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Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

nytimes.com

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Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#171

Post by jrockway »

backtoyoujim wrote: post #150
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not a bullshit argument. It is similar to labor laws in some states. You can claim someone as a indy contractor but if they are working with your tools or at your job site or under your instruction ... guess what? some states don't care what you call them ... they will be processed as employees not contractors. Not bullshit.

If there were a special tax on heart rate monitors that _are_ medical devices, and FitBit was calling theirs not a medical devices to avoid paying that tax, then the analogy would be reasonable.

The whole employee/contractor thing is all about payroll taxes. You have to pay them yourself if you get a 1099, but your employer pays them if you're on a W-2. Employers have a much better track record of paying that, so the government wants to avoid too many 1099s.

I've been a contractor before. I got a W-2, but no benefits. Now everyone is happy.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#172

Post by stephencanon »

jacalata wrote: post #155
jonathankoren wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your house is 60 degrees. It didn't freeze.

If it's 60 degrees then it isn't freezing now, but it could have been lower overnight.

Heat loss is proportional to the temperature difference across the boundary (walls and windows and roof). Even when it's quite cold outside, heat loss slows down as the house gets colder, and then you still have all the phase change energy to dump before pipes freeze. This will not happen overnight except in the most extreme cases, and it certainly will not then warm back up to 60.

Anecdotally, I was once without central heat for three days in 0-20F, and nothing froze. The basement got down to 38.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#173

Post by revelation »

tomkinstinch wrote: post #16
ghaff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you have redundant thermostats? Though I'd note that traditional thermostats and even simple programmable ones are very reliable.

Sure, at least for traditional two-wire thermostats that turn on when the circuit is closed: connect them in parallel. The Nest is so obviously a product designed in warm California—not anywhere that sees truly hard winter. If it were designed well, it would fail safe (furnace on). I'd rather have a hefty heating bill from my furnace running 24/7 than have all of the pipes in my house freeze and break. If I ever inst…

I'm pretty sure the fail safe for a furnace should not be on and blasting. In a well insulated house (well, not CA either) you could easily get the temperature into dangerous areas with a constantly on furnace, and you don't want that happening when asleep.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#174

Post by radiorental »

kordless wrote: post #127
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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, elderly, 2nd home) rolled the dice and are as much at fault as Nest IMHO.

As more devices become 'smart', the companies that invest in design & testing will become more trusted. But also, consumers need to appreciate that a device is only as smart as the infrastructure it's connected too. Any limitations in your house need a fallback plan.

(I'm actually glad that trickle charge hack has come home to roost)

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#175

Post by lucaspiller »

kordless wrote: post #127
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 F…

Did they actually say it was a bug in the battery / recharge code?

It sounds like they could have just added some generic code that prevented the device from going into deep sleep.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#177

Post by hijinks »

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…

we keep ours at 70 just due to small kids that don't have big blankets or understand you have to be under layers at night

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#178

Post by michaelt »

jkestner wrote: post #129
epistasis wrote: post #112

Earlier 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…

  is this just a matter of complexity growing beyond
  its masters' capacity to manage it?
No, this is stuff we know how to get right if it's a priority for the business.

Back in the 1990s if Microsoft released a new version of Windows they would test compatibility with other vendors' software - and often adapted Windows to maintain compatibility of vendors were relying on some eccentric behaviour.

What you do is build a test lab. You buy 100 routers covering a range of chipsets and manufacturers. Plug them into a network and a software-controlled power switch. Every time you do a revision of your hardware you keep a few back for the test lab. Then every time you do a revision of the software, you deploy it to all the hardware, and you test it one at a time on every one of the routers. Customer's having problems with hardware so old you can't get it for your lab? Ask the customer for theirs, and offer them something better in trade.

You do the same with furnaces - although you probably need many fewer units in your test lab because the interfaces are a lot simpler.

The main reason not to do this is cost - a company might think spending $200,000 on a test lab has lower returns than spending that money on adverts or product discounts.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#180

Post by MagnumOpus »

rsync wrote: post #124
insaneirish wrote: post #79

It 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…

> It's not possible to have this "feature set" and not have this pain. It's a fools errand to pursue it.

It is possible. Their competitors seem to achieve it at the same price point to a much better degree (case in point: the British Gas myHome that I own and its newer cousin, the Hive). It helps that they don't shrug their shoulders about software bugs and in general don't roll out untested cowboy code on critical home appliances...

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