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Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

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Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#51

Post by Phiwise_ »

kevmo314 wrote: post #4

> Shipping the Nest thermostat with a screwdriver "turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight" I must be in the minority then. I end up with a ton of these product-specific screwdrivers and get a little frustrated that I have to throw it away, contributing ever-so-slightly to the pile of consumer waste. It'd be cool if you could select a "need tools" option sort of like how take out now has a "need utens…

Just send it to your local goodwill. Some single mother just scraping by in a rotting-out apartment who suddenly needs to fix a sink or lighting fixture that duct tape just isn't working on any more will be delighted to find your nest brand screwdriver with a fifty cent sticker while looking for a pair of shoes her growing kid's feet might fit in.

And that's just here in the US. Our working poor are the world's one percent. If our definition of consumer waste is things no one would like to hold on to, then even what we consider the most banal tools are not consumer waste, and it will be a very long time until they are.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#52

Post by paulgerhardt »

narush wrote: post #13

I'm reading his book Build right now - it came out last week, so assuming that's why he's appearing all over all the feed). About 2/3rds of the way through currently. My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just b…

As counter-balance to his book you should talk to some YC hardware founders about their experiences with Tony.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#53

Post by throwaway_nest »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #23
narush wrote: post #13

I'm reading his book Build right now - it came out last week, so assuming that's why he's appearing all over all the feed). About 2/3rds of the way through currently. My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just b…

> My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation. He's been doing a lot of history rewriting. Don't get me wrong: Building and shipping Nest was a great accomplishment. Howev…

> When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring.

^^ This.

Aamir Virani, who was the co-founder of Dropcam, has his take on this here: https://aamusings.substack.com/p/who-lives-who-dies-who-tell... (also https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1522280960984707072.html)

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#54

Post by kshacker »

twblalock wrote: post #28
aresant wrote: post #5

"Every time my wife and I drove up to our Lake Tahoe ski cabin on Friday nights after work, we’d have to keep our snow jackets on until the next day. The house took all night to heat up." That is first world problems hall of fame material right there! But a great origin story for the Nest regardless.

It's not just a problem for rich people. It's also nice to have if you are coming back home (to your normal home where you live) from a trip and the weather has been very cold or hot while you were gone.

Similar example: came back home from a long trip to stale air. Maybe there's another problem or maybe that's just me, but next time we start the air from the airport and the air is pretty normal by the time we get in.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#55

Post by giarc »

post_break wrote: post #37

I love my honeywell thermostat. It has wifi, a touch screen, schedules, and that's it. I can control it from my phone, google home, and no smarts. It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year. The single pane to double pane window showed just how much energy I was saving. I wouldn't touch a "smart" thermostat with a stick, but this dumb wifi thing is incredible.

"It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year."

I have 2x Nests in my house and I don't know if I'm missing something, but I only get a usage history for the past week. I feel like a "smart" thermostat should tell me a lot more about my usage and it should be pretty trivial to develop.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#56

Post by giarc »

thomaslord wrote: post #9

When I read the headline, I assumed that this was going to be a negative review from a user. We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperatur…

My nest once asked if I wanted it to "learn" my habits and adjust accordingly. I clicked Ok thinking it would create a nice schedule. Instead it set temperatures to 14C at random times and be all over the map with when to heat the house and when to leave it cooler.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#57

Post by kshacker »

TIPSIO wrote: post #15
samwillis wrote: post #7

We have a Nest thermostat, we have now turned off every single smart feature and just use it for a schedule and turning it on/off remotely when away (we gave up with the automatic away detection). I should also point out we are in the UK. I’m completely unconvinced that “smart” thermostats achieve anything for the majority of homes in the UK, despite most energy suppliers pushing customers to purchase them for years.…

I have an Ecobee. Agree with you that the killer feature definitely isn't the self learning stuff. It's simply: - Has WiFi (update from phone) Then also: - Being able to link with Alexa or similar to do things like turning off when you leave automatically - Custom programming modes. So instead of setting a temperature at a single time during the day (home/away), you could do (morning/home/home2/afternoon/night/away)…

Oh I wish nest could run my fan for 5 minutes but it can do only 15. Touched a raw nerve.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#58

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

thomaslord wrote: post #9

When I read the headline, I assumed that this was going to be a negative review from a user. We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperatur…

Interesting. Someone had told me that the Nest figures out if you're home by recognizing the presence of your phone. I wonder if that information was wrong or only applied to a specific version of the Nest.

At one point, I had a cheap WiFi thermostat. No smart features, just allowed remote control via app or web page. At one point, I had reverse-engineered the web app API and wrote a script to implement "away" detection and shut the thermostat off if both phones were away.

The problem was two-fold. First, it detected the phones being away by simply pinging the phone's local IP address. If the phone was in a power saving mode that disabled WiFi, the script would detect the phone as away. Second, I ran into the problem the article author had: If everyone was away, it got cold in the winter, and an absolute oven in the summer, and my aging A/C unit couldn't get the temperature back down until the sun went down.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#59

Post by joshstrange »

So I had a Nest for a year before it just stopped working and Nest told me it wasn't compatible with my system, after previously telling me it was (not sure how it worked more or less perfectly for that first year but whatever). I moved to an EcoBee and I'm happy with it but for all their "smarts" these things are still dumb as rock in my opinion.

I work from home so turning up/down the temp when I'm away is rarely worth it other than when I'm on vacation for a week or a long weekend. I'm happy enough to be able to control it from an app and not have to get up and go to the other side of the house but there is one big thing that is missing for me: it being smart about the outside temp.

Let me elaborate. I want my house to be 65 during the day and 60 at night but there isn't a good way to accomplish that without micromanaging it when the seasons change (or freak weather which happens more and more often).

Depending on the outside temp (and humidity) I have to manually tweak the temp ranges. It would be nice if I could set heat to 65 and cool to 65 but that would kill my HVAC system flipping between the two modes (if the apps even let you do that), I just want it to be a little smarter. Something like "If it's >60 outside then set the cool to 65 and heat to 55" and "If it's I'll probably attempt to tackle this using Home Assistant at some point but it's frustrating that these devices are in some ways stuck in the past of "Set a cool or heat or cool+heat settings", how about a little more intelligence? I want the inside of my house to always "feel like" 65F.

All of the "smart" thermostats are really just the same as before with a way to remotely change the settings (which is an improvement) but I'd never call them smart.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#60

Post by clintonb »

cout wrote: post #31
stblack wrote: post #25

We've had a nest thermostat for five years. For the past four and a half years it's been on a shelf in the basement, in its box. Gonna throw it out someday. What crappy tech. Its problem: its backing plate heats up. Causing the house to be perpetually cold. Three Nest backing-plate replacements later, we gave up. We presently have a much dumber thermostat that can be remotely controlled. We're happy now, but we'll ne…

Do they not have remote temperature sensors as an option?

They do now. The original Nest did not have remote sensors.
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