Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold • Hacker News Board

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#201

Post by mikeash » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 2:50 PM UTC

sparky_z wrote: post #34

rubidium wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could try harder to influence who buys their product and how those buyers use it before they just close up shop.

It's not like Fitbit has gigantic text on their web site and product packaging saying "NOT FOR MEDICAL USE." In fact, I challenge you to find any such statement anywhere on their web site. I couldn't, but maybe I suck at it.

They could try a little harder to educate their buyers, here.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#202

Post by phkahler » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

Failure for a product to perform its primary function is totally unacceptable. Let me repeat: totally unacceptable. From the comments it seems they fail if they lose network connectivity? That's got to be the stupidest thing I ever heard. Apparently some "smart" TVs suffer from similar problems. Remember, there are plenty of thermostats that have NO software - just a stupid little mercury switch - and they are more reliable than this. When any product fails at it's primary function I next it.

But hey it's the Internet of THINGS! woot!

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#203

Post by eropple » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 3:07 PM UTC

radiorental wrote: post #174

kordless wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 F…

This is the heart of the problem. It's not 'the cloud', unnecessarily complex feature sets, or any of the other complaints being thrown around It's that the software was not thoroughly tested. Nest cut corners in R&D. Consumers are also at fault for not taking the time to understand the hack job Nest has done to trickle charge the device when no common wire is available. Those with 'mission critical' needs (babies, e…

> Consumers are also at fault

I can't disagree with this more. When you are trying to replace a thermostat, the onus is on you to do right by your customers. And that may be (is!) difficult. But the customer is never at fault for trusting you, but you can be at fault for abusing their trust.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#204

Post by joezydeco » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 3:09 PM UTC

legulere wrote: post #148

> Although I had set the thermostat to 70 degrees overnight, my wife and I were woken by a crying baby at 4 a.m. The thermometer in his room read 64 degrees, and the Nest was off. This seems quite strange to me. Here in Germany it's extremely common to (automatically) turn of heating all together in the night (called Nachtabsenkung). One reason is to save energy, but lower temperatures also help sleep: http://www.nyt…

Sleeping in cold bedrooms may also help metabolism.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/lets-cool-it-in-the...

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#205

Post by pfarnsworth » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

I've had the Nest for 2 years. To be honest I've had zero problems. The only problem I have is that once Google bought them, there has been little to no improvements in anything. They only give 10 days worth of data which is functionally useless. Why should I care about last week for energy use? I want to compare against last year. They haven't made any significant improvements so it's just another case of an innovator getting bought and then getting the innovation sucked out of it.

The same thing happened with Dropcam. Once they were bought by Nest/Google they stopped making any real changes for the last 2 years. It's sad and infuriating as a customer.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#206

Post by jerf » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 3:19 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #189

jerf wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm yet to see a coherent explanation of what IoT is supposed to do for me as a homeowner. I think "all the household IoT stuff is toys" is rather directly connected to the fact that I just don't have massive problems I need solved with the Internet in my house. Of course the resulting market is nothing but toys; there doesn't appear to be any space for non-toys. (I see the commercial and ci…

Eh... there's some value, it's just really badly implemented currently. A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before. Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can…

The problem isn't that "some value" can't be extracted. The problem is that the value that can be extracted is bounded by my actual problems. Nest can't fundamentally transform my house heating experience into some sort of delight; at the absolute limit, all it could possibly do is cut my heating bill down to $0. Which would be amazing, but it can't do that, of course.

Other IoT possibilities I see tossed about have even worse possibilities; Nest is probably already the biggest possible winner. If you eliminate 100% of the time I spend turning lights on and off, you've basically had no impact on my life. If you design a glorious IoT refrigerator that somehow requires 0 additional time out of my life to feed it data (which is a negative) it still has to face up to the fact that my "display" showing me what I have which I can get to by simply opening the door is superior to any practical front-mounted display. There's very little room for any sort of IoT water-use optimizer, certainly nothing a startup could wedge into and make money. What can the IoT do for my washer and dryer, play tunes off of Pandora while I'm loading them? My cell can already do that.

I don't need an Internet of Things. I need a Robot of doing Things, and if it's hooked up to the internet I rather expect we'll still see it as "a robot" rather than "an IoT device". (I don't think I want my robot live hooked up to the internet anyhow.)

And just to be clear, I'll say again I totally get it for commercial and civil use, so I'm not just down on IoT in general. (I'm down on IoT security in general, but that's a separate problem. Sort of. Close enough for now anyhow.) It just seems to me that the vast bulk of the IoT story involves being not physically proximal to the IoT device (and, indeed, note how the core Nest use case of "turning off the heat when you are not there" fits that to a T), and therefore, unless you live in a mansion, it's solving a problem a homeowner mostly doesn't have.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#207

Post by jerf » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #196

jarek wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh... there's some value, it's just really badly implemented currently. A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before. Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can…

Another thing that you can do is tracking which products you have in your fridges, freezers and cupboards – and when you want to know where something is, you can just do "Jarvis, do we have another bottle of ketchup?" – "Yes, it’s in Kitchen Cupboard Number 2 Left " In fact, I’ve actually designed something similar to that, but a lot simpler. A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check…

"A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check out products you throw away."

Your homework, before you start too far down this road, is to start doing that right now if you haven't already. You don't even need a real scanner; just pretend with a stapler or something vaguely the right shape and weight. You should also go through your cupboards and just scan everything once to simulate the initial load. Then, I don't know whether you mean to design this for yourself or for selling to others, but if it's the latter, consider whether your customers will actually do this for any period of time. I'd also recommend faceoffs between two people, one pretending realistically to ask your system where something is (either literally typing it in somewhere or doing real-enough voice recognition that you can see the correct query came out), and one just looking. Even if I don't know your kitchen, if it's at all sensibly laid out and you give me a quick look around first, decent odds I still beat your system finding something on average, even if it's not my kitchen.

If you completely eliminate 100% of the time in a year that I spend looking for kitchen goods that I don't know where they are, you've brought me maybe $20/year in value total; if you make me scan everything going in and out, I'd pay at least $200/year not to do that. (Probably more if I really faced that problem.)

(If this is just a personal project, go nuts. Very educational, lots of valuable skill building involved, and it's always good to scratch an itch with it. But if you have any ideas of making money with it, then I suggest taking it seriously and doing some heavy market research and proofing before the tech.)

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#208

Post by alextgordon » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 3:34 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #149

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?

It costs quite a bit to maintain an empty house at a comfortable temperature. It also takes a good while (order of hours) to converge on that comfortable temperature if you haven't run the HVAC in a long time and the weather is extreme. The ubiquitous programmable thermostats do different things at night, in the morning, during the workday, and in the evening. The idea being that the temperature is allowed to drift w…

We are talking about a manual dial here, not a programmable thermostat. "Hey it's too cold right now, better turn it up."

In fact you will save money & energy with manual control because the heating will not turn on when it's cold but you are wearing enough layers.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#209

Post by sixothree » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 3:37 PM UTC

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…

I've avoided nest because I worry it may fail and literally cook my animals during the brutal summer heat we get. Seems that worry may be founded.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#210

Post by pdkl95 » Thu, Jan 14, 2016, 3:57 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #183

TeMPOraL wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another angle to that problem is that a lot of IoT today is basically making something equivalent to a weekend hardware hack, tweaking it a bit, and then calling for investors and marketing the living shit out of the device. Popular IoT products are toys, not tools.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm yet to see a coherent explanation of what IoT is supposed to do for me as a homeowner. I think "all the household IoT stuff is toys" is rather directly connected to the fact that I just don't have massive problems I need solved with the Internet in my house. Of course the resulting market is nothing but toys; there doesn't appear to be any space for non-toys. (I see the commercial and ci…

While some IoT project probably are just toys, the reason you have yet to see what IoT is supposed to do for you is because you're looking at it from the wrong perspective.

IoT is about finding some sort of just-shiny-enough bauble - that may or may not have an actual useful purpose - that you find interesting enough to buy without paying attention to the data you're handing over to some company. Occasionally you will find more traditional vendor lock-in plan, but these "smart"/IoT devices usually use some amount of surveillance-as-a-business-model.

Sure, there are lots of possibilities. We have barely begun to explore what is possible with {,inter}networks. I'm sure there really is a lot of very interesting ways to mix traditional products and network access. For now, though, like any new technology, the market is mostly misguided designs, scams, and safety risks.