Nest Thermostat Bug Leaves Owners Without Heating (thestack.com) 432
An anonymous reader writes: Google-owned smart homeware company Nest has asked users to reset their connected thermostats after a software bug forced controllers offline and left owners unable to heat their homes. The company has confirmed that a software update error had caused the thermostat's batteries to drain, therefore making it unable to control the temperature. Users of the smart home device took to social media to express their anger at being left with cold houses. Some feared that the fault had put water pipes under pressure, risking burst plumbing.
The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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From what I understand, the un-reliability of the cloud is a development paradigm: Write your software to be resilient so it will work reliably with an unreliable back end.
The thermostat being the front end in this case, I would expect it to be as reliable as a complex system can be.
But yeah, it's like buying the car with power windows... one more thing to fix when it fails. Keep it simple and reliability goes up... and if done well, usability is not affected.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
The thermostat being the front end in this case, I would expect it to be as reliable as a complex system can be.
See, there's where you get off track.
I would expect something as simple as a thermostat to be "not complex" in the first place.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Funny)
You have to realize you are talking to an Ixian here. If it can be made more complex through technology, they are the ones to do it.
It could be worse. He could be Tleilaxu.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:4, Informative)
I've had to deal with EMS controller woes in the past- the HVAC people programmed the EMS controllers to basically require a network connection back to their HQ in order to function, else they went into an error-state. When it was pointed-out that there were innumerable points of failure including the LAN at the facility, the WAN, and worst of all, their own HQ's LAN or WAN that could take the entire organization down, only then did it dawn on them that it was a bad idea to so centrally-control the EMS, and they've migrated back to a more sane policy where EMS just runs its set programming until interrupted by the HQ controller.
We've seen a lot of failure-mode problems lately, to me this points to a lack of quality assurance testing. The trend in having the programmer QA their own code is obviously not providing us with the results that we need and should be stopped.
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I have a Honeywell 7 day and with lithium AAAs I get 18 months before a low battery warning.
I just don't see the value add from the added complexity of the Nest. The day periods and days on mine are individually programmable and for the most part it really fits our lives just fine. If by chance I'm home during a programmed turndown, it's really not hard to bump up the temperature and it will automatically go back to following the program at the next interval start period.
I pretty much don't want the air c
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I switched from a basic 5+2 day thermostat to a Nest about a year ago (though I wasn't hit by the bug mentioned here). This Christmas, we left home for a few days, but left our dogs there in the care of a dog sitter who stopped by a couple times each day. Normally, we run the heat from about 6:30 PM when we get home, until 10:30 PM when we go to sleep, set to 68F. In the morning, we're not home and awake long enough to make it worth running the heat. It gets down to maybe 62 on a fairly cold day before the
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Sure, but the cloud is saving the planet from global warming. Not to mention the monetary savings in heating fuel experienced by Nest users. (Well those that survived the last cold front anyway)
Perhaps Slashdot needs a template for standardized reporting of the little catastrophes associated with malfunctions of the Internet of Horrors. There are gonna be a lot of them.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem with trusting reliability from the cloud provider is that their economic interests are not necessarily aligned with yours (they could be, but most people are more "selfish" about their own cost-vs-reliability requirements than the typical profit generating enterprise).
In this case, I'm sure the potential value in pushing out their failed update (perhaps for improved data gathering capability), vs the amount of QA testing they did was a cost trade-off that they made. If the thermostat was workin
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with the Cloud for this.
Found the millenial. ^^^
When I recently encountered a person who thought it was normal to have to reboot their light switches (some brand of automated switch) I finally realized that what old people say is true: sometimes the old way of doing things is better.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:4, Funny)
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It will then flash a Morse coded message saying "Your illumination system has installed updates, and needed to automatically reboot to apply them. Click here to repeat this message."
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Hear, hear. Billowing, rickety complexity and interdependence for its own sake leads to only one logical conclusion. This was all foreseen in 1909 by E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops [illinois.edu].
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
FYI, "millennial" is not a synonym for "dumbass." There's plenty of us who know better than to buy into "IoT" and "Cloud" shit.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
The correlation is high enough to believe it is causation ;-)
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the "Baby Boomers" didn't name themselves. The previous generation did. But that generation named themselves "The Greatest Generation."
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not the older is better. It is that tested and vetted is better. That takes time. Never get the newest and greatest unless you are willing to deal with the chance of it breaking or acting in appropriately.
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It is not the older is better. It is that tested and vetted is better. That takes time. Never get the newest and greatest unless you are willing to deal with the chance of it breaking or acting in appropriately.
Acting in appropriately what? Acting in appropriately themed musicals? Acting in appropriately somber drunk driving ads? Please, for the love of god, finish your sentence.
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We cede of a lot of things to centralized generation and control.
You mean like power, water, sewer, gas? All of those things are run by government or highly regulated industries that are held up to much higher standards than some "technology" company owned by an advertising company.
And if this Google owned company has this kind of access to people's homes, I wonder what data they are collecting and how they are going to monetize it. I for one could use that data to find all the folks who use a lot of energy and sell those names to energy and HVAC companies - just off of
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Yeah, just wait until the monetization angle is made clear and utilities start requiring these devices because it makes them money.
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I've already gotten several calls from Duke Energy here in Ohio where they wanted to first put some kind of 'smart' regulator on my heat pump to limit air conditioning, which I declined. Then I got one where they wanted to 'give' me a 'free' smart thermostat of some kind, which I'm sure isn't encumbered in any way by them to do what they want, instead of what I want.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Informative)
Demand control for high drain devices are fine and most users never even notice because the cycle periods where they are shaving peak load are short enough that it makes no difference to the conditions in the house under control (ie if your heat pump runs 15 minutes from now or RIGHT NOW makes little difference to the temp in the house since even relatively crappy houses have enough insulation that delta t is less than one degree per hour). The tradeoff is that we get to build fewer transmission lines and peaking plants which means lower bills for everyone.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:4, Insightful)
Slippery slope arguments are a slippery slope: how do we know aliens won't force the GOP to run some kind of idiot for president to make that happen?
So, what you are talking about will either not be possible (to impose on you) because you can just stop taking the 'money off for utility control' dollar, or you can't because a politician will have legislated something stupid to force you to take it, in which case your gripe is with them.
Rgds
Damon
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Georgia Power will give you a "free" Nest thermostat if you sign up for the "smart usage" plan (which means paying more for peak usage, and paying based on the peak power usage rather than only the total power usage).
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Internet of things is not the problem. Connected things that we control directly.. i.e. punch a hole through our own firewall and access our stuff directly from our other stuff could be a great time saver and make things easier. I will NEVER authenticate to other peoples servers to ask permission to access something in my own home. Number 1, I'll control my own access, thank you very much, and the company I bought the equipment from will not be on the list of authorized users. To do otherwise is the equivalent of buying a house and the real estate agent never giving you the keys.. and insisting that he be the one that comes and unlocks the door every time you come home. Oh and he'll periodically repaint your house a color of his choosing. Fuck that. Internet of things = Good. Current tie to cloud implementations = Hell fucking no.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh there is everything wrong with the cloud for this. Why should anyone have smart devices that are under someone elses control? That is absolutely ludicrous. I would love something like a Nest, but only if I access it DIRECTLY through my firewall and have 100 control of the device and its data flow. Why in the purple fuck would anyone think it is OK to have to authenticate to someone elses servers to control something in your own home? Give us smart connected devices that we don't have to ask permission to use because they are ours. In every sense of the word.
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Netgear GS108PE run about $100, give you 8 gigabit ports, four of which support up to 15w of PoE. Management is via a self hosted web int, the docs say you have to use their crappy windows app to configure them but that's bunk.
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You completely misunderstand. Connected is not the issue. Control is. The owner should be the ONLY person in control of the device, regardless of the owner is. Hotel owns it? Fine! They should have complete and utter control of their device without HAVING to authenticate to anyone elses servers unless they choose to. Owner can mean, business, individual, anything as long as the owner has the control. That goes for any device in my home. DVR's, smart controllers, anything. It really does come down to the com
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
For an application like this, if you want a "mature and reliable", you bloody well buy a thermostat which isn't connected, comes from a company which has been making thermostats a long time, and actually know what they're doing.
Because those things are designed to run without ever being updated or connected to anything.
Oh, and they don't upload your information to anybody or provide security holes into your home.
Go buy a Honeywell programmable thermostat or something. You'll find you never have this problem.
I'm afraid I've kind of reached "peak sympathy" for these problems. To a non-tech person they seem really cool, but it's not like this kind of stupidity wasn't entirely foreseeable and predicted.
Poor QA is the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Oddly, my old Honeywell thermostat had way more problems than the Nest that replaced it. It would frequently turn on heat or AC and leave it on regardless of temperature. Replacing the batteries did not help. Replaced the thermostat and about a year later the new one did the same thing. Junk.
I chose a Nest for one reason. The job I had at the time involved lots of travel, sometimes with limited or short notice. I also live in a climate that gets very hot in the summer and *VERY* cold in the winter. A regular programmable thermostat is utterly useless in that situation as I didn't have a regular schedule to program. You end up either leaving the temperature set to whatever is comfortable all the time or else coming home to a hot or cold house. Since I got the nest 3 years ago, my utility bills have gone down 25% and I have the ability to, from my phone, turn off "Away" mode an hour before I get home and the house is comfortable when I get there. If I forget, it's no biggie and the heat or AC turns on when I walk in the door with no buttons to press or no manual mode switch to accidentally leave on.
I'm not terribly fond of the cloud control aspect of it, but I solved the problem by putting it (and other untrusted IoT things) on a dedicated VLAN with a dedicated SSID with firewall rules preventing access to the rest of my network. The cloud isn't going away, so I figure I may as well protect myself and enjoy the convenience it provides.
Re:Poor QA is the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that Nest is a bit *too* smart for it's own good. Smart things require power and native power requirements of such a smart controller are larger than that can be supplied by common thermostat wiring schemes.
Older thermostat wiring (in 70% of houses) can only really deliver power through the wiring when the heat (or ac) is on/active, so a thermostat must sip power when it is active, and save when it is idle. Ironically, the wire in the wiring scheme that can be used to deliver continuous power is called the "common" wire even though it is actually not too common** ;^)
Being "smart", the Nest device (as with most "smart" controllers) likely attempts to use various power savings tricks to reduce their native power requirements to a lower average power so it can survive between active times on a battery with this typically wiring. Apparently this update wasn't as smart as it thought it was about conserving power and the energy received during the active time and their efforts were not enough to keep all the smarts going on the battery...
Of course the older "dumber" smart thermostats, drew such a small amount of power that they didn't need to apply smart power savings tricks to keep things alive between active cycles. Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good and I think the Nest falls into one of those situations...
** common as in common voltage potential in AC transformer thermostat wiring systems
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This made the installation easy for the average homeowner to complete, but erring on the side of installation ease compromised the long term effectiveness of the product.
Many other wifi-enabled t-stats have kits that allow for a missing common to be accounted for (Ecobee, for
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Does my honneywell programmable thermostat learn that my radiators take x number of hours to get 4 degrees when it's y tempursture outside, or x+1 hours when it's y-5 outside?
Yes, it can, depending on the model. The basic (and inexpensive) programmable ones don't, but even the moderate level 7 day programmable ones do. I think they call it "smart response". By the way, they also have wifi connected thermostats that can be managed remotely through the internet or your phone.
Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Lesson of the day... probably should have bought the honeywell.
Lesson of the day... probably should have connected an old bimetallic mercury switch thermostat in parallel with the IOT unit, set to 10 degrees Celsius or so... "Doesn't go that low", you say? Then simply tilt the thermostat a bit...
Old, simple, no-active-component technologies still have their place, even if only as a fail-safe for shiny-but-vulnerable microcontroller-based gadgets.
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We have a winner!
I'm a geeky guy with plenty of home automation; but
1. It's all wired by me, and NOT connected to the outside.
2. Critical functions are redundant, with good old electro-mechanical or just plain mechanical backups. The technology for these is proven, easy to understand and implement, reliable and...cheap.
No way I'm coming home to a frozen, flooded or on-fire house because of a "firmware update".
IoT (Score:2)
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Comment removed (Score:3)
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Its very easy to change the profiles for daily heating from a local browser. I can turn the heat down before I leave for vacation, and turn it back up just prior to returning. I can check while away to see what the temperature in my home is, so I know if there is a problem with one of my HVAC units.
I'm sur
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Fire.... pfft, that new-fangled technology is just a fad.
I live in a cold cave and eat raw food.
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A cave? Bah. That's for soft skinned hipsters.
I've always slept in a tree branch, and my father before me, and never did I feel the need for a cave.
Batteries? in a Nest ? (Score:5, Informative)
If you remove the Nest from the wall, the wires connecting the t-stat to the equipment relays and contacters are typically red, white, green, yellow, and brown/blue. Red is hot 24v, and white is the wire energized in a call for system heat in about 99% of single stage heating applications... plus, it will get you heat in many other multiple stage heating configurations.
With the furnace de-energized, so you don't fry a transformer, jumper from red to white and restore the power to the furnace/air handler. Keep in mind that this will get you heat, but it will not turn itself off.
Re:Batteries? in a Nest ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or just put the thermostat you took off the wall to install your Nest back up.
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Better yet, reinstall the thermostat that got replaced by the Nest.
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For the benefit of forieng readers note that this may be true in the USA but it's not true everywhere. Here in the UK heating control wiring is usually 240V.
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Almost every home heating and cooling system operates on demand from a t-stat that runs on 24 volts ac low voltage.
Yeah, old or entry-level shit that nobody with a sane mind would get in the first place unless forced to. All less-than-basic furnaces don't use the simple on/off signaling. You'll get these in rented apartments, but I'd hope that most homes with HVAC systems replaced in the last 10 years will not have this old shit anymore.
Sold my Nest (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Florida with a high efficiency A/C (19 Seer) and I noticed very little savings $10/mo at the expense of major fluctuations in temperature and coming home to a hot humid house. The upstairs and downstairs would have strange set points that made one unit run all the time (at full power).
I sold them online and have cheap thermostat with 4 set points during the day. The units run nearly all of the time in the summer but on the low power, high efficiency setting. The house is much more pleasant at very little extra cost.
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The house is 10 years old and is 4,000 sqft evenly divided over two floors. Everything is electric and my bill averages $250/mo.
Re:Sold my Nest (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Sold my Nest (Score:2, Interesting)
I live in Florida too. I never understood what problem the Nest was trying to solve. A programmable thermostat that has been correctly set up is much more efficient and much less expensive, at least in our climate. Having only lived in the southern most states, the reasoning behind buying Nest always baffled me.
Re: Sold my Nest (Score:5, Insightful)
A programmable thermostat that has been correctly set up is much more efficient and much less expensive
Agreed. Now, if we could only take the next step -- making coupled thermostats with humidity monitors more common.
In my experience, in humid climates the most useful measure of comfort is NOT temperature (or even relative humidity), but rather dewpoint. Comfort is a little more complex than that, but I'd much rather have a device that kept my house in the summer at roughly constant dewpoint (essentially constant absolute humidity), rather than constant temperature. With low humidity, 80+ degrees F can be perfectly comfortable. With 100% humidity, 70 degrees F can be unbearable and led you to be awash in sweat with even minimal exertion. A humidistat is also not quite an answer either, particularly if it tries to maintain static relative humidity -- again, that's not the best measure of comfort either across wide temperature ranges.
When seasons change, I'm often making on-the-fly adjustments to my programmable thermostat over several weeks, trying to strike a balance between, "I don't really need to have my AC running continuously at 70F just to remove humidity on some days" and "If I set the AC at a high temperature that would work when it's 100F, it isn't warm enough outside to make the AC run and the house will be unbearably humid."
(I know the Nest does measure humidity and can react to it, though I don't know how effective its programming is in this regard. And I would never use one anyway.)
I'd save more energy and effort adjusting my programmable thermostat if we just ignored temperature altogether. It's easy to measure, but it's simply not a good measure of human comfort.
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Yes - I too wondered about this. But then I realized - how many people actually program their device properly if at all?
I have a basic model which is difficult to program. They've tried to make it easy - but making a change is difficult. If we're home on vacation for a week it is hard to change the set points (I just use Hold). Plus I have two of them in my two story house - so changes must be made twice. Sure, once set I rarely have to make changes (I last made changes a year ago when I got married a
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I got 4 zwave thermostats for far less than 1 nest. The only feature I can not realy find elsewhere is the slab radiant floor learning. Otherwise my thermostats are happily powered off the relay transformers and operate in a self contained manner. Higher level logic moves setpoints etc. Having that logic in a remote DC never made any sense to me, local low power device today integrated with wifi ap tomorrow. We need a standard for application specific gateway for all this stuff. I have openhab as the
A bunch of whiners (Score:5, Funny)
I have heard of computers freezing ... (Score:5, Funny)
due to a software error, but not the rooms that the computers are in.
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On the bright side, I bet they could really OC their rigs and get .4 more FPS.
Auto update (Score:2)
Auto park (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:2)
Often the simplest tool is the best job. (Score:5, Insightful)
At it's core, a thermostat has a simple job to do.
The more complexity that is added to the design, the more points of failure there can be.
And, really, how much benefit does internet connectivity really add to a thermostat anyway?
Re:Often the simplest tool is the best job. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see use for a *network* connected thermostat. Adjusting the programming on a typical 5-2 with a tiny LCD display and 5-6 buttons is horrible. I have to track down the manual every time daylight savings changes. A web page served up on my LAN would be a far less aggravating user interface, unless the UI designers were from Facebook. I'd also prefer a network of temp sensors throughout the house reporting back to the thermostat rather than having it stuck on the wall of one room. But mostly, it's about the clock. My definition of "smart device" is one where I never need to program the actual time.
Incidentally, the time/program UI issue is what I see as the major advantage of a connected coffee maker.
That being said, there's zero need for any of that information to leave my house.
Comment removed (Score:3)
So...couldn't they just run the heat manually? (Score:2)
I can definitely sympathize with someone who went on vacation and came home to all their possessions floating because of a burst pipe. But -- here's a good example of how not knowing how the magic box works under the hood is a problem. In a real emergency, you can hook the control wires together to force the heat on in most systems until the problem is fixed, or worst case, you buy a new thermostat. So, people complaining about having no heat could have at least made do while the problem was worked out.
I ac
More IoT shit ... (Score:3)
Wow, if this isn't an epic example of bullshit stupidity by companies who want to control the infrastructure in your home I have no idea of what it is.
I wouldn't trust a net connected thermostat in the first place. Because it's there to gather information and upload it to the mother ship. And if you can access it via an app, someone else can.
But then they push an update and fuck up the unit to the point people have no heat? Hell no, this is why I have no intention of letting some external party ever be able to access things like my thermostat.
Products used to be engineered knowing their entire life cycle would be in isolation. It had to work, it had to do all of its functions, and it couldn't fuck up because if people had to replace it, they wouldn't replace it with your brand.
Now companies make shitty stuff, ship it out the door, make updates to it, and if you end up with a broken product ... well, bummer.
This world of connected crap tied to smart phones? It's garbage, and it's years away from being anything but. It's insecure, and violates your privacy.
Sadly, this kind of crap is what many people have been warning about -- because you're suddenly at the mercy of some damned company who wants to be agile, or find a way to collect even more information about you. And then they push out an untested update, and you're screwed.
As someone who lives in a place where winter means "really damned cold", if I had been stupid enough to buy one of these, I'd be replacing it immediately. Imagine coming home to frozen pipes because some lazy idiot didn't do enough testing?
Update in the winter? (Score:2)
WTF are they thinking? Updating thermostat software when temperatures are below freezing? They should immediately institute a policy of holding off updates until temperatures are above freezing unless the bug fix is *so* critical it just cannot wait. Looking at mine, I see the last update was January 13!
Idiots.
Next from Google... (Score:2)
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Self driving cars are easy... now thermostats... those are hard.
They finally fixed it (Score:4, Insightful)
Yesterday at 5:38 PM, my nest got an update to version 5.1.6rc4. Since that time, it hasn't dropped offline due to low battery. Not that it won't in the future... but this is supposedly the fixed version. It took them 2 months to fix it! My thermostat started displaying this behavior on November 17th under version 5.1.3rc1. And before anybody asks - yes, I have the common wire hooked up and it's worked fine for over 3 years that way. Up until version 5.1.3rc1 that is. I want to know why in the hell it took them 2 months to fix this issue. At the very least, they should have rolled the broken code back to an earlier version.
I hope some people died, and some houses got burst (Score:3)
Online Review.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was reading thermostat reviews online and ran across this one.... Thinking about a Nest? Read this:
My former wife loves to take expensive vacations. We live in Ohio, which doesn’t exactly have extravagant places to see unless you like to watch grass growing or interstate construction. While we make OK money, I’m convinced she felt the need to single handedly improve the US economy by taking elaborate vacations: Broadway shows in New York City, gambling in Las Vegas, Spa’s in Arizona, sightseeing in San Francisco. The airlines know me so well they ask about my dog when I call to make reservations. His name is Fred.
In my attempt to try and save whatever I could so the princess could have her nice things I bought this Nest Wi-Fi enabled device so I could adjust the HVAC while we were away piling up massive amounts of debt on Mickey Mouse watches. I thought we could save a few bucks by keeping the temp cool in the winter and warm in the summer. The device was easy to install. I did not have the “blue” connector so I had to re-purpose the green one - this required an adjustment to the actual HVAC unit in our home. There are plenty of videos on Youtube to demonstrate how to do this. Within an hour I was up and running.
The device works flawlessly. You can adjust the temp from anywhere you have a Wi-Fi or cellular signal. Little did I know that my ex had found someone that had a bit more money than I did and decided to make other travel plans. Those plans included her no longer being my wife and finding a new travel partner (Carl, a banker). She took the house, the dog and a good chunk of my 401k, but didn’t mess with the wireless access point or the Wi-Fi enabled thermostat.
Since this past Ohio winter has been so cold I’ve been messing with the temp while the new love birds are sleeping. Doesn’t everyone want to wake up at 7 AM to a 40 degree house? When they are away on their weekend getaways, I crank the heat up to 80 degrees and back down to 40 before they arrive home. I can only imagine what their electricity bills might be. It makes me smile. I know this won’t last forever, but I can’t help but smile every time I log in and see that it still works. I also can’t wait for warmer weather when I can crank the heat up to 80 degrees while the love birds are sleeping. After all, who doesn’t want to wake up to an 80 degree home in the middle of June?
And after laughing myself sick, decided I'm not going to have a thermostat that goes 'online' in my home..
Re:Unable to Control != No Heat (Score:4, Informative)
The thermostats went offline which prevented people from turning on their heaters. So, yes, it does mean no heat. Unless you think the heaters just turn themselves on without control from the thermostat?
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Believe it or not, in some jurisdictions (Quebec) it (legally) requires a licensed electrician. I was rather amused when I noticed that in the manual for my last thermostat.
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That's the real deal: the Nest can only replace dumb thermostats on the lowest-end HVAC systems. All more-than-bare-bones HVAC systems use a proprietary protocol to communicate with its own smart thermostat already. If these thermostats fail, all you are exposed to is four wires: two have 24V on them, the other two have CAN or maybe RS-485. Now, thankfully, these protocols are very simple to reverse-engineer, so I have dispensed with the factory Infinity thermostat for years now, but still: it's not as easy
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This is exactly what happened. A medical device refused to work, claiming it was too cold. I went to check the thermostat and it wouldn't function. I checked the mobile app and it said that it had lost connection with the Nest 5 hours earlier. I plugged it into USB for about 1/2 hour so that it had enough of a charge to startup the heater.
I had considered hot-wiring the HVAC behind the Nest panel, but my HVAC has protections against that.
It's a little too bad the USB port isn't external so that I could a
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Sounds like shitty design if it can't do either of these:
1. work off the 24VAC on the common wire that basically any semi-modern heating system has, or
2. have a replaceable AA battery.
The Honeywell Lyric does #2, the Ecobee3 does #1, and includes a thing in the box to fake a 'C' wire if you don't have one.
It's bad design to have to remove your thermostat from the wall and plug it into a cellphone charger for half an hour when the most predictable thing ever happens: a dead battery.
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The Nest does charge from common (or other wires if you prefer). Not sure what the actual bug was that caused it to drain so fast. I'd assume some tight looping.
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Why the heck would you need to charge these things? Don't they get power from the furnace?!
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The thermostat continues to function even if power goes out or if you remove it from the wall. It charges an internal battery from the wiring.
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The real question is why doesn't the Nest remain powered when there is power to the furnace. It's nice to have backup power to report to the mother ship that the power is off or the furnace isn't maintaining the setpoint.
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I see a coming resurgence in 100% analog appliances
Not with thermostats. Those have gone digital and programmable for many years. Even a non-Nest thermostat will fail to operate when its battery dies (though they usually give plenty of warning). My fridge has digital controls, and even though I'm not a huge fan of the overpriced behemoth (it came with the house), I never want a fridge with a "warmer-cooler" knob again. Digital is here to stay.
IoT? Yeah, I can see the appeal of turning on your heat from afar, but the issues you raise are significant.
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I wouldn't bet the farm on that one... [amazon.com].
I never want a fridge with a "warmer-cooler" knob again.
I have never had a fridge with one of those knobs fail to behave as expected. Meanwhile, my current fridge (which I hate) keeps "saving" me from myself by raising the set temperature of the refrigerator part so nothing freezes - Except it has an error of almost 5C, so instead everything stays slightly warmer than entirely safe.
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Even a non-Nest thermostat will fail to operate when its battery dies (though they usually give plenty of warning).
In most instances, the batteries are unnecessary if there is a 24v neutral wire run to the thermostat from the furnace.
Often, even if there's not one, there are extra wires inside the cable that can be commandeered to provide power to the t-stat in the form of 24v ac. The batteries are still recommended to keep your setting preferences in case of power outage.
Not as lame as you think (Score:5, Informative)
I can't help but wonder if they're writing their code in Javascript.
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Really?
What if someone has a vacation cabin in Michigan? I hear it might get a bit cold up there around this time of year, and without a functioning heat system, you can bet there's a damn good chance of a burst pipe.
It took me all of 5 seconds to think of a very likely scenario where a shit firmware update applied (drained battery) to a shit design (not powered by the 24VAC C-wire on the HVAC system itself) could cause real damage. In other words, exactly what this article is about.
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Besides a vacation home is one of the few places where a Nest is actually practical. With the internet access it allows you to check the status of the house remotely.
Re:Lame (Score:5, Insightful)
You obviously have never lived in a cold weather climate.
Try living in a place where 0F is not that uncommon. A house without heat will cause pipes to freeze and burst.
Honestly, if you have no idea of what you're talking about, shut up. Because in places where cold weather is a real thing in the winter, an unheated house can cause massive amounts of damage.
Fear mongering? Sensationalizing? You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
It may not happen in Florida, but anywhere with a real winter and it's an actual thing.
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There was no reason for the summary to mention a risk of pipes bursting, that's just fear-mongering to try and sensationalize the issue.
You must be south of the Mason Dixon line or something....
It's winter time up north and that means the temperature routinely goes below freezing... Heating is not an optional part of a home that has plumbing unless it's been specifically prepared for the temperatures.
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It is hard wired to the HVAC thermostat line. That line is pretty low power so it has a battery which charges off the line. It needs the extra power in bursts for running the wifi.
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The VAST majority of thermostats in North America are 24V with millivolt and line voltage (like yours) being a tiny fraction of installs.
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My mercury switch thermostat did fail; it would turn the furnace on and off but not at the set-point (and not at a fixed offset either; it would change).
I have a Nest now, but I'm paranoid enough to keep a Honeywell Round (new non-mercury version) around just in case.
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Auto-away has worked okay except when the Christmas tree is in the way and it goes to 64 F while we are home.
Their big downfall is not allowing remote sensors or a remote sensor API other than buying another nest (and what - hooking it up to a 24VAC outlet?) or getting one of their smoke detectors.