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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, r

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.
- toefraz 11y ago
  The Nest thermostats do let you set a schedule manually. I set that up a long time ago because their "smart" algorithm was pure garbage.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > 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. That's my big problem with Nest. A basic programmable thermostat with manual override and a delayed blower feature is probably an 85% solution. Machine learning on top of that, for a single-family residence, is ridiculous overkill for very little gain.
  - IgorPartola 11y ago
    Agreed. I am actually more excited about the air vents with built-in thermostats. I have a few rooms that get very hot/cold, so that would be a better solution than a single point of measurement. Also, I think Insteon has a thermostat that can take temperature measurements from several rooms via wireless sensors. No idea how well it works, but I like the sound of that.
- kw71 11y ago
  Even the basic nonprogrammable Honeywell digital thermostat is smarter than most people realize. It is actually monitoring how well the system has been working and planning ahead so that it will not cycle too fast or switch over to the second fuel source unnecessarily. They have put a lot of thought into these.
  - Eiriksmal 11y ago
    Agreed. I thought that feature was fascinating, it worked extremely well. The Honeywell in my midwest home did a perfect job of learning how long the 17-year-old furnace took to heat up the house in the mornings. The heat was set to go back to the daytime temperatures at 6 AM, and I began to wake up at about 5:47 every morning when, like clockwork, the furnace kicked on to reach 64 degrees before I rolled out of bed. Well played, Honeywell engineers.
nommm-nommm 11y ago
>I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company. Honeywell has been in business for 110 years. If you are in business that long you gotta be doing something right! I would assume.
- derefr 11y ago
  I often assume companies that old are succeeding in large part due to enterprise partnership inertia: the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" outlook, applied to whatever enterprise customers they happen to serve. If the majority of their profits do turn out to come from individual consumers rather than enterprises, though, then I feel a bit more sanguine about age as a positive signifier.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  How long has Comcast been around for?
  - kjs3 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#History
manyxcxi 11y ago
I have a $60 no name generic z-wave thermostat that when paired to my Wink Hub (could be any z-wave compatible hub though) I get nearly all of the functionality of Nest with none of the headaches. It runs on a schedule I define instead of some magical algorithm, I can get all the alerts I want in a unified interface (the Wink app on my phone), and I can monitor the temp in my house or turn it on/off remotely when I leave for vacation. More importantly, it's never not worked for any reason.
analog31 11y ago
People came home to apartments that were 90 because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer. When I was in grad school, I wired a temperature controller to an experiment, set it, satisfied myself that it was working OK, and went away. Guess what. The relay failed, and the heater was stuck on, until it melted the experiment. As a grad student in physics (not even EE or embedded systems), I could chalk it up to a beginner mistake. But if you design a commercial product that controls the release of large amounts of energy, you can't make beginner mistakes. There many not be many remaining reasons why age and experience are valuable traits in a engineer, but this is one of them. Germane to one of the other comments, this may also be why a 110 year old company still has a reason to exist.
brianwawok 11y ago
I have actually owned both, a nest and a wifi honeywell. Pros and cons to both. My biggest gripe to nest is that it was focused on saving energy, and did not offer any way to tweak some of the settings. Yes it may be cheaper to let the temp get 3 degrees over what I set it before you turn the AC on, but having 5 degree temp swings every hour is not a very comfortable environment.. The honeywell is simple, but works well. Has a vacation mode, and tells my kids how warm or cold it is outside.. cool!

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.

toefraz 11y ago
The Nest thermostats do let you set a schedule manually. I set that up a long time ago because their "smart" algorithm was pure garbage.
vonmoltke 11y ago
> 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. That's my big problem with Nest. A basic programmable thermostat with manual override and a delayed blower feature is probably an 85% solution. Machine learning on top of that, for a single-family residence, is ridiculous overkill for very little gain.
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  Agreed. I am actually more excited about the air vents with built-in thermostats. I have a few rooms that get very hot/cold, so that would be a better solution than a single point of measurement. Also, I think Insteon has a thermostat that can take temperature measurements from several rooms via wireless sensors. No idea how well it works, but I like the sound of that.
kw71 11y ago
Even the basic nonprogrammable Honeywell digital thermostat is smarter than most people realize. It is actually monitoring how well the system has been working and planning ahead so that it will not cycle too fast or switch over to the second fuel source unnecessarily. They have put a lot of thought into these.
- Eiriksmal 11y ago
  Agreed. I thought that feature was fascinating, it worked extremely well. The Honeywell in my midwest home did a perfect job of learning how long the 17-year-old furnace took to heat up the house in the mornings. The heat was set to go back to the daytime temperatures at 6 AM, and I began to wake up at about 5:47 every morning when, like clockwork, the furnace kicked on to reach 64 degrees before I rolled out of bed. Well played, Honeywell engineers.

nommm-nommm 11y ago

>I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company. Honeywell has been in business for 110 years. If you are in business that long you gotta be doing something right! I would assume.

derefr 11y ago
I often assume companies that old are succeeding in large part due to enterprise partnership inertia: the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" outlook, applied to whatever enterprise customers they happen to serve. If the majority of their profits do turn out to come from individual consumers rather than enterprises, though, then I feel a bit more sanguine about age as a positive signifier.
st3v3r 11y ago
How long has Comcast been around for?
- kjs3 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#History

manyxcxi 11y ago

I have a $60 no name generic z-wave thermostat that when paired to my Wink Hub (could be any z-wave compatible hub though) I get nearly all of the functionality of Nest with none of the headaches. It runs on a schedule I define instead of some magical algorithm, I can get all the alerts I want in a unified interface (the Wink app on my phone), and I can monitor the temp in my house or turn it on/off remotely when I leave for vacation. More importantly, it's never not worked for any reason.

analog31 11y ago

People came home to apartments that were 90 because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer. When I was in grad school, I wired a temperature controller to an experiment, set it, satisfied myself that it was working OK, and went away. Guess what. The relay failed, and the heater was stuck on, until it melted the experiment. As a grad student in physics (not even EE or embedded systems), I could chalk it up to a beginner mistake. But if you design a commercial product that controls the release of large amounts of energy, you can't make beginner mistakes. There many not be many remaining reasons why age and experience are valuable traits in a engineer, but this is one of them. Germane to one of the other comments, this may also be why a 110 year old company still has a reason to exist.

brianwawok 11y ago

I have actually owned both, a nest and a wifi honeywell. Pros and cons to both. My biggest gripe to nest is that it was focused on saving energy, and did not offer any way to tweak some of the settings. Yes it may be cheaper to let the temp get 3 degrees over what I set it before you turn the AC on, but having 5 degree temp swings every hour is not a very comfortable environment.. The honeywell is simple, but works well. Has a vacation mode, and tells my kids how warm or cold it is outside.. cool!