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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

#41

Post by allturtles »

amscanne wrote: post #33
allturtles wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood what problem smart thermostats were supposed to solve, now I do: ski home pre-heating. Cool, makes sense, but no use to me.

That's just a simple example. When the Nest came out, it felt like an amazing no brainer product to me: 1) The thermostat drives most home energy usage. It's probably above $1000/yr for most households. 2) The existing programmable thermostats were awful and no one used them effectively. There's a ton of waste as a result. 3) The smart thermostat can easily pay for itself in a year or two just by having a better UX t…

I use the programmable UX on my existing $40 dollar thermostat. It works fine and it's not that hard to use. It only ever requires adjusting when we leave for/return from vacation, and takes ~1 minute to get back into the right state each time.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#43

Post by post_break »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #40
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.

I have a Nest. I had to watch a 10-minute video to disable all "smarts" on it. It's possible, but painful. I'd rather have your Honeywell.

This is the one I have. It came with my house that I bought so I didn't even pick it out so I'm not some shill. The app is kind of old and ugly but I honestly don't even care because it just works. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Home-Wi-Fi-Smart-Color...

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#44

Post by delabay »

allturtles wrote: post #20
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.

I never understood what problem smart thermostats were supposed to solve, now I do: ski home pre-heating. Cool, makes sense, but no use to me.

What a ridiculous statement to make and perfectly exemplifies the absurdity of HN comment section.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#45

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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…

I thought it also used the bluetooth aspect of the app to know if you're home? IOW, if the app can ping Nest over bluetooth, the Nest knows you're home.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#46

Post by BigBubbleButt »

delabay wrote: post #44
allturtles wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood what problem smart thermostats were supposed to solve, now I do: ski home pre-heating. Cool, makes sense, but no use to me.

What a ridiculous statement to make and perfectly exemplifies the absurdity of HN comment section.

I donno, I feel your reactive defense of a smart thermostat (with a comical origin story) is more absurdist HN than the person you're replying to.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#47

Post by bmitc »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #40
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.

I have a Nest. I had to watch a 10-minute video to disable all "smarts" on it. It's possible, but painful. I'd rather have your Honeywell.

We have a Nest in which we turned off all smarts and scheduling, but it was still turning itself on and smoking us out of the house. We could not find any setting, any schedule, or anything that indicated why it was turning on. We ended up having to do a factory reset, and we never connected it back to the WiFi to get rid of these "smart" scheduling features. If anything, the Nest wastes money when using its smart features, as it's never on or off when it needs to be. The most stable room in the house is the basement controlled by a dumb, admittedly ugly thermostat.

The only nice thing about Nests is the overall look, but they're really poor devices. The OS on them constantly lags, causing dial inputs to suddenly "catch up". Each one of our Nests has its own personality: one lags, one turns on when it wants to (prior to factory reset, probably the third or fourth time we've had to do so), and the other one seems to actually just work.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#48

Post by ridgered4 »

nrjames wrote: post #26
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.

In the early 1990s, my roommate and I used to visit his family's tiny cabin in northern Wisconsin. The place was very rustic but did have electric heat. It was very cold and snowy during the winter. He could call the cabin's phone number and press * 2-3 times and it would tell the heat system to turn on or off. The system would respond somehow with a beep or two to tell him whether it was turning on or off. Seems lik…

There's an LGR video (probably under oddware) where he tests out one of the "smart home" systems from the 1980s that sounds similar.

Re: Tony Fadell: The Nest Thermostat Disrupted My Life

#49

Post by geoffpado »

BigBubbleButt wrote: post #46
delabay wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculous statement to make and perfectly exemplifies the absurdity of HN comment section.

I donno, I feel your reactive defense of a smart thermostat (with a comical origin story) is more absurdist HN than the person you're replying to.

Ultimately, though, nothing is more absurdist HN than two people bickering about the definition of “absurdist HN”.
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