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I have a nest and it is a real piece of shit. I usually don't curse on HN but I can barely contain my hate for this product. My absolutely ugly, crappy old the

by atonse 11y ago

I have a nest and it is a real piece of shit. I usually don't curse on HN but I can barely contain my hate for this product. My absolutely ugly, crappy old thermostat with a needle on it works WAY better than the nest (thankfully we have it upstairs where we sleep). When it's cold, we turn that needle up, and we get warm. With the nest, which is downstairs, when we're cold, we turn the nest up, we get weird "+2 hour" things, and nothing happens. The heater doesn't come on, we're freezing and the thing has a mind of its own. I have taken photos where I've set the thermostat at 90 degrees, the room is at about 60 degrees, and the Nest hasn't turned the heating unit on. This is a the worst kind of sin of user experience, when a user feels like the machine controls them, and not the other way round. As big a nerd as I am, and loved that the Nest shook up the thermostat industry, I absolutely regret buying a Nest. I wanted to love this product, but it fails spectacularly at the ONE thing it's supposed to do, which is to let us set a comfortable temperature for our house. Because of this experience, I absolutely avoid their smoke detectors (I was ready to buy three of them before buying the thermostat). I've told family and friends to stay away as well.

brandon272 11y ago
Are you sure that an ordinary thermostat "turns your heater on" right away? I know that my furnace, regardless of thermostat, doesn't audibly "turn on" right away. The burners fire up right away (which you can only hear if you're standing next to the furnace) and then the blower turns on some minutes later. In the summer, the Nest turns on the air conditioning unit right away.
- atonse 11y ago
  Oh definitely, because I'm not just standing there waiting for it to turn on immediately. There have been times when we're freezing, and I tell my wife "just turn the temperature all the way up" and then she says "I did a while back" and when I go to check, it's on 90. So we're talking 20 mins having passed and the heating unit barely coming alive, when in reality it should be on the whole time attempting to heat up to 90.
  - rblatz 11y ago
    I had a similar issue, but it's because I had setup the nest incorrectly. It asked about my equipment and about my setup, and I got it wrong. So when it would try to turn on the heat it would not turn the blower on. Once I fixed the configuration error it works instantly.
    - atonse 11y ago
      Thanks, I'll check this out. I had mine professionally installed, so I generally trust the company that did it, but always good to double check.
      - soylentcola 11y ago
        I set mine up myself (easy setup was a perk I noticed when buying it a few years ago) and in the application, there are several details you want to fill out on initial setup. A big one is the type of heating/cooling you have in your house because it adjusts behavior in response. Over time it "learns" the quirks of your setup such as how responsive it is and adjusts to compensate. At least that's how it's supposed to work and how mine works. The "90 minutes" or "2 hours" or whatever it shows is supposed to be based on its estimate based on how it's modeled your house's hvac setup.
rbritton 11y ago
Mine at least correctly controls the furnace, but the one feature I bought it for -- a thermostat I can control from my iPhone -- barely works. Their app has gone downhill with every single release, and it's at least half the time that I get a message saying it can't connect.
Eiriksmal 11y ago
Your comments are worrying, but match a disappointing number of other users. When I was ready to switch to a programmable thermostat to save money, I really, really wanted to like the Nest. It was cool, whizzbang, etc., etc. But then I started reading the 1-star reviews on Amazon, and the support forums. And it worried me. People came home to apartments that were 90* because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer. All sorts of people bought $300 Nests, only to discover their 8-year-old equipment was apparently not compatible with it. People spoke of Nests being fried by voltage surges in "old" (a scant 4 years!) HVAC systems. EEs were comparing the Nest's voltage regulators to that of a generic $20 thermostat and finding the generic more reliable in every aspect. Nervous that my 14-year-old system would annihilate a very expensive toy, and that my wife staying at home would make the thing pointless, regardless, I bought a $100 Wifi Honeywell with a traditional 7-day calendar. It's fantastic. I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company, but their Android and web apps are simply excellent. Easy to use, well-designed, and it just works. I saved about $120 in utility bills in the first 8 months I had it, living in the nebulous division of the continental climate and humid subtropical climate in the midwest. When we moved to San Diego to a house with only central heat, no AC, I still dropped $70 on the same thermostat just to have access to the "what temperature is it in my house right now" feature.
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  I currently have non-Wi-Fi programmable thermostats. I have no experience with Nest directly, but from the description of how it determines when to turn the temp up or down I don't see how it would be that "smart" for me. I work from home, but my office is nowhere near the downstairs thermostat. So any motion detection it might do would assume that nobody is home, when I in fact am. On the other hand, my simple Honeywell thermostats do wonderfully because I can program them to my actual schedule and only need to adjust things twice a year. Sure, it's probably not as efficient as a dynamic algorithm, but I'd rather to do this than worry about waking up freezing in the middle of the night, or worse, having my condenser unit fried by an over-eager thermostat by starting/stopping it constantly. I am thinking of getting something Wi-Fi compatible though because setting the temp from my phone would be really nice. Too bad not many work with multi-zone systems.
nostromo 11y ago
The Nest thermostat is a dream compared to the smoke detector. The smoke detector goes off all the time -- without rhyme or reason. With a normal detector, you can just pull the battery if it refuses to shut off. With Nest, you actually need a screw driver to open the battery compartment to turn it off. So, when it decides to wake up the entire house at 3am (yes, the entire house, since they all go off in unison) you'll need to go find a screw driver to get it to shut up. The one flippin' reason I bought a Nest Protect was so I could "wave to silence" an alarm. Well, every time it goes off, it tells me that "this alarm cannot be silenced" - even by pushing the power button. Not once have I been able to turn off an alarm without removing the batteries. The worst feeling is when you get an alert on your iPhone while nobody (but your pet) is home. "Alert: your house is on fire." Then you rush home and realize it's a false alarm. After our fourth or fifth false alarm we returned them all and replaced them with the old-fashioned alarms. Watch this hilarious video if you're considering buying a Nest Protect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY (warning: loud alarms in video)
- Eiriksmal 11y ago
  That's a horrible experience. But, to be fair, many newer structures have all their smoke detectors wired together so when one goes off, they all go off. I experienced that in my house, built in '97, which was extremely disorienting and stressful when it first happened. Growing up in a house built in the 80s, only the kitchen's smoke detector would go off if you burned something. I understand the perceived safety enhancement, but waking up the sleeping baby because dumb ol' dad smoked too much oil when stir frying something... Ugh. Edit: formatting.
  - IgorPartola 11y ago
    This is why I like the FirstAlert wireless detectors: mesh network so they all go off, but you program each one to announce with a voice which room the trouble is in. They even announce which one has the low battery instead of chirping in the middle of the night.
    - 11y ago
heywire 11y ago
I actually chose a competing product, the Sensi Thermostat from Emerson, after reading so many complaints like this. While it doesn't have the fancy learning capabilities of the Nest, it does have full scheduling capability, which I actually prefer. The mobile apps work great, and I've even written some small utilities to monitor their API so I can get some email alerts on certain interesting events. Aside from a couple small outages with the mobile app / website, I've had zero problems with the HVAC functions.
- gherkin0 11y ago
  > I've even written some small utilities to monitor their API Is their API local to the unit or "in the cloud?"
  - rbritton 11y ago
    Looks like it's yet another cloud one based on the code here [0]. [0]: https://github.com/mguterl/sensi/blob/master/index.js https://github.com/mguterl/sensi/blob/master/index.js
  - heywire 11y ago
    Unfortunately it is cloud based (signalr), so if they decide to close the service, my Wi-Fi thermostat becomes a basic programmable thermostat. I haven't yet sniffed the traffic between the thermostat and their servers to see if it would be possible to replace their service with my own.
dperfect 11y ago
Not sure if it's the same problem, but a few months after getting my Nest it started ignoring my adjustments as well. After some investigation, I found that it had automatically set up a bunch of temperature schedules without my knowledge (I guess it thought it was smart and could learn my weekly patterns from my past usage). That's all fine if it actually cared to take my manual adjustments more seriously than trusting its own "intelligence," but I'm pretty sure it just thought my adjustments were irrelevant suggestions :) Anyway, after clearing all the schedules that it added (and turning off auto-schedule in the settings), it now works as I would expect.
- city41 11y ago
  In my experience it will re-add those schedules. I've cleared them out several times now.
  - dperfect 11y ago
    Looks like there's a setting (at least in the web interface) to turn off auto-schedule. Apparently I had turned it off for one of my Nest thermostats, but not the other one - turning it off now.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  > That's all fine if it actually cared to take my manual adjustments more seriously than trusting its own "intelligence," but I'm pretty sure it just thought my adjustments were irrelevant suggestions :) And this has been my problem with all of Google's products. They can be really smart, but when I want to override something, they treat that as irrelevant.
city41 11y ago
The apartment we are renting has a Nest. And it just reeks of solution looking for a problem to me. I've never felt like the Nest is an improvement over what it's replacing. It hit me when I was in bed and wanted to turn the heat up, so I grabbed my phone and launched the Nest app. Not sure what segment of the network was having issues, but it wouldn't connect to the thermostat. After about 3 minutes of fiddling, I got up, turned the heat up on the thermostat itself, and went back to bed. The whole situation was just really dumb.
- gherkin0 11y ago
  Yeah, I really don't get value of the Nest either. I'd rather just program my schedule myself and have some certainty about it, rather than let some algorithm try to guess. The only smart thermostat feature that's at all tempting to me is the Ecobee's remote sensors (which the Nest doesn't have). I've lived in places where uneven heating is a legitimate problem.
  - st3v3r 11y ago
    Not everyone has a set schedule like that, though.
    - gherkin0 11y ago
      Yeah, but I assume it would be even worse at learning those. To handle non-set schedules it would really need to be more reactive, with more sensor data that I believe it actually has.
      - gherkin0 11y ago
        > with more sensor data that I believe it actually has. I missed the edit window: I meant "with more sensor data than I believe it actually has."
  - a3n 11y ago
    > remote sensors (which the Nest doesn't have) Maybe each Nest is a remote sensor, and everyone who has one has their house temperature set to the same temp, the result of some super-duper averaging algorithm running on Nest's cloud.
zekevermillion 11y ago
The machine controls you -- exactly, isn't that what Google is all about?
zippergz 11y ago
It's always fascinating (and disappointing) to me to read stories like this. I have had two Nest thermostats in my house for three years now, and I regularly think of them as the single best upgrade we made when we moved in. Ours work great, and provide a far better experience than the old-style programmable thermostats we had in our previous places. I don't know if we just got lucky, or what. I wish that everyone could have the same experience we have, because for us it really is a great product...
peckrob 11y ago
I had a similar experience. When I first got them, they worked great in the summertime. No complaints. But they were bloody awful for me in the winter: * Nest would, randomly, refuse to turn on AUX heat. I woke up one morning and my house was in the upper 50s (the set temperature was 68) and Nest was just sitting there trying to run the heat pump instead of turning on AUX when it wasn't keeping up. At first I thought there was something wrong with my HVAC system, but I've had two different people look my system over, on three different occasions, and found everything working properly. Nest was just refusing to turn on AUX. The first time it happened it was in the single digits outside and Nest let my house get into the upper 50s (temperature was set at 68, and it was still trying to run the heat pump even though it was in the single freaking digits outside). I finally took Nest off the wall and manually shorted the aux heat on - I didn't want the house to get any colder while we "troubleshooted" it, and Nest was just refusing, no matter how I adjusted it, to turn the aux heat on and warm the house back up. * Other times, it would use AUX when it doesn't need it. It was 37 outside once, and nest was burning AUX like crazy when the heat pump was having no problems keeping up. I had a nearly $400 power bill that January. Now, in fairness, it was very cold that month, but Nest using AUX when it shouldn't was a big contributor. For awhile they wouldn't even let you set an AUX lockout lower than 35! There was a complicated "hack" you could go through that involved juggling the thermostat and the smartphone app and taking advantage of some timing flaw to set it lower. The most recent update in November or December allowed you to set a lower lockout, but the gremlin returned and Nest would be burning my AUX heat again when it was 40 outside. How did I finally solve this? For now, until there's a better solution, I;ve set my location to somewhere 50 miles south. Really. * They are very difficult to troubleshoot. At the time there was no way to manually turn on AUX, even to test if it's working. The only way we were able to test it is to take the thing off the wall and manually short the wires together (and, of course, it worked fine). This is not some weird setup either. It's a standard heat pump with electric heat strips for aux heat, that's only about 5 years old. Where I live, this is the absolute most common form of heating. Because I can take the thermostat off the wall and short the wires together to turn aux on (and because I've had two different HVAC contractors check my system), I'm fairly certain the problem is not my HVAC system. The biggest problem was, after three times of waking up to a cold house, I had a very difficult time trusting them. I had an infant in the house, and for something that I'm not supposed to have to think about, I was spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about. So at one point I replaced one of them with a Honeywell (not the Lyric, one of the touchscreen models). And it worked fine for the rest of winter and was much less crazy to deal with, but once summer rolled around the Honeywell wouldn't turn my air conditioning on! In troubleshooting it, we found that the Honeywell was defective and wasn't putting enough voltage to activate the reversing valve. So the heat pump was still running. So I ended up putting the Nest back on for the summer, but spent a lot of time reading the Nest forums. Apparently problems with AUX heat are SUPER common with Nests (just Google "nest aux heat" to see tons of complaints). I'm still very wary of them. If I wake up to a cold house again, they are going right in the trash can and I'm getting another Honeywell or an ecobee3. I like being able to monitor and control from my phone or the web, but not at the cost of having to constantly worry about either my house getting too cold at night or a $400 power bill.
emcrazyone 11y ago
I've been dabbling in the smart home stuff for a few years. Had a gig where some dudes with some VC money paid us to develop a smart home controller - this was circa 1999-2000 but they ran out of money and the project dried up. I would love to find some hackers who would love to collaborate and do something here. Funny story: When I was working on the smart home stuff, it was called BeAtHome and the VCs some how got national attention as an energy smart/saving device. We had an office building that was physically connected to a barber shop next door. We shared the same entrace into the building. During the prototyping phase of some of the hardware, we got permission to put a pressure sensitive mat at the front door which would trigger when someone stepped on it. A web cam was then used to snap a picture and we would email this a test account, etc... We had a lot of fun on the project. The idea was a door mat or doorbell could be used to capture pictures of who is at at the front door. One of the VC guys had a relationship with a company called Icebox which made these under the cabinet flip down screens where you could watch TV & surf the web. We were trying to connect CCTV and WebCams to their screen. anyway, times have changed and there are so many new technologies out there that I think Nest and Smartthings (Samsung?) is ripe for some serious competition.
eli 11y ago
It sounds like your Nest is broken or is not installed properly. (The installation can be tricky; I put mine in myself and did it wrong at first because the existing wiring was mislabeled)
pmarreck 11y ago
You're just 1 data point, but my data point is that my 2 Nests work absolutely fine, with the sole exception that they seem (lately?) to be too aggressive in turning down the heat when we're here and not aggressive enough in turning it off when we're not (did it used to be smarter at this?) I like the ability to control them from the app as well as the Nest Report I get every month.
volker48 11y ago
Polar opposite of my experience. My nest was easy to install and has worked perfectly ever since. It does do a +15 minutes if I adjust, but that is just telling me it will take that amount of time to change the temperature e.g. the temp is set to 65 but I change it to 70 and it will say +15 meaning it will take 15 minutes to get from 65 to 70.
ghaff 11y ago
And, as someone who lives in the Northeast (where it was -20 F on Saturday night) and travels a lot, reliability absolutely trumps features no matter how cool. And I've heard way too many stories, however anecdotal, about Nests not doing what they're supposed to to use one even if you gave it to me for free. (I do have a programmable Honeywell but it's very basic and I just make a point of changing the batteries every year.)
a3n 11y ago
> it fails spectacularly at the ONE thing it's supposed to do, which is to let us set a comfortable temperature for our house. Is that the one this it's supposed to do? I thought it's main feature was to be connected to the internet. Why you'd want that I have no idea. I have about as cheap a programmable as you can get. It has four time ranges per day. I set them for morning, away, evening, sleep. It always works, all the time. If I come home and it's cold, or if I'm up late and it's cold, I hit the button a few times and go back to the couch. It always works. Always. Always.

by atonse 11y ago

brandon272 11y ago

Are you sure that an ordinary thermostat "turns your heater on" right away? I know that my furnace, regardless of thermostat, doesn't audibly "turn on" right away. The burners fire up right away (which you can only hear if you're standing next to the furnace) and then the blower turns on some minutes later. In the summer, the Nest turns on the air conditioning unit right away.

atonse 11y ago
Oh definitely, because I'm not just standing there waiting for it to turn on immediately. There have been times when we're freezing, and I tell my wife "just turn the temperature all the way up" and then she says "I did a while back" and when I go to check, it's on 90. So we're talking 20 mins having passed and the heating unit barely coming alive, when in reality it should be on the whole time attempting to heat up to 90.
- rblatz 11y ago
  I had a similar issue, but it's because I had setup the nest incorrectly. It asked about my equipment and about my setup, and I got it wrong. So when it would try to turn on the heat it would not turn the blower on. Once I fixed the configuration error it works instantly.
  - atonse 11y ago
    Thanks, I'll check this out. I had mine professionally installed, so I generally trust the company that did it, but always good to double check.
    - soylentcola 11y ago
      I set mine up myself (easy setup was a perk I noticed when buying it a few years ago) and in the application, there are several details you want to fill out on initial setup. A big one is the type of heating/cooling you have in your house because it adjusts behavior in response. Over time it "learns" the quirks of your setup such as how responsive it is and adjusts to compensate. At least that's how it's supposed to work and how mine works. The "90 minutes" or "2 hours" or whatever it shows is supposed to be based on its estimate based on how it's modeled your house's hvac setup.

rbritton 11y ago

Mine at least correctly controls the furnace, but the one feature I bought it for -- a thermostat I can control from my iPhone -- barely works. Their app has gone downhill with every single release, and it's at least half the time that I get a message saying it can't connect.

Eiriksmal 11y ago

Your comments are worrying, but match a disappointing number of other users. When I was ready to switch to a programmable thermostat to save money, I really, really wanted to like the Nest. It was cool, whizzbang, etc., etc. But then I started reading the 1-star reviews on Amazon, and the support forums. And it worried me. People came home to apartments that were 90* because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer. All sorts of people bought $300 Nests, only to discover their 8-year-old equipment was apparently not compatible with it. People spoke of Nests being fried by voltage surges in "old" (a scant 4 years!) HVAC systems. EEs were comparing the Nest's voltage regulators to that of a generic $20 thermostat and finding the generic more reliable in every aspect. Nervous that my 14-year-old system would annihilate a very expensive toy, and that my wife staying at home would make the thing pointless, regardless, I bought a $100 Wifi Honeywell with a traditional 7-day calendar. It's fantastic. I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company, but their Android and web apps are simply excellent. Easy to use, well-designed, and it just works. I saved about $120 in utility bills in the first 8 months I had it, living in the nebulous division of the continental climate and humid subtropical climate in the midwest. When we moved to San Diego to a house with only central heat, no AC, I still dropped $70 on the same thermostat just to have access to the "what temperature is it in my house right now" feature.

IgorPartola 11y ago
I currently have non-Wi-Fi programmable thermostats. I have no experience with Nest directly, but from the description of how it determines when to turn the temp up or down I don't see how it would be that "smart" for me. I work from home, but my office is nowhere near the downstairs thermostat. So any motion detection it might do would assume that nobody is home, when I in fact am. On the other hand, my simple Honeywell thermostats do wonderfully because I can program them to my actual schedule and only need to adjust things twice a year. Sure, it's probably not as efficient as a dynamic algorithm, but I'd rather to do this than worry about waking up freezing in the middle of the night, or worse, having my condenser unit fried by an over-eager thermostat by starting/stopping it constantly. I am thinking of getting something Wi-Fi compatible though because setting the temp from my phone would be really nice. Too bad not many work with multi-zone systems.

nostromo 11y ago

The Nest thermostat is a dream compared to the smoke detector. The smoke detector goes off all the time -- without rhyme or reason. With a normal detector, you can just pull the battery if it refuses to shut off. With Nest, you actually need a screw driver to open the battery compartment to turn it off. So, when it decides to wake up the entire house at 3am (yes, the entire house, since they all go off in unison) you'll need to go find a screw driver to get it to shut up. The one flippin' reason I bought a Nest Protect was so I could "wave to silence" an alarm. Well, every time it goes off, it tells me that "this alarm cannot be silenced" - even by pushing the power button. Not once have I been able to turn off an alarm without removing the batteries. The worst feeling is when you get an alert on your iPhone while nobody (but your pet) is home. "Alert: your house is on fire." Then you rush home and realize it's a false alarm. After our fourth or fifth false alarm we returned them all and replaced them with the old-fashioned alarms. Watch this hilarious video if you're considering buying a Nest Protect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY (warning: loud alarms in video)

Eiriksmal 11y ago
That's a horrible experience. But, to be fair, many newer structures have all their smoke detectors wired together so when one goes off, they all go off. I experienced that in my house, built in '97, which was extremely disorienting and stressful when it first happened. Growing up in a house built in the 80s, only the kitchen's smoke detector would go off if you burned something. I understand the perceived safety enhancement, but waking up the sleeping baby because dumb ol' dad smoked too much oil when stir frying something... Ugh. Edit: formatting.
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  This is why I like the FirstAlert wireless detectors: mesh network so they all go off, but you program each one to announce with a voice which room the trouble is in. They even announce which one has the low battery instead of chirping in the middle of the night.
  - 11y ago

heywire 11y ago

I actually chose a competing product, the Sensi Thermostat from Emerson, after reading so many complaints like this. While it doesn't have the fancy learning capabilities of the Nest, it does have full scheduling capability, which I actually prefer. The mobile apps work great, and I've even written some small utilities to monitor their API so I can get some email alerts on certain interesting events. Aside from a couple small outages with the mobile app / website, I've had zero problems with the HVAC functions.

gherkin0 11y ago
> I've even written some small utilities to monitor their API Is their API local to the unit or "in the cloud?"
- rbritton 11y ago
  Looks like it's yet another cloud one based on the code here [0]. [0]: https://github.com/mguterl/sensi/blob/master/index.js https://github.com/mguterl/sensi/blob/master/index.js
- heywire 11y ago
  Unfortunately it is cloud based (signalr), so if they decide to close the service, my Wi-Fi thermostat becomes a basic programmable thermostat. I haven't yet sniffed the traffic between the thermostat and their servers to see if it would be possible to replace their service with my own.

dperfect 11y ago

Not sure if it's the same problem, but a few months after getting my Nest it started ignoring my adjustments as well. After some investigation, I found that it had automatically set up a bunch of temperature schedules without my knowledge (I guess it thought it was smart and could learn my weekly patterns from my past usage). That's all fine if it actually cared to take my manual adjustments more seriously than trusting its own "intelligence," but I'm pretty sure it just thought my adjustments were irrelevant suggestions :) Anyway, after clearing all the schedules that it added (and turning off auto-schedule in the settings), it now works as I would expect.

city41 11y ago
In my experience it will re-add those schedules. I've cleared them out several times now.
- dperfect 11y ago
  Looks like there's a setting (at least in the web interface) to turn off auto-schedule. Apparently I had turned it off for one of my Nest thermostats, but not the other one - turning it off now.
CaptSpify 11y ago
> That's all fine if it actually cared to take my manual adjustments more seriously than trusting its own "intelligence," but I'm pretty sure it just thought my adjustments were irrelevant suggestions :) And this has been my problem with all of Google's products. They can be really smart, but when I want to override something, they treat that as irrelevant.

city41 11y ago

The apartment we are renting has a Nest. And it just reeks of solution looking for a problem to me. I've never felt like the Nest is an improvement over what it's replacing. It hit me when I was in bed and wanted to turn the heat up, so I grabbed my phone and launched the Nest app. Not sure what segment of the network was having issues, but it wouldn't connect to the thermostat. After about 3 minutes of fiddling, I got up, turned the heat up on the thermostat itself, and went back to bed. The whole situation was just really dumb.

gherkin0 11y ago
Yeah, I really don't get value of the Nest either. I'd rather just program my schedule myself and have some certainty about it, rather than let some algorithm try to guess. The only smart thermostat feature that's at all tempting to me is the Ecobee's remote sensors (which the Nest doesn't have). I've lived in places where uneven heating is a legitimate problem.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  Not everyone has a set schedule like that, though.
  - gherkin0 11y ago
    Yeah, but I assume it would be even worse at learning those. To handle non-set schedules it would really need to be more reactive, with more sensor data that I believe it actually has.
    - gherkin0 11y ago
      > with more sensor data that I believe it actually has. I missed the edit window: I meant "with more sensor data than I believe it actually has."
- a3n 11y ago
  > remote sensors (which the Nest doesn't have) Maybe each Nest is a remote sensor, and everyone who has one has their house temperature set to the same temp, the result of some super-duper averaging algorithm running on Nest's cloud.

zekevermillion 11y ago

The machine controls you -- exactly, isn't that what Google is all about?

zippergz 11y ago

It's always fascinating (and disappointing) to me to read stories like this. I have had two Nest thermostats in my house for three years now, and I regularly think of them as the single best upgrade we made when we moved in. Ours work great, and provide a far better experience than the old-style programmable thermostats we had in our previous places. I don't know if we just got lucky, or what. I wish that everyone could have the same experience we have, because for us it really is a great product...

peckrob 11y ago

I had a similar experience. When I first got them, they worked great in the summertime. No complaints. But they were bloody awful for me in the winter: * Nest would, randomly, refuse to turn on AUX heat. I woke up one morning and my house was in the upper 50s (the set temperature was 68) and Nest was just sitting there trying to run the heat pump instead of turning on AUX when it wasn't keeping up. At first I thought there was something wrong with my HVAC system, but I've had two different people look my system over, on three different occasions, and found everything working properly. Nest was just refusing to turn on AUX. The first time it happened it was in the single digits outside and Nest let my house get into the upper 50s (temperature was set at 68, and it was still trying to run the heat pump even though it was in the single freaking digits outside). I finally took Nest off the wall and manually shorted the aux heat on - I didn't want the house to get any colder while we "troubleshooted" it, and Nest was just refusing, no matter how I adjusted it, to turn the aux heat on and warm the house back up. * Other times, it would use AUX when it doesn't need it. It was 37 outside once, and nest was burning AUX like crazy when the heat pump was having no problems keeping up. I had a nearly $400 power bill that January. Now, in fairness, it was very cold that month, but Nest using AUX when it shouldn't was a big contributor. For awhile they wouldn't even let you set an AUX lockout lower than 35! There was a complicated "hack" you could go through that involved juggling the thermostat and the smartphone app and taking advantage of some timing flaw to set it lower. The most recent update in November or December allowed you to set a lower lockout, but the gremlin returned and Nest would be burning my AUX heat again when it was 40 outside. How did I finally solve this? For now, until there's a better solution, I;ve set my location to somewhere 50 miles south. Really. * They are very difficult to troubleshoot. At the time there was no way to manually turn on AUX, even to test if it's working. The only way we were able to test it is to take the thing off the wall and manually short the wires together (and, of course, it worked fine). This is not some weird setup either. It's a standard heat pump with electric heat strips for aux heat, that's only about 5 years old. Where I live, this is the absolute most common form of heating. Because I can take the thermostat off the wall and short the wires together to turn aux on (and because I've had two different HVAC contractors check my system), I'm fairly certain the problem is not my HVAC system. The biggest problem was, after three times of waking up to a cold house, I had a very difficult time trusting them. I had an infant in the house, and for something that I'm not supposed to have to think about, I was spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about. So at one point I replaced one of them with a Honeywell (not the Lyric, one of the touchscreen models). And it worked fine for the rest of winter and was much less crazy to deal with, but once summer rolled around the Honeywell wouldn't turn my air conditioning on! In troubleshooting it, we found that the Honeywell was defective and wasn't putting enough voltage to activate the reversing valve. So the heat pump was still running. So I ended up putting the Nest back on for the summer, but spent a lot of time reading the Nest forums. Apparently problems with AUX heat are SUPER common with Nests (just Google "nest aux heat" to see tons of complaints). I'm still very wary of them. If I wake up to a cold house again, they are going right in the trash can and I'm getting another Honeywell or an ecobee3. I like being able to monitor and control from my phone or the web, but not at the cost of having to constantly worry about either my house getting too cold at night or a $400 power bill.

emcrazyone 11y ago

I've been dabbling in the smart home stuff for a few years. Had a gig where some dudes with some VC money paid us to develop a smart home controller - this was circa 1999-2000 but they ran out of money and the project dried up. I would love to find some hackers who would love to collaborate and do something here. Funny story: When I was working on the smart home stuff, it was called BeAtHome and the VCs some how got national attention as an energy smart/saving device. We had an office building that was physically connected to a barber shop next door. We shared the same entrace into the building. During the prototyping phase of some of the hardware, we got permission to put a pressure sensitive mat at the front door which would trigger when someone stepped on it. A web cam was then used to snap a picture and we would email this a test account, etc... We had a lot of fun on the project. The idea was a door mat or doorbell could be used to capture pictures of who is at at the front door. One of the VC guys had a relationship with a company called Icebox which made these under the cabinet flip down screens where you could watch TV & surf the web. We were trying to connect CCTV and WebCams to their screen. anyway, times have changed and there are so many new technologies out there that I think Nest and Smartthings (Samsung?) is ripe for some serious competition.

eli 11y ago

It sounds like your Nest is broken or is not installed properly. (The installation can be tricky; I put mine in myself and did it wrong at first because the existing wiring was mislabeled)

pmarreck 11y ago

You're just 1 data point, but my data point is that my 2 Nests work absolutely fine, with the sole exception that they seem (lately?) to be too aggressive in turning down the heat when we're here and not aggressive enough in turning it off when we're not (did it used to be smarter at this?) I like the ability to control them from the app as well as the Nest Report I get every month.

volker48 11y ago

Polar opposite of my experience. My nest was easy to install and has worked perfectly ever since. It does do a +15 minutes if I adjust, but that is just telling me it will take that amount of time to change the temperature e.g. the temp is set to 65 but I change it to 70 and it will say +15 meaning it will take 15 minutes to get from 65 to 70.

ghaff 11y ago

And, as someone who lives in the Northeast (where it was -20 F on Saturday night) and travels a lot, reliability absolutely trumps features no matter how cool. And I've heard way too many stories, however anecdotal, about Nests not doing what they're supposed to to use one even if you gave it to me for free. (I do have a programmable Honeywell but it's very basic and I just make a point of changing the batteries every year.)

a3n 11y ago

> it fails spectacularly at the ONE thing it's supposed to do, which is to let us set a comfortable temperature for our house. Is that the one this it's supposed to do? I thought it's main feature was to be connected to the internet. Why you'd want that I have no idea. I have about as cheap a programmable as you can get. It has four time ranges per day. I set them for morning, away, evening, sleep. It always works, all the time. If I come home and it's cold, or if I'm up late and it's cold, I hit the button a few times and go back to the couch. It always works. Always. Always.