8 ms·

Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

68 points by takiwatanga 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago
Imagine if he had decided to just pay a local dude $30 to stop by and pre-warm the house instead …
richliss 4y ago
This kind of link is why I come to HN. Thanks for sharing.
shishy 4y ago
His new book Build was an excellent read. Highly recommend it, really picks up after Chapter 2 with lots of good advice and anecdotes. It also contextualized where our startup is for me and helped me visualize what to anticipate in the future really well.
kevmo314 4y ago
> Shipping the Nest thermostat with a screwdriver "turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight" I must be in the minority then. I end up with a ton of these product-specific screwdrivers and get a little frustrated that I have to throw it away, contributing ever-so-slightly to the pile of consumer waste. It'd be cool if you could select a "need tools" option sort of like how take out now has a "need utensils" option.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jrockway 4y ago
  For me it's kind of a wash. For years I avoided buying any imperial allen keys because I had a pile of free ones that were good when I infrequently needed them. I also got this combination 2.5mm hex / Phillips screwdriver which is actually quite convenient as those are the sizes of screwdriver I need most frequently. The rest go into the landfill unfortunately, and I agree the waste isn't really worth the 3 random sizes of allen key I once needed.
  - cout 4y ago
    I'm a little wary of those cheap hex keys -- I've been burned a few times by them stripping out a hex head when the key was just a little loose. I know I should invest in some quality hex keys, but you are right -- it's hard to justify the purchase when I already have so many lying around.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Yeah. I think part of the problem there is also low-quality fasteners, but good hex wrenches do prevent a lot of problems. As I go through my stash of direct-from-the-Shenzhen-market-at-10x-the-price fasteners from Amazon I'm replacing them with equivalents from McMaster. I have to say the increase in quality is noticeable. I half expect to break an Amazon screw and find that it's hollow inside to save a few cents.
- eddieroger 4y ago
  Check out the picture - it's not a product-specific screwdriver, it's just a screwdriver with standard Philips and flathead bits. Some of the products used outdoors have security bits, but even those are just Torx bits most of the time. I am delighted to not need additional tools, and feel no pressure to keep it since I have a good set of screwdrivers already. Plus, this makes a handy small one to keep in the kitchen for random uses.
- cout 4y ago
  The zinus bedframe I bought came with a mini ratcheting wrench instead of a flat wrench. The wrench is just the right size to fit hex shank screwdriver bits, and so I've used it many times when I couldn't find my screwdriver or I needed just a little bit more torque. I have even used it to repair my John Deere tractor since it's small enough to fit where a regular size ratcheting wrench couldn't. The wrench definitely made the product feel higher quality, and I have a tool I will keep for a long time, if I don't wear it out.
- Phiwise_ 4y ago
  Just send it to your local goodwill. Some single mother just scraping by in a rotting-out apartment who suddenly needs to fix a sink or lighting fixture that duct tape just isn't working on any more will be delighted to find your nest brand screwdriver with a fifty cent sticker while looking for a pair of shoes her growing kid's feet might fit in. And that's just here in the US. Our working poor are the world's one percent. If our definition of consumer waste is things no one would like to hold on to, then even what we consider the most banal tools are not consumer waste, and it will be a very long time until they are.
- prepend 4y ago
  I love the screwdriver. It’s better than any I can find at Ace or HomeDepot. I bought three Nests and while the thermostats are pretty annoying, I really love the screwdrivers. They are really pleasant to hold.
aresant 4y ago
"Every time my wife and I drove up to our Lake Tahoe ski cabin on Friday nights after work, we’d have to keep our snow jackets on until the next day. The house took all night to heat up." That is first world problems hall of fame material right there! But a great origin story for the Nest regardless.
- closetohome 4y ago
  - burnte 4y ago
- amirhirsch 4y ago
- allturtles 4y ago
  I never understood what problem smart thermostats were supposed to solve, now I do: ski home pre-heating. Cool, makes sense, but no use to me.
  - nullwarp 4y ago
    Ours is helpful for turning the air up or down when we leave/come home or turning it up in the morning (we cool the house off at night so it holds it longer in the day before needing to fire up). Granted our thermostat isn't really "smart" it just has an API exposed that integrates into Home Assistant. I wouldn't put in one of those cloud based ones like Nest or Ecobee
    - fold 4y ago
      Which one are you using with Home Assistant?
  - amscanne 4y ago
    That's just a simple example. When the Nest came out, it felt like an amazing no brainer product to me: 1) The thermostat drives most home energy usage. It's probably above $1000/yr for most households. 2) The existing programmable thermostats were awful and no one used them effectively. There's a ton of waste as a result. 3) The smart thermostat can easily pay for itself in a year or two just by having a better UX that you'll actually use. That's an amazing value proposition.
samwillis 4y ago
We have a Nest thermostat, we have now turned off every single smart feature and just use it for a schedule and turning it on/off remotely when away (we gave up with the automatic away detection). I should also point out we are in the UK. I’m completely unconvinced that “smart” thermostats achieve anything for the majority of homes in the UK, despite most energy suppliers pushing customers to purchase them for years. For those unaware, the majority of homes in the UK have a gas boiler central heating system with TRVs on each radiator. This means that you end up with two competing temperature control systems in your home, which result in some rooms regularly being too cold/hot, it literally worse than have no central thermostat. We now have the Nest set to about 5deg higher than we want, then have all the TRVs set to what we want each room to be. In our last house we had the Tado system with “smart” electric TRVs, you would think that would solve the problems, but it was flaky, noisy and very expensive. If I was doing it again I would get whatever the cheapest boiler controller with remote (internet) control I could find. But then I would probably not be putting in a gas boiler again, I'm hoping that by next time we need to overhaul a heating system heat pump systems have dropped in price in the UK. I'm sure that in countries where people tend to have forced air HVAC systems these thermostats make a lot more sense. And I do love the industrial design, it is a "beautiful" thermostat.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I find even here that the “smart” features basically come down to “I can bump the temperature from my couch” and not much more. Ever since work from home the “away” hasn’t mattered much and the house has so much thermal mass that letting it cool down a bit when we are actually away doesn’t seem to do much at all.
- beembeem 4y ago
  Agreed on the "smart" features. When I moved into my current house we had painters working on one floor. They cranked the newly programmed Nest that was in learning mode to 90 degrees for one night to keep the paint warm while it dried. I, of course, had no idea they had done something that silly, but for weeks afterwards this smart thermostat will crank the heat to 90 and I have to manually turn it down. I'm convinced that it will not be able to unlearn and I'll have to delete the profile and recreate it. I should set it on a schedule as you mention.
thomaslord 4y ago
When I read the headline, I assumed that this was going to be a negative review from a user. We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperature, otherwise it will disobey your commands and go to the configured energy saving temperature. There were 2 problems with this, one universal and one application-specific: first, if you live in anything other than a small apartment your thermostat may be in a different room from you. In our 2-story house, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're specifically in the living room. The 2 2nd-floor bedrooms, the 1st-floor bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, the dining room, and the 1st-floor office all don't count. In our house specifically the thermostat was installed behind a wall-mounted TV, which only makes things worse - even if you're in the living room, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're actively playing with it. Trying to make the Nest ignore whether you're home and disable the eco mode is an exercise in futility. I found a setting to disable eco mode, but the house was still never the temperature we set it to. When I checked the thermostat I saw the green leaf icon, indicating that the Nest completely ignores the setting that disables eco mode. When I called Nest support, they couldn't figure out what was going on either. The only way I could get it to function semi-reasonably was to manually set the eco mode temperature to the temperature we actually wanted the house at, which means that you have to set the temperature twice to actually set the temperature. The idea of a thermostat that tries to save power automatically is great, but it falls apart when you rely on a single motion sensor to determine if an entire house is occupied. This bad assumption was a letdown, but the fake setting to disable eco mode turned me off of Nest completely.
- fgonzag 4y ago
  The ecobee3 solves this particular problem by having remote sensors. I'm absolutely in love with it since it takes an average of all the sensors as the temperature.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  I know exactly what you’re talking about, as I’ve had a share of my own struggles against Nest which thinks it knows better. However, right now, I have it set like the following: https://postimg.cc/D8YBfB4x https://postimg.cc/D8YBfB4x And it works just like a normal thermostat, which makes me happy. I’d never buy a smart thermostat now, I keep using Nest because previous owner of the house installed it, and after lobotomizing it, it works good enough.
sydthrowaway 4y ago
Jesus, what's so good about a thermostat? This fellow is a constant self booster. We need cooler, game-changing hardware. Not a janky drone (looking at you Snapchat)
narush 4y ago
I'm reading his book Build right now - it came out last week, so assuming that's why he's appearing all over all the feed). About 2/3rds of the way through currently. My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation. 2. Some advice goes heavily against current startup orthodoxy. He rejects fail-fast / figure it out later mentality, and argues for a lengthy product design process (for both atoms and bits!). 3. Lots of good details about how to think about managing people, managing and scaling team, and issues with scaling, etc, taken from his days building Nest. Both (2) and (3) stand out to me as functions of his specific background. Building a company like Nest is obviously wildly (!) hard, but doing it after building the iPhone is a different game. I don't think his advice about lengthy design processes make a ton of sense for my startup [1], for example. Generally, I always try and remind myself when I'm reading company-building advice books: this is probably good advice for someone in the same context as Tony Fadell (e.g. someone who is launching a second company after building... the iPhone). For me, it may or may not be relevant. The good thing about failing fast is that you can use it at a strategy-level, aka fail fast _at_ failing fast, and switch to longer product cycles if you think that might work better. Starting with a long-product cycle doesn't give you much of a chance to try again if your first swing is a miss (which Mito's first attempt was...). [1] https://trymito.io https://trymito.io
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  I'm also reading it. About done. There's many good gems here and his philosophy hits close to home. I don't think you need to be of his fame to apply it. Many of these tips are applicable. I find lots of his product & marketing advice to be very useful for new PMs to tech too.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation. He's been doing a lot of history rewriting. Don't get me wrong: Building and shipping Nest was a great accomplishment. However, he was a famously terrible leader in many regards and drove a number of great employees away. When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dropcam-regrets-2016-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring. Nest didn't go on to revolutionize the space after Tony Fadell arrived with his hard-hitting management styles. Nest cameras haven't really evolved much and the Nest security system was abandoned. I don't doubt that there are some lessons to be learned in his book, but in practice Tony Fadell hasn't been a great leader in the past decade. I'd take his book with a grain of salt.
stblack 4y ago
We've had a nest thermostat for five years. For the past four and a half years it's been on a shelf in the basement, in its box. Gonna throw it out someday. What crappy tech. Its problem: its backing plate heats up. Causing the house to be perpetually cold. Three Nest backing-plate replacements later, we gave up. We presently have a much dumber thermostat that can be remotely controlled. We're happy now, but we'll never purchase another Nest product again.
- cout 4y ago
  Do they not have remote temperature sensors as an option?
  - clintonb 4y ago
    They do now. The original Nest did not have remote sensors.
- lostgame 4y ago
  The one my girlfriend has was bundled with a remote temperature sensor. I guess yours didn’t come with one? Either way - she hasn’t installed it and it’s worked fine. It’s possible you had a dud unit?
post_break 4y ago
I love my honeywell thermostat. It has wifi, a touch screen, schedules, and that's it. I can control it from my phone, google home, and no smarts. It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year. The single pane to double pane window showed just how much energy I was saving. I wouldn't touch a "smart" thermostat with a stick, but this dumb wifi thing is incredible.
- giarc 4y ago
  "It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year." I have 2x Nests in my house and I don't know if I'm missing something, but I only get a usage history for the past week. I feel like a "smart" thermostat should tell me a lot more about my usage and it should be pretty trivial to develop.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I have a Nest. I had to watch a 10-minute video to disable all "smarts" on it. It's possible, but painful. I'd rather have your Honeywell.
  - post_break 4y ago
    This is the one I have. It came with my house that I bought so I didn't even pick it out so I'm not some shill. The app is kind of old and ugly but I honestly don't even care because it just works. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Home-Wi-Fi-Smart-Color-7-Day-Programmable-Smart-Thermostat-with-Color-Changing-Touchscreen-Display-RTH9585WF/301665800 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Home-Wi-Fi-Smart-Color...
  - bmitc 4y ago
    We have a Nest in which we turned off all smarts and scheduling, but it was still turning itself on and smoking us out of the house. We could not find any setting, any schedule, or anything that indicated why it was turning on. We ended up having to do a factory reset, and we never connected it back to the WiFi to get rid of these "smart" scheduling features. If anything, the Nest wastes money when using its smart features, as it's never on or off when it needs to be. The most stable room in the house is the basement controlled by a dumb, admittedly ugly thermostat. The only nice thing about Nests is the overall look, but they're really poor devices. The OS on them constantly lags, causing dial inputs to suddenly "catch up". Each one of our Nests has its own personality: one lags, one turns on when it wants to (prior to factory reset, probably the third or fourth time we've had to do so), and the other one seems to actually just work.
threeio 4y ago
My nest screwdrivers (I have two) are my most used tools in the house to this day.
taylodl 4y ago
I want a thermostat that factors in humidity. Warmer temperatures are okay if it isn't as humid. I may only need to run the AC to knock out some of the humidity to make it comfortable. Does anyone know of a thermostat that does this?
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I was just complaining about this in my comment. All of these "smart" thermostats are super dumb IMHO. I want one that takes into account outside temp/humidity as well as indoor. I want my house to always feel like 65F (and ideally 60F at night). That's it. No smarts, no "away" detection, no eco mode, none of that. It's bonkers to me that all these newer thermostats accomplished was adding the ability to remotely control the same old stupid tech (and wasting everyone's time figuring out how to turn off eco mode).
- post_break 4y ago
  Newer AC systems can do this. I believe my "dumb" honeywell looks at humidity factors as well because on occasion I have caught it running the AC even though it's colder than what I have it set to because the humidity was high. Perks of living in Houston I guess.
joshstrange 4y ago
So I had a Nest for a year before it just stopped working and Nest told me it wasn't compatible with my system, after previously telling me it was (not sure how it worked more or less perfectly for that first year but whatever). I moved to an EcoBee and I'm happy with it but for all their "smarts" these things are still dumb as rock in my opinion. I work from home so turning up/down the temp when I'm away is rarely worth it other than when I'm on vacation for a week or a long weekend. I'm happy enough to be able to control it from an app and not have to get up and go to the other side of the house but there is one big thing that is missing for me: it being smart about the outside temp. Let me elaborate. I want my house to be 65 during the day and 60 at night but there isn't a good way to accomplish that without micromanaging it when the seasons change (or freak weather which happens more and more often). Depending on the outside temp (and humidity) I have to manually tweak the temp ranges. It would be nice if I could set heat to 65 and cool to 65 but that would kill my HVAC system flipping between the two modes (if the apps even let you do that), I just want it to be a little smarter. Something like "If it's >60 outside then set the cool to 65 and heat to 55" and "If it's <60 outside then set the heat to 65 and cool to 75" (though humidity, inside and out, probably need to be taken into account as well). I'll probably attempt to tackle this using Home Assistant at some point but it's frustrating that these devices are in some ways stuck in the past of "Set a cool or heat or cool+heat settings", how about a little more intelligence? I want the inside of my house to always "feel like" 65F. All of the "smart" thermostats are really just the same as before with a way to remotely change the settings (which is an improvement) but I'd never call them smart.
- thebean11 4y ago
  You can't set a temperature range, like "keep my house between 65 and 70"? So when it's cold it would heat to 65, when it's hot it would cool to 70, and between 65-70 it would do nothing? That's not very smart..seems like the most basic thing they should be able to handle.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    I can set a range but it's been my experience that in the "summer" I need to set it to 65 cool-only. and the in "winter" I need to set it to 65 heat-only. Fall and spring are hell and I have to check the temp to know where to set it. Ranges suck and are a carryover from the old tech, I want my house to be 65, this should be possible. I think humidity is playing a part in it but I don't want my house to get up to 70 so setting 60-70 isn't going to work and likewise, no matter the season, I don't want it to get down to 60 unless it's at night.
smspf 4y ago
I couldn't finish reading the article. The first iPhone made connectors and electronic components easier to get to? Sure, it indirectly helped, as any other new, recent electronic device did. But please don't try to rewrite history. He couldn't make things work over the phone, although he invested large sums of money and dedicated hardware? Come on, I rigged an old analog (rotary) phone to do that using a relay when I was 14 or 15 years old. After all, in that case all he needed to do was to switch on the heating and nothing more. The whole thing just reads like a marketing fluff piece.
bound008 4y ago
Heads up for privacy minded people in the Apple ecosystem... if you buy a HomeKit thermostat (or generally any HomeKit compatible device), you can usually set it up without the vendors app, or making an account, or accepting the ToS or Privacy Policy. There are some well established boring HVAC thermostat makers that have HomeKit compatible devices, and they are available for under $100. If you are a renter, you may need to get a 100-240VAC -> 24 VAC power brick to supply adequate power if your HVAC is not wired up properly.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  Can you share the names of these manufacturers and/or devices?
jshier 4y ago
One of my biggest annoyances is that, for whatever reason, Nest and ecobee haven't continued to expand their thermostats to support more sophisticated HVAC setups. I recently updated to a variable speed furnace (just the furnace, not the AC) and the Trane thermostat is complete shit, exactly what you'd think a "smart" thermostat made by an HVAC company would be. But I can't replace it because the third-party thermostats don't support variable speed furnaces, humidity systems, or electronic air filters. Why?
lostgame 4y ago
My girlfriend is a landlady. She had issues with these two particular tenants who seemed to have an obsession with fighting over the temperature dial. It cost her a whole ton in either heating or A/C every month, and would leave the whole place either ridiculously freezing or way too hot all the time. (She lives in the basement herself, so this affected her as well.) She bought a Nest, put a password on it, left it there, and has likely already saved around what the Nest cost within a year or so just from stopping these idiots and future potential idiots from constantly messing with the thing. She’s never had an issue with it. Essentially - it really depends on what you want a product for, and how you intend to use it. I’m aware there are other, cheaper; less convenient solutions such as a lockbox, but honestly the Nest has been a wonderful solution for her.
jeffrallen 4y ago
Reading this brought back memories of my own family's cabin in the Sierra Nevada. My grandfather always left a fire laid when leaving so with one match, you could light it on arrival and start heating the place up instantly. An old school, kinder and simpler solution. I'm happy for Tony. But I also miss my grandfather and his kind of engineering.
nicolas_t 4y ago
> In 2016 Google decided to sell Nest, so I left the company. Months after I left, Google changed its mind. I wish Google had sold it, then I could buy a Nest. I do not trust Google and do not want them to have more of a foothold in my house, my networks.

68 points by takiwatanga 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

Imagine if he had decided to just pay a local dude $30 to stop by and pre-warm the house instead …

richliss 4y ago

This kind of link is why I come to HN. Thanks for sharing.

shishy 4y ago

His new book Build was an excellent read. Highly recommend it, really picks up after Chapter 2 with lots of good advice and anecdotes. It also contextualized where our startup is for me and helped me visualize what to anticipate in the future really well.

kevmo314 4y ago

> Shipping the Nest thermostat with a screwdriver "turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight" I must be in the minority then. I end up with a ton of these product-specific screwdrivers and get a little frustrated that I have to throw it away, contributing ever-so-slightly to the pile of consumer waste. It'd be cool if you could select a "need tools" option sort of like how take out now has a "need utensils" option.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jrockway 4y ago
For me it's kind of a wash. For years I avoided buying any imperial allen keys because I had a pile of free ones that were good when I infrequently needed them. I also got this combination 2.5mm hex / Phillips screwdriver which is actually quite convenient as those are the sizes of screwdriver I need most frequently. The rest go into the landfill unfortunately, and I agree the waste isn't really worth the 3 random sizes of allen key I once needed.
- cout 4y ago
  I'm a little wary of those cheap hex keys -- I've been burned a few times by them stripping out a hex head when the key was just a little loose. I know I should invest in some quality hex keys, but you are right -- it's hard to justify the purchase when I already have so many lying around.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Yeah. I think part of the problem there is also low-quality fasteners, but good hex wrenches do prevent a lot of problems. As I go through my stash of direct-from-the-Shenzhen-market-at-10x-the-price fasteners from Amazon I'm replacing them with equivalents from McMaster. I have to say the increase in quality is noticeable. I half expect to break an Amazon screw and find that it's hollow inside to save a few cents.
eddieroger 4y ago
Check out the picture - it's not a product-specific screwdriver, it's just a screwdriver with standard Philips and flathead bits. Some of the products used outdoors have security bits, but even those are just Torx bits most of the time. I am delighted to not need additional tools, and feel no pressure to keep it since I have a good set of screwdrivers already. Plus, this makes a handy small one to keep in the kitchen for random uses.
cout 4y ago
The zinus bedframe I bought came with a mini ratcheting wrench instead of a flat wrench. The wrench is just the right size to fit hex shank screwdriver bits, and so I've used it many times when I couldn't find my screwdriver or I needed just a little bit more torque. I have even used it to repair my John Deere tractor since it's small enough to fit where a regular size ratcheting wrench couldn't. The wrench definitely made the product feel higher quality, and I have a tool I will keep for a long time, if I don't wear it out.
Phiwise_ 4y ago
Just send it to your local goodwill. Some single mother just scraping by in a rotting-out apartment who suddenly needs to fix a sink or lighting fixture that duct tape just isn't working on any more will be delighted to find your nest brand screwdriver with a fifty cent sticker while looking for a pair of shoes her growing kid's feet might fit in. And that's just here in the US. Our working poor are the world's one percent. If our definition of consumer waste is things no one would like to hold on to, then even what we consider the most banal tools are not consumer waste, and it will be a very long time until they are.
prepend 4y ago
I love the screwdriver. It’s better than any I can find at Ace or HomeDepot. I bought three Nests and while the thermostats are pretty annoying, I really love the screwdrivers. They are really pleasant to hold.

aresant 4y ago

"Every time my wife and I drove up to our Lake Tahoe ski cabin on Friday nights after work, we’d have to keep our snow jackets on until the next day. The house took all night to heat up." That is first world problems hall of fame material right there! But a great origin story for the Nest regardless.

closetohome 4y ago
- burnte 4y ago
amirhirsch 4y ago
allturtles 4y ago
I never understood what problem smart thermostats were supposed to solve, now I do: ski home pre-heating. Cool, makes sense, but no use to me.
- nullwarp 4y ago
  Ours is helpful for turning the air up or down when we leave/come home or turning it up in the morning (we cool the house off at night so it holds it longer in the day before needing to fire up). Granted our thermostat isn't really "smart" it just has an API exposed that integrates into Home Assistant. I wouldn't put in one of those cloud based ones like Nest or Ecobee
  - fold 4y ago
    Which one are you using with Home Assistant?
- amscanne 4y ago
  That's just a simple example. When the Nest came out, it felt like an amazing no brainer product to me: 1) The thermostat drives most home energy usage. It's probably above $1000/yr for most households. 2) The existing programmable thermostats were awful and no one used them effectively. There's a ton of waste as a result. 3) The smart thermostat can easily pay for itself in a year or two just by having a better UX that you'll actually use. That's an amazing value proposition.

samwillis 4y ago

We have a Nest thermostat, we have now turned off every single smart feature and just use it for a schedule and turning it on/off remotely when away (we gave up with the automatic away detection). I should also point out we are in the UK. I’m completely unconvinced that “smart” thermostats achieve anything for the majority of homes in the UK, despite most energy suppliers pushing customers to purchase them for years. For those unaware, the majority of homes in the UK have a gas boiler central heating system with TRVs on each radiator. This means that you end up with two competing temperature control systems in your home, which result in some rooms regularly being too cold/hot, it literally worse than have no central thermostat. We now have the Nest set to about 5deg higher than we want, then have all the TRVs set to what we want each room to be. In our last house we had the Tado system with “smart” electric TRVs, you would think that would solve the problems, but it was flaky, noisy and very expensive. If I was doing it again I would get whatever the cheapest boiler controller with remote (internet) control I could find. But then I would probably not be putting in a gas boiler again, I'm hoping that by next time we need to overhaul a heating system heat pump systems have dropped in price in the UK. I'm sure that in countries where people tend to have forced air HVAC systems these thermostats make a lot more sense. And I do love the industrial design, it is a "beautiful" thermostat.

bombcar 4y ago
I find even here that the “smart” features basically come down to “I can bump the temperature from my couch” and not much more. Ever since work from home the “away” hasn’t mattered much and the house has so much thermal mass that letting it cool down a bit when we are actually away doesn’t seem to do much at all.
beembeem 4y ago
Agreed on the "smart" features. When I moved into my current house we had painters working on one floor. They cranked the newly programmed Nest that was in learning mode to 90 degrees for one night to keep the paint warm while it dried. I, of course, had no idea they had done something that silly, but for weeks afterwards this smart thermostat will crank the heat to 90 and I have to manually turn it down. I'm convinced that it will not be able to unlearn and I'll have to delete the profile and recreate it. I should set it on a schedule as you mention.

thomaslord 4y ago

When I read the headline, I assumed that this was going to be a negative review from a user. We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperature, otherwise it will disobey your commands and go to the configured energy saving temperature. There were 2 problems with this, one universal and one application-specific: first, if you live in anything other than a small apartment your thermostat may be in a different room from you. In our 2-story house, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're specifically in the living room. The 2 2nd-floor bedrooms, the 1st-floor bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, the dining room, and the 1st-floor office all don't count. In our house specifically the thermostat was installed behind a wall-mounted TV, which only makes things worse - even if you're in the living room, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're actively playing with it. Trying to make the Nest ignore whether you're home and disable the eco mode is an exercise in futility. I found a setting to disable eco mode, but the house was still never the temperature we set it to. When I checked the thermostat I saw the green leaf icon, indicating that the Nest completely ignores the setting that disables eco mode. When I called Nest support, they couldn't figure out what was going on either. The only way I could get it to function semi-reasonably was to manually set the eco mode temperature to the temperature we actually wanted the house at, which means that you have to set the temperature twice to actually set the temperature. The idea of a thermostat that tries to save power automatically is great, but it falls apart when you rely on a single motion sensor to determine if an entire house is occupied. This bad assumption was a letdown, but the fake setting to disable eco mode turned me off of Nest completely.

fgonzag 4y ago
The ecobee3 solves this particular problem by having remote sensors. I'm absolutely in love with it since it takes an average of all the sensors as the temperature.
xyzzyz 4y ago
I know exactly what you’re talking about, as I’ve had a share of my own struggles against Nest which thinks it knows better. However, right now, I have it set like the following: https://postimg.cc/D8YBfB4x https://postimg.cc/D8YBfB4x And it works just like a normal thermostat, which makes me happy. I’d never buy a smart thermostat now, I keep using Nest because previous owner of the house installed it, and after lobotomizing it, it works good enough.

sydthrowaway 4y ago

Jesus, what's so good about a thermostat? This fellow is a constant self booster. We need cooler, game-changing hardware. Not a janky drone (looking at you Snapchat)

narush 4y ago

I'm reading his book Build right now - it came out last week, so assuming that's why he's appearing all over all the feed). About 2/3rds of the way through currently. My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation. 2. Some advice goes heavily against current startup orthodoxy. He rejects fail-fast / figure it out later mentality, and argues for a lengthy product design process (for both atoms and bits!). 3. Lots of good details about how to think about managing people, managing and scaling team, and issues with scaling, etc, taken from his days building Nest. Both (2) and (3) stand out to me as functions of his specific background. Building a company like Nest is obviously wildly (!) hard, but doing it after building the iPhone is a different game. I don't think his advice about lengthy design processes make a ton of sense for my startup [1], for example. Generally, I always try and remind myself when I'm reading company-building advice books: this is probably good advice for someone in the same context as Tony Fadell (e.g. someone who is launching a second company after building... the iPhone). For me, it may or may not be relevant. The good thing about failing fast is that you can use it at a strategy-level, aka fail fast _at_ failing fast, and switch to longer product cycles if you think that might work better. Starting with a long-product cycle doesn't give you much of a chance to try again if your first swing is a miss (which Mito's first attempt was...). [1] https://trymito.io https://trymito.io

thenerdhead 4y ago
I'm also reading it. About done. There's many good gems here and his philosophy hits close to home. I don't think you need to be of his fame to apply it. Many of these tips are applicable. I find lots of his product & marketing advice to be very useful for new PMs to tech too.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation. He's been doing a lot of history rewriting. Don't get me wrong: Building and shipping Nest was a great accomplishment. However, he was a famously terrible leader in many regards and drove a number of great employees away. When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dropcam-regrets-2016-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring. Nest didn't go on to revolutionize the space after Tony Fadell arrived with his hard-hitting management styles. Nest cameras haven't really evolved much and the Nest security system was abandoned. I don't doubt that there are some lessons to be learned in his book, but in practice Tony Fadell hasn't been a great leader in the past decade. I'd take his book with a grain of salt.

stblack 4y ago

We've had a nest thermostat for five years. For the past four and a half years it's been on a shelf in the basement, in its box. Gonna throw it out someday. What crappy tech. Its problem: its backing plate heats up. Causing the house to be perpetually cold. Three Nest backing-plate replacements later, we gave up. We presently have a much dumber thermostat that can be remotely controlled. We're happy now, but we'll never purchase another Nest product again.

cout 4y ago
Do they not have remote temperature sensors as an option?
- clintonb 4y ago
  They do now. The original Nest did not have remote sensors.
lostgame 4y ago
The one my girlfriend has was bundled with a remote temperature sensor. I guess yours didn’t come with one? Either way - she hasn’t installed it and it’s worked fine. It’s possible you had a dud unit?

post_break 4y ago

I love my honeywell thermostat. It has wifi, a touch screen, schedules, and that's it. I can control it from my phone, google home, and no smarts. It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year. The single pane to double pane window showed just how much energy I was saving. I wouldn't touch a "smart" thermostat with a stick, but this dumb wifi thing is incredible.

giarc 4y ago
"It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year." I have 2x Nests in my house and I don't know if I'm missing something, but I only get a usage history for the past week. I feel like a "smart" thermostat should tell me a lot more about my usage and it should be pretty trivial to develop.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
I have a Nest. I had to watch a 10-minute video to disable all "smarts" on it. It's possible, but painful. I'd rather have your Honeywell.
- post_break 4y ago
  This is the one I have. It came with my house that I bought so I didn't even pick it out so I'm not some shill. The app is kind of old and ugly but I honestly don't even care because it just works. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Home-Wi-Fi-Smart-Color-7-Day-Programmable-Smart-Thermostat-with-Color-Changing-Touchscreen-Display-RTH9585WF/301665800 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Home-Wi-Fi-Smart-Color...
- bmitc 4y ago
  We have a Nest in which we turned off all smarts and scheduling, but it was still turning itself on and smoking us out of the house. We could not find any setting, any schedule, or anything that indicated why it was turning on. We ended up having to do a factory reset, and we never connected it back to the WiFi to get rid of these "smart" scheduling features. If anything, the Nest wastes money when using its smart features, as it's never on or off when it needs to be. The most stable room in the house is the basement controlled by a dumb, admittedly ugly thermostat. The only nice thing about Nests is the overall look, but they're really poor devices. The OS on them constantly lags, causing dial inputs to suddenly "catch up". Each one of our Nests has its own personality: one lags, one turns on when it wants to (prior to factory reset, probably the third or fourth time we've had to do so), and the other one seems to actually just work.

threeio 4y ago

My nest screwdrivers (I have two) are my most used tools in the house to this day.

taylodl 4y ago

I want a thermostat that factors in humidity. Warmer temperatures are okay if it isn't as humid. I may only need to run the AC to knock out some of the humidity to make it comfortable. Does anyone know of a thermostat that does this?

joshstrange 4y ago
I was just complaining about this in my comment. All of these "smart" thermostats are super dumb IMHO. I want one that takes into account outside temp/humidity as well as indoor. I want my house to always feel like 65F (and ideally 60F at night). That's it. No smarts, no "away" detection, no eco mode, none of that. It's bonkers to me that all these newer thermostats accomplished was adding the ability to remotely control the same old stupid tech (and wasting everyone's time figuring out how to turn off eco mode).
post_break 4y ago
Newer AC systems can do this. I believe my "dumb" honeywell looks at humidity factors as well because on occasion I have caught it running the AC even though it's colder than what I have it set to because the humidity was high. Perks of living in Houston I guess.

joshstrange 4y ago

So I had a Nest for a year before it just stopped working and Nest told me it wasn't compatible with my system, after previously telling me it was (not sure how it worked more or less perfectly for that first year but whatever). I moved to an EcoBee and I'm happy with it but for all their "smarts" these things are still dumb as rock in my opinion. I work from home so turning up/down the temp when I'm away is rarely worth it other than when I'm on vacation for a week or a long weekend. I'm happy enough to be able to control it from an app and not have to get up and go to the other side of the house but there is one big thing that is missing for me: it being smart about the outside temp. Let me elaborate. I want my house to be 65 during the day and 60 at night but there isn't a good way to accomplish that without micromanaging it when the seasons change (or freak weather which happens more and more often). Depending on the outside temp (and humidity) I have to manually tweak the temp ranges. It would be nice if I could set heat to 65 and cool to 65 but that would kill my HVAC system flipping between the two modes (if the apps even let you do that), I just want it to be a little smarter. Something like "If it's >60 outside then set the cool to 65 and heat to 55" and "If it's <60 outside then set the heat to 65 and cool to 75" (though humidity, inside and out, probably need to be taken into account as well). I'll probably attempt to tackle this using Home Assistant at some point but it's frustrating that these devices are in some ways stuck in the past of "Set a cool or heat or cool+heat settings", how about a little more intelligence? I want the inside of my house to always "feel like" 65F. All of the "smart" thermostats are really just the same as before with a way to remotely change the settings (which is an improvement) but I'd never call them smart.

thebean11 4y ago
You can't set a temperature range, like "keep my house between 65 and 70"? So when it's cold it would heat to 65, when it's hot it would cool to 70, and between 65-70 it would do nothing? That's not very smart..seems like the most basic thing they should be able to handle.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  I can set a range but it's been my experience that in the "summer" I need to set it to 65 cool-only. and the in "winter" I need to set it to 65 heat-only. Fall and spring are hell and I have to check the temp to know where to set it. Ranges suck and are a carryover from the old tech, I want my house to be 65, this should be possible. I think humidity is playing a part in it but I don't want my house to get up to 70 so setting 60-70 isn't going to work and likewise, no matter the season, I don't want it to get down to 60 unless it's at night.

smspf 4y ago

I couldn't finish reading the article. The first iPhone made connectors and electronic components easier to get to? Sure, it indirectly helped, as any other new, recent electronic device did. But please don't try to rewrite history. He couldn't make things work over the phone, although he invested large sums of money and dedicated hardware? Come on, I rigged an old analog (rotary) phone to do that using a relay when I was 14 or 15 years old. After all, in that case all he needed to do was to switch on the heating and nothing more. The whole thing just reads like a marketing fluff piece.

bound008 4y ago

Heads up for privacy minded people in the Apple ecosystem... if you buy a HomeKit thermostat (or generally any HomeKit compatible device), you can usually set it up without the vendors app, or making an account, or accepting the ToS or Privacy Policy. There are some well established boring HVAC thermostat makers that have HomeKit compatible devices, and they are available for under $100. If you are a renter, you may need to get a 100-240VAC -> 24 VAC power brick to supply adequate power if your HVAC is not wired up properly.

thewebcount 4y ago
Can you share the names of these manufacturers and/or devices?

jshier 4y ago

One of my biggest annoyances is that, for whatever reason, Nest and ecobee haven't continued to expand their thermostats to support more sophisticated HVAC setups. I recently updated to a variable speed furnace (just the furnace, not the AC) and the Trane thermostat is complete shit, exactly what you'd think a "smart" thermostat made by an HVAC company would be. But I can't replace it because the third-party thermostats don't support variable speed furnaces, humidity systems, or electronic air filters. Why?

lostgame 4y ago

My girlfriend is a landlady. She had issues with these two particular tenants who seemed to have an obsession with fighting over the temperature dial. It cost her a whole ton in either heating or A/C every month, and would leave the whole place either ridiculously freezing or way too hot all the time. (She lives in the basement herself, so this affected her as well.) She bought a Nest, put a password on it, left it there, and has likely already saved around what the Nest cost within a year or so just from stopping these idiots and future potential idiots from constantly messing with the thing. She’s never had an issue with it. Essentially - it really depends on what you want a product for, and how you intend to use it. I’m aware there are other, cheaper; less convenient solutions such as a lockbox, but honestly the Nest has been a wonderful solution for her.

jeffrallen 4y ago

Reading this brought back memories of my own family's cabin in the Sierra Nevada. My grandfather always left a fire laid when leaving so with one match, you could light it on arrival and start heating the place up instantly. An old school, kinder and simpler solution. I'm happy for Tony. But I also miss my grandfather and his kind of engineering.

nicolas_t 4y ago

> In 2016 Google decided to sell Nest, so I left the company. Months after I left, Google changed its mind. I wish Google had sold it, then I could buy a Nest. I do not trust Google and do not want them to have more of a foothold in my house, my networks.