I have a mercury thermostat in the basement set to 12C directly across the thermostat leads. I live in a cold place, if the heat goes off things get damaged. You can't beat simplicity.
Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
121–130 of 234 posts
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#122> 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. NYT has been on the case recently: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitrat... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/business/dealbook/in-arbit... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-relig... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/business/dealbook/sued-ove...
Despite arbitration clauses in the EULA, there are people who can sue. The buyer of the device may be barred from suing, but other parties who suffered damages can still use. Roommates, guests, family members, people who live downstairs below pipes broken due to a Nest failure - they can all sue. They didn't agree to the EULA. Regular negligence standards apply. If you can show that a lot of the things failed all at once, that's a pretty good case for negligence.
This can also come up in landlord/tenant situations. If the landlord put in a Nest, and its failure caused the tenant problems, like having to spend the night in a hotel, the tenant can probably sue Nest.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
It shouldn't matter. It says it can read your heart rate. That's what it advertises as. It should be able to do so. I'm curious if there are legal precedents on how accurate a thing must be to advertise as a being a measurement device.
This is a bullshit argument. They do read your heart rate. But they explicitly say that it isn't up to a medical or diagnostic level of reliability. Everything has some level of quality or tolerance expected. Car parts break all the time, it is just a normal part of owning a car. You don't get to sue a car company when your battery dies and you need a jump. You only get to do it when there is a significant or dangero…
Actually it's quite unlike car parts breaking. Car parts have infant/random failures and wear-out failures. These kinds of failures are usually a very small percentage of the total number of devices shipped.
Fitbit's HR monitor fails to provide accurate readings whenever you move on almost everybody. What they don't do is advertise that you have to be still to get an accurate reading. Fitbit is marketed in such a way as to make you think it tracks HR during motion, I'd say it's not the same as a car parts that break at all. It's more like lying by omission.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#124It 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 co…
"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."
Ipso Facto. They can't not screw it up.
A critical component of infrastructure should not be IP addressable. It should not be "on your wifi". It should not have a login or a password. It should be as dumb as possible and as simple as possible - and as anti-fragile to all of these events as possible.
It's not possible to have this "feature set" and not have this pain. It's a fools errand to pursue it.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you sell a device that monitors heart rates, and that device doesn't properly monitor heart rates... then you need to fix it or stop making it. I don't see why that is unfair? If I buy a desk lamp and it doesn't work reliably then you sold me a lemon and I want my money back. It doesn't matter why I need light on my desk.
For a measurement device, "accurate" and "reliable" aren't binary conditions, they're continuums. Not every sensor in the world has to be medical grade. There are plenty of applications where a less accurate sensor at a much lower price point is the right choice.
Remember, I'm talking about situations where the company actually says "not for medical/diagnostic use". They're not trying to get away with selling lemons.
To use your analogy: If I sell you a small LED (say for use as a power indicator on a computer) and you try to use it as a desk lamp, you shouldn't be able to sue me on the grounds that "you should have known I was going to use it as a desk lamp and made it fit for that purpose". That's what seems unfair to me.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#126If 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:…
Nest could fix this easily by including two fixed-temperature safety thermostats, devices which cost about $0.25 each. One is hard-wired to turn on heat below 55F. One is hard-wired to turn off heat above 80F. With that, no matter how badly they botch the software, the temperature will stay in a safe, if not totally comfortable, range.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
>“We had a bug that was introduced in the software update that didn’t show up for about two weeks,” Mr. Rogers said apologetically. In January, devices went offline, and “that’s when things started to heat up.”
I don't think "offline" in this context means that the problem was because the device couldn't connect to the internet. It sounds like the bug drained the battery which prevented it from functioning.
The bug probably affect the Nest's ability to do low power charging using the fan wire. Evidently, as long as the fan runs, the Nest will charge at a lower rate than you get with the common wire hooked up. That is, unless you release some bad code and didn't do a full CI/CD run on a test unit and wait 2 weeks for the battery to go dead to figure out there was a bug.
Which hit me on the 8th at exactly 9:29AM. It was FREEZING in the house. Dead nest. Took me about 10 minutes to look up the issue and 5 to hook up common.
Any code that touches battery or recharge methods should throw a red flag immediately and have a 1 month wait time slapped on them. Also, there should be a dedicated Test Nest for each release known to be "in production".
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, OK, you don't have that in the US apparently. Why's it necessary?
Almost all US central heat and air systems are "forced air" -- gas or electric heaters (furnaces) that blow conditioned air through ducting. Boiler-radiator systems wouldn't work with the standard US thermostat, not least because US thermostats use low-voltage signaling.
I don't claim to be an expert but I have a forced hot water system (converted at some point from steam) and AFAIK it uses a "standard" thermostat. At least when I upgraded to a Honeywell programmable thermostat 15 years or so ago, I don't remember it being anything unusual. I bought a thermostat at the home improvement store and an electrician who was doing some other work installed it.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? The Nest Thermostat should still be able to control your heaters even without internet. https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest
>“We had a bug that was introduced in the software update that didn’t show up for about two weeks,” Mr. Rogers said apologetically. In January, devices went offline, and “that’s when things started to heat up.”
At what point is this just a matter of complexity growing beyond its masters' capacity to manage it? Computers interacting with all sorts of analog systems are going to have a million edge cases.
But it's just beginning. Give them the ability to interact with other connected objects, and your potential problems proliferate. Add a smart garage door opener, and you may not figure out how that's connected to your thermostat cranking the heat too high, or who's to blame.
Seriously — listen to this: http://iotpodcast.com/2015/12/episode-36-a-total-breakdown-i...
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#130It 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 co…
It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration
I don't know what you're using as a DCHP server, but the servers I've used try hard not to hand out the same IP address to a second device until after handing out all possible IP addresses. Which means my network would need something close to 256 different DHCP clients before having a problem.
I do have some flexibility at home because I run my own dhcpd on OpenBSD, rather than relying on something in a router. Which means extra flexibility. So I lock down the IP addresses anyway. E.g. I have entries like this in my dhcpd.conf file:
host foo {
hardware ethernet 00:1b:63:95:1c:4f;
fixed-address foo.example.com;
default-lease-time 3600;
}
It's a little bit of hassle to set things up this way, but there are never problems even if devices are stupid about when they renew their leases.
That's not to take anything away from your comments, it's just a workaround that has worked for me. Your entire list seems like annoying problems for the Nest.