We're hearing about troubles at Nest

A great way to fix that is to add more managers to gain better control of your runaway teams. Microsoft Project might be a good solution to get them back on track too. Planning out every hour of the project at the beginning really helps developers focus and get things done. Oh, and you want to introduce daily status meetings, preferably in the morning. As a final step, it helps to let a few people go and put a hiring freeze on developers. You don't want to reward their departments' bad behavior by giving them more people. I've seen this done at several companies before and it always leads to spectacularly amazing results.

Your comments are worrying, but match a disappointing number of other users.

When I was ready to switch to a programmable thermostat to save money, I really, really wanted to like the Nest. It was cool, whizzbang, etc., etc. But then I started reading the 1-star reviews on Amazon, and the support forums. And it worried me. People came home to apartments that were 90* because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer. All sorts of people bought $300 Nests, only to discover their 8-year-old equipment was apparently not compatible with it. People spoke of Nests being fried by voltage surges in "old" (a scant 4 years!) HVAC systems. EEs were comparing the Nest's voltage regulators to that of a generic $20 thermostat and finding the generic more reliable in every aspect.

Nervous that my 14-year-old system would annihilate a very expensive toy, and that my wife staying at home would make the thing pointless, regardless, I bought a $100 Wifi Honeywell with a traditional 7-day calendar. It's fantastic. I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company, but their Android and web apps are simply excellent. Easy to use, well-designed, and it just works. I saved about $120 in utility bills in the first 8 months I had it, living in the nebulous division of the continental climate and humid subtropical climate in the midwest.

When we moved to San Diego to a house with only central heat, no AC, I still dropped $70 on the same thermostat just to have access to the "what temperature is it in my house right now" feature.

The Nest thermostat is a dream compared to the smoke detector.

The smoke detector goes off all the time -- without rhyme or reason. With a normal detector, you can just pull the battery if it refuses to shut off. With Nest, you actually need a screw driver to open the battery compartment to turn it off.

So, when it decides to wake up the entire house at 3am (yes, the entire house, since they all go off in unison) you'll need to go find a screw driver to get it to shut up.

The one flippin' reason I bought a Nest Protect was so I could "wave to silence" an alarm. Well, every time it goes off, it tells me that "this alarm cannot be silenced" - even by pushing the power button. Not once have I been able to turn off an alarm without removing the batteries.

The worst feeling is when you get an alert on your iPhone while nobody (but your pet) is home. "Alert: your house is on fire." Then you rush home and realize it's a false alarm.

After our fourth or fifth false alarm we returned them all and replaced them with the old-fashioned alarms.

Watch this hilarious video if you're considering buying a Nest Protect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY (warning: loud alarms in video)

That's a horrible experience.

But, to be fair, many newer structures have all their smoke detectors wired together so when one goes off, they all go off. I experienced that in my house, built in '97, which was extremely disorienting and stressful when it first happened. Growing up in a house built in the 80s, only the kitchen's smoke detector would go off if you burned something. I understand the perceived safety enhancement, but waking up the sleeping baby because dumb ol' dad smoked too much oil when stir frying something... Ugh.

Edit: formatting.

I currently have non-Wi-Fi programmable thermostats. I have no experience with Nest directly, but from the description of how it determines when to turn the temp up or down I don't see how it would be that "smart" for me. I work from home, but my office is nowhere near the downstairs thermostat. So any motion detection it might do would assume that nobody is home, when I in fact am.

On the other hand, my simple Honeywell thermostats do wonderfully because I can program them to my actual schedule and only need to adjust things twice a year. Sure, it's probably not as efficient as a dynamic algorithm, but I'd rather to do this than worry about waking up freezing in the middle of the night, or worse, having my condenser unit fried by an over-eager thermostat by starting/stopping it constantly.

I am thinking of getting something Wi-Fi compatible though because setting the temp from my phone would be really nice. Too bad not many work with multi-zone systems.