We have two nest thermostats installed at work. I rotate the WiFi keys for our APs quarterly and these things are the biggest pain in the ass to reconnect to the WiFi. The furnace turns off almost immediately after changing the WiFi key once the Nest loses connectivity. At first I thought it was coincidence but now that I rotate on a strict schedule it's a joke in our office. However, what's not a joke is what happen…
Why have I only heard horror stories about the Nest? I see their reviews on Amazon and I see huge problems with this product .
Because happy users don't feel motivated to tell people everything is okay. It's a common bias which you have to constantly remind yourself to correct for.
Sure, at least for traditional two-wire thermostats that turn on when the circuit is closed: connect them in parallel. The Nest is so obviously a product designed in warm California—not anywhere that sees truly hard winter. If it were designed well, it would fail safe (furnace on). I'd rather have a hefty heating bill from my furnace running 24/7 than have all of the pipes in my house freeze and break. If I ever inst…
I don't think it would be as simple as a high heating bill. A residential furnace is certainly not made to run 24/7. No big deal if you're at work but if you're out of town for a while...
The thermostat doesn't actually control the plant directly. It requests heat or AC by closing a connection. The HVAC controller responds to those requests as it is able to as per its programmed parameters.
You're absolutely right that furnaces aren't designed to run 24/7. But your thermostat can request heat 24/7 and unless the furnace control board is broken, it'll the cycle the system as necessary to keep up with the requests.
Most people never learn this because the systems are designed for peak needs and most days don't get anywhere near peak.
We have two nest thermostats installed at work. I rotate the WiFi keys for our APs quarterly and these things are the biggest pain in the ass to reconnect to the WiFi. The furnace turns off almost immediately after changing the WiFi key once the Nest loses connectivity. At first I thought it was coincidence but now that I rotate on a strict schedule it's a joke in our office. However, what's not a joke is what happen…
> However, what's not a joke is what happens when the internet goes down. So does our heat.
That's very odd. My Nest functions fine during Time Warner outages.
I have a manual thermostat, no batteries required. It has worked flawlessly for over 30 years. It has a simple intuitive interface: a switch for "heat" or "cool" and a dial with a pointer to set the desired temperature. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
Because people derive value from it. It's that simple. You don't have to, and that's fine, but having the temperature settings for the house happen on a schedule that makes sense and depends on the time and day of the week can be quite useful.
And having the ability to change the temperature from my bed is nice too.
I have a manual thermostat, no batteries required. It has worked flawlessly for over 30 years. It has a simple intuitive interface: a switch for "heat" or "cool" and a dial with a pointer to set the desired temperature. Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
> Why make things more complicated than they need to be?
My energy bills dropped about 30% with the Nest.
It does a number of neat things to save money, including running the AC fan through the chilled ducts for a period of time after stopping the active cooling.
For a forgetful person like me, it's also very handy to be able to turn the house into vacation mode the day after I left for vacation.
> Buried deep in Nest’s 8,000-word service agreement is a section called “Disputes and Arbitration,” which prohibits customers from suing the company or joining a class-action suit. Though I have no need for a thermostat whatsoever, I kinda like nest. However, I'd love if people went to court with a class action suit against them. These 'no class action' and 'arbitration' clauses are becoming increasingly common, but…
Judges dismissing cases based on arbitration clauses seems pretty common.
It turns out even if a company markets its products with big bold "not for diagnostic/medical use", and its customers use the products for diagnostic or medical use, the company can still be on the hook. It depends on a number of things, not least of which is the company's knowledge of the actual use of their devices.
That doesn't seem fair. What's a company supposed to do in that situation? Just close up shop? Makes me wonder if it would be possible to intentionally drive a company out of business by convincing a bunch of people to use their products incorrectly.
I don't know about Fitbit per se, but there are cases where a company says one thing in it's legal interface, but does another with it's sales interface. IOW (pure speculation on my part), Fitbit could say "don't use this for such and such" and the sales people say "yeah, we say that (wink, wink), but we don't really mean it." To be clear, I am not saying Fitbit does that, but I am familiar with other companies that have done such and gotten in trouble for it.