of the week can be quite useful. And having the ability to change the temperature from my bed is nice too.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  Sure, but we've had that level of automation for decades. My Honeywell programmable thermostat has time/day scheduling with several phases per day, and different phases for the weekend. It runs off a 9V battery and I can't tell you how long the battery lasts but I _can_ tell you that it's at least 15 years.
  - greenyoda 11y ago
    It would be pretty rare for a 9V battery to last for 15 years of continuous operation. In my thermostat, which has features similar to yours, the battery is just for backup in case the power goes out, and the thermostat normally runs off the 24V power from the furnace circuit (it works fine if you remove the battery). It's possible that your thermostat works the same way and your battery has been dead for many years.
    - thrownaway2424 11y ago
      That could be, but even if the battery is dead or leaking the thing trucks along and works fine.
11y ago

zitterbewegung 11y ago

Why have I only heard horror stories about the Nest? I see their reviews on Amazon and I see huge problems with this product .

acdha 11y ago
Because happy users don't feel motivated to tell people everything is okay. It's a common bias which you have to constantly remind yourself to correct for.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  That would make sense if there weren't plenty of other product reviews in which people are gushing about how awesome they are.
  - acdha 11y ago
    What's the ratio of happy to unhappy users? If 80% of Nest users are happy you could see twice as many positive reviews as negative and still overstate the percentage of unhappy customers.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    They're usually astroturfed. Some vendors will go as far as offering a small rebate to customers who leave a positive review of the product. I would guess that probably 85% of "user-generated content" on mainstream outlets like Amazon is the result of astroturfing or other paid schemes. It's practically impossible to compete in any online marketplace without turfing the crap out of every slightly relevant outlet. Your competitors are doing it constantly, and the disadvantage will be really big if you don't play ball too. One example: our objectively superior product with a great design and great functional foundation was substantially less popular than the dirty rip off that had their site built with cheap oDesk labor and designed with cheesy stock photos, but spent ridiculous amounts of money on SEO and fake Facebook comments. We were substantially cheaper too. There was literally no reason to ever use the other person's offering, and there was no reason for them to show up ahead of us on searches, but they did. Don't believe Google's line of BS that to get to the top you just need to put out good content. It's total nonsense. What you need are backlinks, which are bought and laundered into a network of sites controlled by the same SEO group, and social media clout, which is bought by paying third-world contractors $1.50/hr to make fake Facebook and Twitter profiles and talk about your company.

grayje 11y ago

"At the point of desire, you want more, but at the point of daily use, you want less." -John Maeda, on complexity in product design

wstrange 11y ago

Why don't they build in a simple fail safe on the Nest? That is, have a user settable manual switch that fails to "heat on" if there is no response from the main unit. The house would be quite hot - but probably much less damaging than frozen pipes. The liability costs for frozen pipes could be staggering.

nrjames 11y ago

I've had a Nest for ~ 3 years now. It was a mistake. The "learning" on it is not intelligent enough to understand the idiosyncrasies of our 60 yr old house. I have to manually adjust it every day to make sure my kids are roasting/freezing in their bedrooms. I really should just switch it back to a manual thermostat.

atom_enger 11y ago
> to make sure my kids are roasting/freezing in their bedrooms. I'm sure it's just a grammatical mistake, but I lol'ed. We have a lot of problems with the Nest thermostats at work. I've got a 10 year old basic thermostat at home that works exactly as it should. Follows its schedule perfectly. No "learning" necessary.
knz 11y ago
Disable the autoaway settings and you have a conventional thermostat with the advantage of being able to remotely adjust the temperature.
- ecopoesis 11y ago
  And use something like Skylark to set home or away based on geofencing your phone.

pdkl95 11y ago

So how many people will use this lesson about common mode failure to re-evaluate their risk assessment of technology with a central point of failure?

grandalf 11y ago

I had been thinking of buying a Nest, now I think I'll attempt to build my own using a Raspberry Pi. There are some very inexpensive bluetooth beacons that support temperature measurement... Does anyone have ideas for cool hardware or algorithms for something like this?

elliottcarlson 11y ago
http://makezine.com/2014/02/03/nest-thermostat-inspires-diy-open-source-versions/ http://makezine.com/2014/02/03/nest-thermostat-inspires-diy-...
brandmeyer 11y ago
Digi-Key is your friend. Build yourself a daughter card with a bunch of relay driver IC's and 24VAC relays. Bare minimum is three, but there are several different arragements for home HVAC, and more doesn't hurt. Some high-SEER rating HVAC units also have multiple speeds. Say, 6-8 relays for some flexibility. Check behind your existing thermostat and see how many wires it gets to be sure. Most units just use bang-bang control around some known limits. Something I've always wanted to try is to have a "periodic recirculation" mode for the times that I'm relying on passive solar heating, just to turn over the stratified air.
- grandalf 11y ago
  Great ideas. > Something I've always wanted to try is to have a "periodic recirculation" mode Yes! That is one thing I want to try too. I did an experiment in an office setting during summer where I found that if set on "auto" someone would inevitably turn the thermostat down to 65 to cool some spot that was in the sun or where the air had gotten too warm. When I switched the fan to "always on" I would set the thermostat to 70 and nobody would feel the need to adjust it. I suppose depending on the cost of running the compressor vs the fan my approach may not have saved money, but it was interesting to see the difference in comfort offered by both.
- jsight 11y ago
  The Ecobee3 can be programmed to run the fans for a configurable amount of time every hour.

insaneirish 11y ago

It was never great, and it's been worse and worse since Google bought them. Examples of some issues with mine: 1. It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration [1]. It will happily keep using its IP without renewing its lease. I've had situations where it's gone long enough without a lease renewal that another device has received its old IP and caused a conflict. 2. It constantly disassociates from the AP, and decides to come back on the network when it feels like it, not when there is traffic for it. And note, this is with a constantly powered device, so there should be no power saving causing it to power down. Also, the AP is about 6 feet away and there are zero other WiFi issues. Manually kicking the device off the AP causes it to come back immediately. 3. Their backend goes down all the time, usually for 1-2 hours. 4. They had a perfectly working method for turning heating on in advance of your setpoint with the goal of reaching your desired temperature at that time rather than just turning on at that time. Then they broke it [2]. This led to nice surprises like waking up to a completely cold house. Instead of rolling back the broken code, they refused to respond on the aforementioned thread for well over a month. It's really inexplicable. They have nice industrial design, good brand recognition, no shortage of money behind them, and they screw up at every conceivable turn. I'm going to try out the ecobee thermostat because I very much appreciate the convenience of being able to remotely adjust the temperature. [1]: https://community.nest.com/thread/10316 https://community.nest.com/thread/10316 [2]: https://community.nest.com/thread/11438 https://community.nest.com/thread/11438

rsync 11y ago
"It's really inexplicable. They have nice industrial design, good brand recognition, no shortage of money behind them, and they screw up at every conceivable turn." Ipso Facto. They can't not screw it up. A critical component of infrastructure should not be IP addressable. It should not be "on your wifi". It should not have a login or a password. It should be as dumb as possible and as simple as possible - and as anti-fragile to all of these events as possible. It's not possible to have this "feature set" and not have this pain. It's a fools errand to pursue it.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Yes, it is possible: Have a microcontroller that stores the time table for when to set which temperature, and applies it. Have a second processor, with internet access, that updates this table. Simple as that.

rdtsc 11y ago

In line with this is the classic "It Can't Be Hushed Here" Nest bug video, by Brad Fitzpatrick from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY [Warning: contains extremely annoying Nest smoke detectors beeping. So prepare to lower your volume] Brad looks very annoyed and it was no fun for him, but on an artistic level it is really well done, it is an epic battle between human and machine.

euske 11y ago

I find these companies deeply deceptive and disingenuous which advertise IoT things (or anything that contains more than 100k lines of code) so reliable as not to warn possible consequences or offer solid fallback mechanisms.

meesterdude 11y ago

This offers an interesting insight into the Internet of Things. Take something simple, and tack on a bunch of new technology that is subject to failure. Don't be surprised if it fails. To be fair, the issue isn't that there was software involved; digital thermostats have that. I think more telling was the level of complexity, which allows for a lot more to go wrong. Combined with a poor process behind update validation, this is what happens. Keep it Simple. If you're going to use new technology, keep the old stuff around, ideally working in parallel as a failsafe. And generally, anything you can do to distribute the failure points and allow for overlap (such as backup spaceheaters that don't normally kick on) should be considered if someone's life is on the line, or property is at risk. Stuff can always go wrong, but the more you can do to reduce risk the better. This applies to any system dependency; mechanical thermostat or nest.

kuschku 11y ago
In general, the way IoT is treated is wrong. Startups try to treat IoT devices as a standard arm or x86 processor with some additional GPIO pins where they read info, deal with it, and write info. No real-time guarantee, a level of QA similar to websites or consumer software, etc. And here is what previous companies building smart devices (say, SIEMENS) treated them like: As extended microcontrollers. Put all the critical software on one tiny microcontroller, do static verification that that microcontroller is always acting correct. If you need Internet access, add a second chip that does that, and provides the results of that data to the first microcontroller — but don't depend on it. There is a large divide between the Engineers designing these devices in the past, and today's crowd.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Another angle to that problem is that a lot of IoT today is basically making something equivalent to a weekend hardware hack, tweaking it a bit, and then calling for investors and marketing the living shit out of the device. Popular IoT products are toys, not tools.
  - jerf 11y ago

noneTheHacker 11y ago

My house didn't play nicely with my Nest. I got a new Furnace and AC and had them install a Nest. It started acting weird. We replaced it with a low-tech Honeywell while trying to get it figured out. I then replaced the Nest thinking maybe it was faulty. I took a photo of the wire layout for the Honeywell and made sure I did the proper layout for the new Nest. It worked fine for a few days and then one day I came home to a 110 degree house! The Nest reported that things were 70-whatever. I then replaced it with a Wi-Fi Honeywell (not their Nest competitor) and that one has worked fine since. It was a very scary experience. I won't be trying a Nest again.

tacos 11y ago
Identical experience here. Installed Honeywell RedLINK and finally my problems went away. Ditto Honeywell wireless security, also works great. There's SO MUCH crap out there, and the wave hasn't even started yet.

CrowFly 11y ago

It's one thing when your thermostat has trouble. But would you trust a Nest Smoke Alarm? http://www.amazon.com/Nest-Protect-Carbon-Monoxide-Battery/dp/B00XV1RCRY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452740432&sr=8-1&keywords=nest+protect+smoke+alarm http://www.amazon.com/Nest-Protect-Carbon-Monoxide-Battery/d...

UnoriginalGuy 11y ago

This is why I purchased the Honeywell 9000 WiFi Color Touchscreen Thermostat[0] instead. The nice thing about the Honeywell is that you can use it completely offline if you so choose. It also has a REAL interface, so an app is an optional extra not a required component. Both the Nest and Honeywell require the infamous C wire, both are similar installation, and both cost around $200. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-RTH9580WF-Touchscreen-Thermostat-Premier/dp/B00FLZEQH2 http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-RTH9580WF-Touchscreen-Thermo... PS - And, yes, the Nest has a theoretical setup without the C wire, but you'll lose key things like fan control, or if the boiler doesn't run enough the entire thing can die. On both it is ultimately C wire or don't waste your time.

manyxcxi 11y ago
100% on the same page as you. I didn't get the Honeywell, I actually got a relatively cheap z-wave thermostat that acts like a regular ol' dumb programmable thermostat that can also be controlled by ANY z-wave compatible home automation hub (I use the Wink hub, to my sometimes chagrin). Pretty sure my thermostat was sub $75 on Amazon.

cameldrv 11y ago

If the software fails this often, they really should have some sort of reversion mode with multiple watchdogs that runs on a tiny microcontroller and just keeps the temperature at 70 degrees. If they can't get that right, maybe just a hard switch that wires in a calibrated bimetalic strip to keep the wheels on until the software is fixed.

feld 11y ago

I had a Nest and sold it to my brother after Google bought them and it was clear they were never going to release the rumored remote sensors. I got an ecobee instead. The ecobee is much smarter, mostly because of the remote sensors. My house is far more comfortable. It's also nice that ecobee has an API and IFTTT support. It has no issues running normally when the internet goes down. (My internet was down completely the other night and there was -25F windchill. It followed schedule just fine.) I'm guessing ecobee coming from Canada they know the value of a functional thermostat...

upofadown 11y ago

I have a mercury thermostat in the basement set to 12C directly across the thermostat leads. I live in a cold place, if the heat goes off things get damaged. You can't beat simplicity.

ilurkedhere 11y ago

Dude, did you try rebooting your thermostat?

Rasell 11y ago

Kite Festivals in the USA http://goo.gl/QYJJ4Z http://goo.gl/QYJJ4Z

legulere 11y ago

> Although I had set the thermostat to 70 degrees overnight, my wife and I were woken by a crying baby at 4 a.m. The thermometer in his room read 64 degrees, and the Nest was off. This seems quite strange to me. Here in Germany it's extremely common to (automatically) turn of heating all together in the night (called Nachtabsenkung). One reason is to save energy, but lower temperatures also help sleep: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/health/04real.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/health/04real.html The article says between 60°F (15.5°C) to 68°F (20°) is best.

pqs 11y ago
Sleeping with heating on seems a waste of energy to me. At least in Spain. I have a dumb thermostat. It doesn't even have a clock. It just has two buttons, one two increase temperature, the other to decrease it. In winter, during the day, I put it at 20C. At night, I put it at 15C or lower (which stops heating, as the house temperature decreases to about 17 or 18 degrees during the night, without heating). It works like a charm. We are not cold at night as we use pyjamas and duvet. We also have a baby. In fact, if I forget to turn off the heating at night, I can't sleep well and I often get up to turn it off.
- deleted 11y ago
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- osi 11y ago
  You should get a simple programmable thermostat that just lets you put temperature at given times. Will automate away what you forget to do.
  - pqs 11y ago
    Yest, it would be better. But this happens once or twice in a year. It's really not worth it.
venomsnake 11y ago
I sleep with all windows open even in -20 C. You get really refreshed, you sleep much deeper and you learn to ignore all street noise.

ricksplat 11y ago

I looked into this, but I quickly realised I never use my Thermostat. My heating is controlled by a time-switch that directly enables the boiler in the morning and at night, and as far as I know this is how most people I know operate. We do have thermostats but they are largely ignored boxes that sit in the hallway and/or landing. Is this just something to do with living in a cold country? I would have thought a nest equivalent that directly operates the boiler would have been a better device ...

stevep98 11y ago
Sounds like you have a water-pipe central heating system. You probably have thermostatic valves on each radiator, which control the flow to each radiator. That's why the main thermostat doesn't do much.
- ricksplat 11y ago
  Yep exactly! It's pretty much standard here. So I guess the Nest is targeting people with electric heating only? Sounds like taking a "quick win" while ignoring a potentially larger market!

DataJunkie 11y ago

I love Nest, but this is the exact reason why I have not installed one in my mountain home. I have to keep the heater set at 55 so the pipes won't freeze and burst. A bug like this would be financially catastrophic.

ck2 11y ago

Now think about all the people installing "smart" smoke detectors.

shallowpedantic 11y ago

this is what happens when people want to keep advancing and be looked at as "superior". "wow you still have that old LG ac box, why don't you go get a nest man" if it isn't broke, don't fix it. now you get screwed. hahaha.

unclebucknasty 11y ago

Nest is arrogant and obnoxious as a product. It is overrated and unnecessary. So ridiculous when you stop and think about it. If you ever scroll through the settings, it's completely laughable that this is all for a thermostat. And all for some supposed improvement that is marginal at best. At worst, it simply doesn't work; taking over and setting some uncomfortable temperature that you never requested. My old thermostat worked just fine. Set it on exactly what I liked, so there was no need for it to "learn". I literally gave it a specific number. Don't really get the concept of wanting it to second guess me. When I Googled and found others with similar issues, they seemed to be largely insulted on forums, as if the users were somehow unworthy of the wonderful Nest. They just hadn't invested enough time in understanding what the Nest wants. The whole thing seems like a hoax--an elaborate parody of the times.

rlpb 11y ago

Perhaps we need to start looking at arbitration clauses the same as we see doing business with some company is some distant country. Fine when everything goes smoothly, but expect to lose your money if it doesn't. The way to look at it is that a company with an arbitration clause might as well not be in the US.

phkahler 11y ago

Failure for a product to perform its primary function is totally unacceptable. Let me repeat: totally unacceptable. From the comments it seems they fail if they lose network connectivity? That's got to be the stupidest thing I ever heard. Apparently some "smart" TVs suffer from similar problems. Remember, there are plenty of thermostats that have NO software - just a stupid little mercury switch - and they are more reliable than this. When any product fails at it's primary function I next it. But hey it's the Internet of THINGS! woot!

pfarnsworth 11y ago

I've had the Nest for 2 years. To be honest I've had zero problems. The only problem I have is that once Google bought them, there has been little to no improvements in anything. They only give 10 days worth of data which is functionally useless. Why should I care about last week for energy use? I want to compare against last year. They haven't made any significant improvements so it's just another case of an innovator getting bought and then getting the innovation sucked out of it. The same thing happened with Dropcam. Once they were bought by Nest/Google they stopped making any real changes for the last 2 years. It's sad and infuriating as a customer.

gduffy 11y ago
Believe it or not, it wasn't really Google's fault. Agreed that it is sad and infuriating, though.

rrauenza 11y ago

After seeing this article, I noticed my Nest hadn't been "online" since December 26th. It could not see any wifi ssid's: not mine, not my neighbors', nor my iPhone's hotspot held right next to it. It was fully charged, not sluggish -- none of the problems listed as 'typical problems'. I went through the menu system and did a reset. I think that was a soft reboot. Still no success. Then I found you could reset it by pushing it in for 10 seconds until it turns off. It seemed more like a hard reset, and voila -- network back up. It's anecdotal, but this firmware update doesn't seem to be just about the charging. They seem to have messed up the wireless capabilities until a hard reset is performed.

CurtHagenlocher 11y ago

Interesting. This happened to me on the fifth and I assumed it had been an isolated glitch. The steps I had to take to make the thermostat work again were quite nonintuitive, and it was frustrating at how little help there was to be found in the available documentation.