Dude, did you try rebooting your thermostat?
Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
131–140 of 234 posts
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If your house is 60 degrees. It didn't freeze.
I've always heard that if you're leaving your home for an extended period of time in winter, you should set the thermostats to 55F to prevent freezing.
So 60F is surely fine.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#133Earlier 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.”
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 thermo…
But that is not the case.
Any non-hip, non-fancy, non-SV thermostat control system doesn't have these bugs.
Sure, those systems don't come in fancy design, but they will work offline, they will work in every edge case, and they'll cost twice of what Nest costs.
Treating IoT devices as if they'd be consumer software, with updates every week and constant internet access has never worked, and probably never will.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#134Earlier 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.
Boiler + hot water circulation through radiators is also pretty common in US and will also use a low voltage thermostat. The only exception I can think of is older gas-powered steam boilers which may use a millivolt thermostat (which have the advantage of working when the power is out).
(Or electric baseboards...but who can afford to heat that way?)
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#135Earlier 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.
You must be from a warm part of the U.S.
Forced hot water systems are very common in the colder parts, and they use the same thermostat wiring as forced air. Some parts of the U.S. even use diesel fuel for heat (it's called #2 heating oil, but it's really just diesel fuel with pink dye added so they can fine you for using it as a vehicle fuel...it's taxed advantageously).
Also, boiler-radiator systems can absolutely work with standard thermostats. The classic design has no electrical control at all, just bimetal valves (like car thermostats) to regulate the flow of heated water. But the modern revision uses the same kind of electrically controlled valves (24VAC, IIRC) that forced hot water does.
All low-voltage thermostats with standardized wiring layouts.
I didn't know the UK ran high voltage to ordinary thermostats though, that seems crazy if it's just a control circuit. Presumably the full mains voltage?
Old U.S. "radiant" (electrical, non-hydronic) heat ran 220/240 VAC to big rheostats in each room, but that was actually the supply to the heating elements. It feels like something that wouldn't meet code today, but it used to be popular in some parts of the country where electricity was inexpensive.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#136This offers an interesting insight into the Internet of Things. Take something simple, and tack on a bunch of new technology that is subject to failure. Don't be surprised if it fails. To be fair, the issue isn't that there was software involved; digital thermostats have that. I think more telling was the level of complexity, which allows for a lot more to go wrong. Combined with a poor process behind update validati…
In general, the way IoT is treated is wrong.
Startups try to treat IoT devices as a standard arm or x86 processor with some additional GPIO pins where they read info, deal with it, and write info.
No real-time guarantee, a level of QA similar to websites or consumer software, etc.
And here is what previous companies building smart devices (say, SIEMENS) treated them like: As extended microcontrollers.
Put all the critical software on one tiny microcontroller, do static verification that that microcontroller is always acting correct. If you need Internet access, add a second chip that does that, and provides the results of that data to the first microcontroller — but don't depend on it.
There is a large divide between the Engineers designing these devices in the past, and today's crowd.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#137We 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…
Nest's wifi has always been sh*t (for lack of a better word). It's the only device that I've had to reboot the AP for.
It is by far the most fragile device from a network connectivity standpoint. I'm so happy that I won the Nest or I would be so much angrier at the whole thing.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#138It 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 ant…
Yes, it is possible:
Have a microcontroller that stores the time table for when to set which temperature, and applies it.
Have a second processor, with internet access, that updates this table.
Simple as that.
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#139If 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.
my a/c bill in AZ would be about $400-500 / mo higher in the summer if they made that move! Most people in AZ put their A/C to 87 or so if they aren't home and actually keep it in the high 70s even when home. Otherwise you're looking at $1K/mo energy bills in the summer
Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold
#140We 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 not (and i realise that this is a dirty horrible hack) isolate those devices to their own dedicated virtual ap and isolated network. that way you get to restrict what they can talk to, what can talk to them and the keys that everyone else uses. this also allows you to finally get around to rolling out eap so the scourge of shared wifi keys can die out :)
> this also allows you to finally get around to rolling out eap
* WPA2-Enterprise is not universally supported. (Ferinstance, no Chromecast can connect via WPA2-Enterpise. :( )
* Which EAP? EAP-TLS? EAP-MD5? [0] EAP-MSCHAPv2? Or perhaps EAP-GTC? [1][2]
> this also allows you to finally get around to rolling out eap so the scourge of shared wifi keys can die out
Unrelated to the issue at hand... I really wish OS X and Windows supported EAP-WFA-UNAUTH-TLS (and that EAP-UNAUTH-TLS would become an "actual" EAP method, rather than languishing as a vendor specific extension. Securely encrypted zero-configuration public WiFi can't come fast enough! :)
[0] God no! ;)
[1] It probably sounds like I'm trying to imply that WPA2-Enterprise is too complicated. Frankly (speaking as a guy who's implementing his own RADIUS server as a hobby project), it's really not. There are just many, many options available to you... and not all of them are supported by all RADIUS servers.
[2] Anyway... given what very little I know about EAP-GTC, I would suggest that -if we're going for a near-zero-configuration deployment- it would be the most suitable for the situation that we're talking about... The trick would be hooking the verification logic for the security token in the device into the RADIUS server. :)