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Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

nytimes.com

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Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#51

Post by post_break »

ams6110 wrote: post #37

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 when you forget to change the setting to heat and wake up to a 60 degree house you rush around hoping the pipes didn't freeze. Or when you set the AC to 70 because you were warm and leave to go to work and forget to set it back.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#52

Post by scoates »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #38

Why have I only heard horror stories about the Nest? I see their reviews on Amazon and I see huge problems with this product .

Mine's fine, FWIW.

My heating system (hot water baseboards) doesn't really respond quickly enough for it to be super useful for things like away detection, but as a programmable thermostat, for the most part, it works better than I expect most software to work.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#53

Post by [deleted] »

post_break wrote: post #51
ams6110 wrote: post #37

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 when you forget to change the setting to heat and wake up to a 60 degree house you rush around hoping the pipes didn't freeze. Or when you set the AC to 70 because you were warm and leave to go to work and forget to set it back.

[deleted]

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#54

Post by nrjames »

I've had a Nest for ~ 3 years now. It was a mistake. The "learning" on it is not intelligent enough to understand the idiosyncrasies of our 60 yr old house. I have to manually adjust it every day to make sure my kids are roasting/freezing in their bedrooms. I really should just switch it back to a manual thermostat.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#55

Post by CamperBob2 »

mhurron wrote: post #8
tcdent wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scary enough to have redundancy? edit: I'm talking about redundant systems. A wood fireplace, for example. You should have a backup of any form of technology you rely on to maintain your life. We regularly do it with far less critical applications.

Think about what you just said. Redundancy for a thermostat. You know, that thing that before the Nest you never even had to think about.

Redundancy is already built into many home heating systems. My heat pump has a backup furnace for emergency heat (which is also used if it's too cold outside for the heat pump to work efficiently.)

So the hardware is solid enough -- it's just up to the thermostat to not drop the ball.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#57

Post by CamperBob2 »

acdha wrote: post #42
zitterbewegung wrote: post #38

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.

That would make sense if there weren't plenty of other product reviews in which people are gushing about how awesome they are.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#58

Post by bitmapbrother »

ams6110 wrote: post #37

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 heat or cool an an empty house?

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#59

Post by soneil »

schwap wrote: post #18
ghaff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you have redundant thermostats? Though I'd note that traditional thermostats and even simple programmable ones are very reliable.

Maybe you could have a thermostat in parallel that's normally set to a minimum temperature? Thermostat -> furnace communication is pretty dead simple.

I'm curious why the nest can't do exactly that. Have a simple microcontroller running a thermostat, with hard low, soft low, hard high, soft high. Then let the brain twiddle the soft low/high all it likes. If the brain goes missing, the micro just carries on brainless with the previous settings. If the brain really screws the pooch, at least the hard low can kick in somewhere before pipes burst.

It seems like a safety-net would be high-school easy, and at least let them claim they've learnt from their mistakes.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#60

Post by atom_enger »

nrjames wrote: post #54

I've had a Nest for ~ 3 years now. It was a mistake. The "learning" on it is not intelligent enough to understand the idiosyncrasies of our 60 yr old house. I have to manually adjust it every day to make sure my kids are roasting/freezing in their bedrooms. I really should just switch it back to a manual thermostat.

> to make sure my kids are roasting/freezing in their bedrooms.

I'm sure it's just a grammatical mistake, but I lol'ed.

We have a lot of problems with the Nest thermostats at work. I've got a 10 year old basic thermostat at home that works exactly as it should. Follows its schedule perfectly.

No "learning" necessary.

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