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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

#71

Post by psutor »

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?

I bought my smart thermostat (Ecobee) for a couple reasons -

1. Economic - it easily paid for itself in one summer by not running the A/C when no one is home. I have geofencing set up to do this automatically.

2. Comfort - my office/bedroom temperature is all I really care about as it's where I spend all my time. My thermostat was not wired to there, and temperatures fluctuated wildly in my office. Ecobee has remote sensors so that I can set the rooms I care about to the correct temperature.

Overall, it has certainly made my life a lot less complicated; I never have to touch the thermostat again to get comfortable in my office, and I save a lot of money too.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#72

Post by x1798DE »

buro9 wrote: post #23
x0x0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a fitbit chargehr. It doesn't monitor heartrate for shit; it's 20-50 bpm off during exercise.

Have you considered that you may just be an incredibly gifted athlete?

The parent comment said "off", which I took to mean that he measured his heartrate manually and compared to the device readout.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#73

Post by knz »

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.

Disable the autoaway settings and you have a conventional thermostat with the advantage of being able to remotely adjust the temperature.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#74

Post by ak217 »

josinalvo wrote: post #33

> 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…

John Roberts, the Chief Justice on the Supreme Court, is a pro-arbitration lawyer. In a complex legal landscape, arbitration clauses are winning. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitrat...

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#75

Post by thrownaway2424 »

atom_enger wrote: post #31

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…

It is also a gigantic pain in the ass to change wifi settings on the Nest Protect, and it's worse because they are mounted on the ceiling so you have to get a ladder. These guys could have learned a lot about ease of use from Sonos. In fact, for the money that Google spent, I would have bought Sonos five times rather than buying Nest.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#76

Post by foobarian »

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?

Before the Nest there was exactly one excellent thermostat user interface: the oldschool rotary GE type like you probably have. I waited many years for a good programmable equivalent, and had to endure the endless stream of crap with hard to see LCD screens and tiny confusing buttons with tiny labels so you never knew which one made the heat go up. (And which one turned off the thermostat or changed some critical setting). Nest finally delivered that, and now look at all the copycats. It's kind of similar to what happened with the iPod and iPhone.

I don't really care for the "learning" feature but the 2 other features I find critical are 1) ability to schedule, and 2) remote control.

It's nothing you really need, but it's nice to have. I can program the temp to go 10 degrees lower overnight, and have the heat ramp up 30 minutes before we get up. I can have the blower run 15 minutes every hour without heat or cooling to make sure air circulates around the house. You could do that by hand but it would be more manual and cognitive work.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#77

Post by lololomg »

FireBeyond wrote: post #6

"It also happened recently with Fitbit, the maker of wearable activity trackers. The company was hit with a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco asserting that the wristbands failed to “consistently and accurately record wearers’ heart rates,” which is vital for those with certain medical conditions." Apropos of anything else - I don't think Fitbit has ever tried to market itself as a medical device.

If you buy a heart-rate monitoring device to monitor your heart rate, and it fails to properly monitor your heart rate... why does it matter how you use that data?

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#78

Post by mattbee »

stcredzero wrote: post #36

If you watch the unhappy early adopter YouTube videos of Nest thermostats, this outcome is pretty predictable. There's a level of quality control you need to put up a web app, which won't physically affect anyone if it happens to crash for awhile. Then there's a much higher level required when you're controlling things in the real world. This outcome was predictable from the experience of those early adopters. EDIT:…

The Nest comes in two parts - the "smart" bit with the USB charger & battery & wifi, and the Heat Link - the actual radio control for your boiler.

The Heat Link has a big button on which lets you turn the heating on and off, overriding what the Nest is telling it. That's not as economical as a regular thermostat, but it means you won't freeze: https://nest.com/uk/support/article/How-do-I-turn-the-heat-o...

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#79

Post by insaneirish »

It was never great, and it's been worse and worse since Google bought them. Examples of some issues with mine:

1. It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration [1]. It will happily keep using its IP without renewing its lease. I've had situations where it's gone long enough without a lease renewal that another device has received its old IP and caused a conflict.

2. It constantly disassociates from the AP, and decides to come back on the network when it feels like it, not when there is traffic for it. And note, this is with a constantly powered device, so there should be no power saving causing it to power down. Also, the AP is about 6 feet away and there are zero other WiFi issues. Manually kicking the device off the AP causes it to come back immediately.

3. Their backend goes down all the time, usually for 1-2 hours.

4. They had a perfectly working method for turning heating on in advance of your setpoint with the goal of reaching your desired temperature at that time rather than just turning on at that time. Then they broke it [2]. This led to nice surprises like waking up to a completely cold house. Instead of rolling back the broken code, they refused to respond on the aforementioned thread for well over a month.

It's really inexplicable. They have nice industrial design, good brand recognition, no shortage of money behind them, and they screw up at every conceivable turn.

I'm going to try out the ecobee thermostat because I very much appreciate the convenience of being able to remotely adjust the temperature.

[1]: https://community.nest.com/thread/10316 [2]: https://community.nest.com/thread/11438

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#80

Post by jedberg »

atom_enger wrote: post #31

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.

As a couple of other folks have noted, that's not normal. You might want to get on tech support with them.

My Nest just keeps running its last program when it looses internet.

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