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Nest Thermostat Bug Leaves Owners Without Heating (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google-owned smart homeware company Nest has asked users to reset their connected thermostats after a software bug forced controllers offline and left owners unable to heat their homes. The company has confirmed that a software update error had caused the thermostat's batteries to drain, therefore making it unable to control the temperature. Users of the smart home device took to social media to express their anger at being left with cold houses. Some feared that the fault had put water pipes under pressure, risking burst plumbing.
When you cede control of your world to The Cloud and automatic updates, you should not expect reliability.
Anyone who whines about the so-called "cold" is obviously science denying scum who pretends that there's no climate and shills for BIG OIL!
The Internet of Things breaking.
And here I am using a knob to turn the heater on and off. I like tech. I also know that it is not then end all and be all.
Expect these kind of things more and more with the Internet of Things.
Next: People are unable to brush their teeth due to a bug.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Lol!
This is what happens when you let devices to which you have no access to repair control things that matter.
Personally, I'd just simulate the call for heat until I could debug the thing. But whatever.
I can hardly wait to have everything part of the IoT! So when can I get Grandma's oxygen generator online? And hey, I need an excuse to clean out the fridge more often anyway, software updates making all the food rot should give me that extra motivation I need.
More seriously, I see a coming resurgence in 100% analog appliances as more and more digital ones become vulnerable to "bugs" (Nest) or vendor lockout (Hue) or actively recalled content (Kindle) - And that doesn't even consider active attacks by malicious entities (whether private or governmental).
The thermostats went offline which prevented people from turning on their heaters. So, yes, it does mean no heat. Unless you think the heaters just turn themselves on without control from the thermostat?
If that happened to me, I'd remove the thermostat and connect the correct wires to make the furnace turn on manually. Then go buy a new thermostat to replace it. Replacing a thermostat is just about the easiest "home improvement" thing anyone can do. The wires don't carry high voltage.
If you remove the Nest from the wall, the wires connecting the t-stat to the equipment relays and contacters are typically red, white, green, yellow, and brown/blue. Red is hot 24v, and white is the wire energized in a call for system heat in about 99% of single stage heating applications... plus, it will get you heat in many other multiple stage heating configurations.
With the furnace de-energized, so you don't fry a transformer, jumper from red to white and restore the power to the furnace/air handler. Keep in mind that this will get you heat, but it will not turn itself off.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I live in Florida with a high efficiency A/C (19 Seer) and I noticed very little savings $10/mo at the expense of major fluctuations in temperature and coming home to a hot humid house. The upstairs and downstairs would have strange set points that made one unit run all the time (at full power).
I sold them online and have cheap thermostat with 4 set points during the day. The units run nearly all of the time in the summer but on the low power, high efficiency setting. The house is much more pleasant at very little extra cost.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It was -6 degrees Fahrenheit where I live yesterday morning. We have had a pipe freeze and burst which caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage to our home. It's a very real risk if you lose heat in your home. If I had a nest and that happened to me two weeks ago I would have definitely had burst pipes in my home since I was out of town.
I can't help but wonder if they're writing their code in Javascript.
Nest saved them money by not heating their homes. And still they complain???
Listen ass-hole, keeping pipes from freezing is one of the reasons you heat your home. So yes, your heat not working is a cause for alarm. Do you have any idea the damage burst pipes can cause. Fuck off.
that's the spirit...
due to a software error, but not the rooms that the computers are in.
You are forgetting the market for Nest devices. These are people that can't figure out how to program a thermostat and want the thermostat and the magic cloud to do it for them.
I am curious if the Nest has a way to turn off the auto update feature. I do not currently own a Nest but I have thought about getting one. I could see this being a major headache for someone who might be away for a long trip and not be able to "reset" a thermostat because of a problem with an update. I prefer to be around when a device is being updated so that I can intervene if there is a problem. I would want to be home for at least a day or so after an update. I don't allow Windows to auto-update, so why should I allow a thermostat to?
This is exactly what happened. A medical device refused to work, claiming it was too cold. I went to check the thermostat and it wouldn't function. I checked the mobile app and it said that it had lost connection with the Nest 5 hours earlier. I plugged it into USB for about 1/2 hour so that it had enough of a charge to startup the heater.
I had considered hot-wiring the HVAC behind the Nest panel, but my HVAC has protections against that.
It's a little too bad the USB port isn't external so that I could attach a charger to it while it was still on the wall.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
My mercury-switch thermostat has never failed.
Suck it, millenials.
I see a lot of hate for the Nest. However they are very useful for people who have a vacation get away. Nests are pretty useful for these homes and I know I'd be ticked if I showed up at my little mountain getaway in Vermont and had busted pipes.
Your thermostat shouldn't have to be online.
What fucking idiot relies upon a battery-operated system instead of one physically hard-wired to utilities power in the first place?
What, disable updating and forgo the feature that your house can park by itself?
Yea, just wait until self driving cars become the norm. Google tries to hide how many times its human drivers had to take over because the car was going to crash.
But let's get back to these smart t stats. People mostly will set temperatures based on how they want to feel. No smart t stat will be able to save them money if they want to be comfortable. Also, nothing has been proven for most to ask a system to compensate dramatically in wide temp swings. Most modern climate HVAC systems are designed with efficiency in mind and do not have built in over capacity. So drastically changing temperatures means the system will most likely have to operate more if it asks to return to a comfortable level from a extreme. A person who slightly dials in a subtle change probably would benefit more. I think investing too much in a t-stat is not going to pay back people very quickly. Having a t- stat properly installed in the right area will do more good. Isolating rooms not used, insulating, using window treatments for UV reduction probably more effective.
ecobee, Nest, etc
They all *must* connect to the *cloud* to work.
One of them makes the statement that "this allows us to not have to implement a UI in the device which would be difficult with the limited CPU. But wait this is good, because now we can bring you a more sophisticated UI and an *app* with a more user friendly aspect". Yeah, sure, I'm all in favor of a nice visual app, but for gosh sakes, at least give the device some native interface, it can be ugly, but it has to be local.
And the folks who provide support for these devices are worse: "is the thermostat connected to the network locally, or does it need internet access". "Oh, it connects to the network locally". "Great, so if my internet connection goes out, my thermostat still works", "Oh, no, sir, your thermostat needs to connect to our server"
Believe it or not, in some jurisdictions (Quebec) it (legally) requires a licensed electrician. I was rather amused when I noticed that in the manual for my last thermostat.
Log in or piss off.
Sounds like shitty design if it can't do either of these:
1. work off the 24VAC on the common wire that basically any semi-modern heating system has, or
2. have a replaceable AA battery.
The Honeywell Lyric does #2, the Ecobee3 does #1, and includes a thing in the box to fake a 'C' wire if you don't have one.
It's bad design to have to remove your thermostat from the wall and plug it into a cellphone charger for half an hour when the most predictable thing ever happens: a dead battery.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
That's the real deal: the Nest can only replace dumb thermostats on the lowest-end HVAC systems. All more-than-bare-bones HVAC systems use a proprietary protocol to communicate with its own smart thermostat already. If these thermostats fail, all you are exposed to is four wires: two have 24V on them, the other two have CAN or maybe RS-485. Now, thankfully, these protocols are very simple to reverse-engineer, so I have dispensed with the factory Infinity thermostat for years now, but still: it's not as easy as shorting two wires together, and you need a working thermostat to see the protocol first. Unless you want to reverse-engineer or re-write furnace firmware, that is. I'm contemplating redoing the furnace firmware and moving to some standard protocol like CANopen but I haven't found any HVAC profiles for it yet :(
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Why the heck would you need to charge these things? Don't they get power from the furnace?!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Nests are sold to "Oooh shiny!" retards who wouldn't know how to do what you state.
Really?
What if someone has a vacation cabin in Michigan? I hear it might get a bit cold up there around this time of year, and without a functioning heat system, you can bet there's a damn good chance of a burst pipe.
It took me all of 5 seconds to think of a very likely scenario where a shit firmware update applied (drained battery) to a shit design (not powered by the 24VAC C-wire on the HVAC system itself) could cause real damage. In other words, exactly what this article is about.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The Nest does charge from common (or other wires if you prefer). Not sure what the actual bug was that caused it to drain so fast. I'd assume some tight looping.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Of course it's a shitty design. It was produced by Nest. Have you not been following all of their design fails over the years? Did you never hear about the bug in their smoke detector where if you moved your arms in a certain way that it would disable Itself? LOL! Only a retard would trust a Nest product.
The thermostat continues to function even if power goes out or if you remove it from the wall. It charges an internal battery from the wiring.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Batteries and the cloud are both mentioned, but the biggest problem is the process that let an update go out without running the power consumption regression test. Yes, it might take hours or even days, but on a limited power budget bad things happen when you don't test.
And this is a pretty good demonstration of a less simple tool not being better.
At it's core, a thermostat has a simple job to do.
The more complexity that is added to the design, the more points of failure there can be.
And, really, how much benefit does internet connectivity really add to a thermostat anyway?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Every time I see a bug like this I can't help but think - the engineers that built this don't actually use this.
Android wear is another one. I believe no engineer on that product actually wears an Android Wear device. It's so full of bugs that it's practically useless.
The people developing products should be forced to actually live with them (except maybe medical equipment....).
I'm a software engineer. When I bought my home in a new area four years ago, I bought a Nest to replace the old thermostat and installed it myself. I wasn't happy with its learning because I work from home (so it never seemed to make the right decisions). I then set it to a schedule that I adjust between Winter and Summer. Its power saving (AirWave or whatever for AC, etc) features really do work and I regularly use the remote control features from inside my home as well as out (when coming back from a long trip). The power consumption analytics are helpful too.
I haven't seen this bug but I know what to do if the thermostat stops working because I'm not an idiot (I'm tech minded, which is why I bought it in the first place).
In short, you're overgeneralizing about the people who buy these things and the features they use.
I have a non-elderly senior mother who thinks that changing the HDMI source on the TV is advanced technology and she will not touch it. You tell her to change her thermostat when it's 10 degrees outside.
I can definitely sympathize with someone who went on vacation and came home to all their possessions floating because of a burst pipe. But -- here's a good example of how not knowing how the magic box works under the hood is a problem. In a real emergency, you can hook the control wires together to force the heat on in most systems until the problem is fixed, or worst case, you buy a new thermostat. So, people complaining about having no heat could have at least made do while the problem was worked out.
I actually have one of these, but didn't experience the bug. Guess I'll go reset it just in case when I get home...
Unfortunately, this is one of the things that make Agile development and the cloud/IoT look bad. I don't want to go back to a complete waterfall software process, but pushing out random releases with the mentality you can always patch it later makes software quality very sloppy. At the very least, control software like this needs to be tested a little better than your average website/app back-end.
Got steam heat with a mercury-switch pressuretrol to control the boiler pressure.
Hasn't given a problem in 30 years, and the pipes/radiators themselves are almost 100 years old.
Sometimes the old stuff just works well. People back then weren't necessarily stupid. A lot of problems with the old systems come from later generations not understanding how they work. You have to keep those pipes insulated, the radiators level, the pressure low, and the venting balanced. It's amazing how well it works when set up properly.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
Wow, if this isn't an epic example of bullshit stupidity by companies who want to control the infrastructure in your home I have no idea of what it is.
I wouldn't trust a net connected thermostat in the first place. Because it's there to gather information and upload it to the mother ship. And if you can access it via an app, someone else can.
But then they push an update and fuck up the unit to the point people have no heat? Hell no, this is why I have no intention of letting some external party ever be able to access things like my thermostat.
Products used to be engineered knowing their entire life cycle would be in isolation. It had to work, it had to do all of its functions, and it couldn't fuck up because if people had to replace it, they wouldn't replace it with your brand.
Now companies make shitty stuff, ship it out the door, make updates to it, and if you end up with a broken product ... well, bummer.
This world of connected crap tied to smart phones? It's garbage, and it's years away from being anything but. It's insecure, and violates your privacy.
Sadly, this kind of crap is what many people have been warning about -- because you're suddenly at the mercy of some damned company who wants to be agile, or find a way to collect even more information about you. And then they push out an untested update, and you're screwed.
As someone who lives in a place where winter means "really damned cold", if I had been stupid enough to buy one of these, I'd be replacing it immediately. Imagine coming home to frozen pipes because some lazy idiot didn't do enough testing?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
WTF are they thinking? Updating thermostat software when temperatures are below freezing? They should immediately institute a policy of holding off updates until temperatures are above freezing unless the bug fix is *so* critical it just cannot wait. Looking at mine, I see the last update was January 13!
Idiots.
Ian Ameline
I'm a software engineer...I bought a Nest
No, you're probably some shitty Rubyist or web "programmer" banging out code on his MacBook "Pro".
Overall, I've been pleased with my Nest. I've had it for about 1.5-2 years now. It's nice for me because I can't have the ideal schedules setup during the day because my wife doesn't work the same days every week. Auto-away has worked okay except when the Christmas tree is in the way and it goes to 64 F while we are home. Other times, if I remember, I'll set it to away remotely if I know she works that day. Working on a solution to know when both of us are not home to set to away automatically instead of waiting on auto-away.
I can't say I had this particular issue but I had a similar one where the blower on the furnace would run but not blow out any hot air. The furnace would light and have a flame for maybe a minute but then shut off with the blower still running. It would repeatedly do this and we only had warm air coming out of the vents for a couple minutes at a time. I had to disconnect the wire for the A/C and this solved my issue. Disconnecting the A/C during the winter in the midwest isn't a big deal for me but I'm sure others would have an issue with it. I also only have the heat or A/C enabled at a time, not both so that really left me wondering wtf.
Why does everyone here keep going on about vacation homes? Am I just incredibly poor that I don't have a vacation home somewhere and apparently most other people do? Because my thought went to "What if I were traveling" be it for work or to visit family. It seems a much more likely scenario than the vacation homes people keep mentioning.
...a self-driving car. Who wants one?
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
The problem here is not IoT, it's shit hardware design. The right way is to take an existing thermostat design and then slap your interface on the front, and to isolate your hardware from the original design as much as possible. Your hardware is used for monitoring and to program the original hardware — there are plenty of programmable thermostats out there. If your complicated hardware goes wrong, the simple hardware is still there doing its job. The thermostat's job is very simple and low-power, so you should be able to power it with a very puny and inexpensive solder-tab LiIon cell, and use that to back your RTC in the bargain.
If I wanted my thermostat to be internet-connected, which seems slightly reasonable in theory, I'd want the internet connection functionality to be laid atop the existing functionality.
A happy middle ground for someone determined to design the entire system might be to implement the actual thermostat control on a lesser chip, and give it just enough circuitry for frost protection, but there's no good reason not to start with an existing design.
Another way to go might be to just provide a passthrough, and let the user supply a backup thermostat if they like. If the unit loses power, it can switch control to the legacy thermostat using microrelays which default in that direction.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Industrial Internet is making manufacturing and other industrial activities much more efficient.
The consumer IoT is nothing but an over-hyped gimmick to get people to part with more of their hard earned money. It's the gee-whiz factor - like the iWatch - there is no need for it. It's a "I just want it." thing. It's more worthless shit to give more justification to own other electronic crap.
And that's what consumer electronics has become: toys that add no value to our lives and actually decrease our quality of life. These smartphones are just making people more hurried and rushed and the Web has made people more isolated with the delusion that they have more "friends".
I have a $50 LUX programmable thermostat that does the same thing as Nest, is very reliable, and doesn't rely on unnecessary technology.
If I need to make quick temporary changes, I can walk the few feet to the thermostat and just override the program.
I do not need an Internet or smart phone app to do that.
One more reason not to have your thermostat connected to the internet.
I don't want to reboot my TV or refrigerator.
I don't want my lighting system spying on me.
Voice activated stuff that phones home is for people too lazy to press a button?!?!?
The risks way out weigh the benefits.
If you are spending $250 on a thermostat you have plenty of money to burn so owning a vacation home is not out of the question.
Besides a vacation home is one of the few places where a Nest is actually practical. With the internet access it allows you to check the status of the house remotely.
Yesterday at 5:38 PM, my nest got an update to version 5.1.6rc4. Since that time, it hasn't dropped offline due to low battery. Not that it won't in the future... but this is supposedly the fixed version. It took them 2 months to fix it! My thermostat started displaying this behavior on November 17th under version 5.1.3rc1. And before anybody asks - yes, I have the common wire hooked up and it's worked fine for over 3 years that way. Up until version 5.1.3rc1 that is. I want to know why in the hell it took them 2 months to fix this issue. At the very least, they should have rolled the broken code back to an earlier version.
Oddly, my old Honeywell thermostat had way more problems than the Nest that replaced it. It would frequently turn on heat or AC and leave it on regardless of temperature. Replacing the batteries did not help. Replaced the thermostat and about a year later the new one did the same thing. Junk.
I chose a Nest for one reason. The job I had at the time involved lots of travel, sometimes with limited or short notice. I also live in a climate that gets very hot in the summer and *VERY* cold in the winter. A regular programmable thermostat is utterly useless in that situation as I didn't have a regular schedule to program. You end up either leaving the temperature set to whatever is comfortable all the time or else coming home to a hot or cold house. Since I got the nest 3 years ago, my utility bills have gone down 25% and I have the ability to, from my phone, turn off "Away" mode an hour before I get home and the house is comfortable when I get there. If I forget, it's no biggie and the heat or AC turns on when I walk in the door with no buttons to press or no manual mode switch to accidentally leave on.
I'm not terribly fond of the cloud control aspect of it, but I solved the problem by putting it (and other untrusted IoT things) on a dedicated VLAN with a dedicated SSID with firewall rules preventing access to the rest of my network. The cloud isn't going away, so I figure I may as well protect myself and enjoy the convenience it provides.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
The thing is connected to the internet and the EPA decided that you're using too much energy.
Yes, I'm being facetious but in the Soviet Union before WWII, you weren't allowed to have light bulbs higher than approved wattage. Lots of people did and they covered up their windows at night when they wanted to use them.
While true in a lot of cases, that's not entirely true for everyone. If you have separate heating and cooling systems (ie AC and boiler instead of just a single AC/furnace unit) and you don't jumper the thermostat correctly you can cause some serious damage to your boiler control unit. I have 4 thermostats in the house, 2 are zoned solely for heat and 2 control both heat and AC. Each thermostat installed in my house has to be re/un jumpered from the factory setting before being installed.
Just replacing the thermostat is difficult to do when you're a thousand miles away on vacation. Coming home to pipes that have burst is no fun.
I was staying in a relatives house last week when their relatively new outdoor heat pump unit conked out overnight while temps were in the 20's. The tech that installed it, didn't set it up to turn on the resistance heating strips if the unit could not hold the temp within a couple degrees of set point, which should be standard. I woke up to a cold house and switched it to emergency heat mode, took a hot shower and lived to fight another day. But if I hadn't been there, the owners would have returned to an iced up house and maybe much worse. A smart device or a dumb tech, either can ruin your day.
You obviously have never lived in a cold weather climate.
Try living in a place where 0F is not that uncommon. A house without heat will cause pipes to freeze and burst.
Honestly, if you have no idea of what you're talking about, shut up. Because in places where cold weather is a real thing in the winter, an unheated house can cause massive amounts of damage.
Fear mongering? Sensationalizing? You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
It may not happen in Florida, but anywhere with a real winter and it's an actual thing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm a software engineer...I bought a Nest
No, you're probably some shitty Rubyist or web "programmer" banging out code on his MacBook "Pro".
Says the guy who can't close a quote correctly, or be bothered to proof his work before submitting.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I'd like to find a single house that ever caught fire due to improper thermostat installation. Because you certainly can't electrocute yourself with that 24V circuit, so what other reason could there be for government meddling?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
When I was living in Florida a couple of decades ago I replaced our thermostat with a newfangled programmable digital one to save money when we weren't in the house.
Florida is of course the lightning capital of the world, so of course one fine evening in AUGUST a strike fried the thermostat about 10 minutes after the home supply stores had all closed. Nothing quite like being stuck all night in a un-airconditioned house in Florida in August with a cranky wife and baby.
Lesson learned: If you live somewhere with extreme temperatures, and your thermostat isn't 100% mechanical, always keep a mechanical spare.
SystemD is everywhere now, isn't it?
That's the design flaw. It should be able to run directly from the 24V if the battery fails.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I hope some people died, and some houses got burst pipes from freezing, and I hope the lawsuits and resulting publicity shuts down the internet of things for another ten years.
no, you are wrong. Expecting a 3d party to be consistently good over time can mathematically be shown to be retarded. You own stock in them or something? Linex is reliable and mature, there is still no good reason for my heating controls to be connected to it. There isn't one complex "reliable and mature" thing that is completely safe if connected to the internet. Besides the company, there are rouge updates, etc.
I usually keep it just above freezing (so my paint and glue doesn't freeze), so I've got markings on the wall calibrated for 0, 5, and 10 degrees (Celcius).
Even the new furnaces generally have a fallback mode that can be triggered by jumpering a couple of wires. This is so that they can be used with an old thermostat. When used with newer thermostats you just connect up more wires to allow finer control.
The trigger on every thermostat I've seen comes down to just "short these two wires". You could wire a fail-safe analog thermostat in parallel to the fancy one somewhere. Just keep your old one, and you don't even have to figure out how to dispose of the liquid mercury properly. Set it to 45-50F, and it should only trigger if something went very wrong.
You are a shining example of humanity, my friend.
I hope the person who dies is not a loved one of yours.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
We have a dropcam at home, which we use for watching over our child. And since yesterday morning, it stopped functioning. So I called Nest tech support yesterday evening and when plugged, they could see the dropcam on their end; however the camera was not turning on. Seems like the firmware update messed up their other products as well. Anyways, they will be sending a replacement soon. So all is well :)
Why would I care what a pole smoker thinks?
This is what happens when we pretend that random C++ hackers are real engineers, things that used to "just work" now exhibit the flakiness we've come to expect from software, due mostly to the primitive testing technology in broad use by software engineers and their complete ignorance of how physical systems are classically engineered & tested.
It's really just a matter of time until C++ & Agile development start killing people in large numbers.
There was no reason for the summary to mention a risk of pipes bursting, that's just fear-mongering to try and sensationalize the issue.
You must be south of the Mason Dixon line or something....
It's winter time up north and that means the temperature routinely goes below freezing... Heating is not an optional part of a home that has plumbing unless it's been specifically prepared for the temperatures.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Don't worry, people hoped that about the car and the smartphone and everything else that has made our life better / more convenient too.
If it was the old, classic, manual thermostat I bet she'd have zero trouble.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I was reading thermostat reviews online and ran across this one.... Thinking about a Nest? Read this:
My former wife loves to take expensive vacations. We live in Ohio, which doesn’t exactly have extravagant places to see unless you like to watch grass growing or interstate construction. While we make OK money, I’m convinced she felt the need to single handedly improve the US economy by taking elaborate vacations: Broadway shows in New York City, gambling in Las Vegas, Spa’s in Arizona, sightseeing in San Francisco. The airlines know me so well they ask about my dog when I call to make reservations. His name is Fred.
In my attempt to try and save whatever I could so the princess could have her nice things I bought this Nest Wi-Fi enabled device so I could adjust the HVAC while we were away piling up massive amounts of debt on Mickey Mouse watches. I thought we could save a few bucks by keeping the temp cool in the winter and warm in the summer. The device was easy to install. I did not have the “blue” connector so I had to re-purpose the green one - this required an adjustment to the actual HVAC unit in our home. There are plenty of videos on Youtube to demonstrate how to do this. Within an hour I was up and running.
The device works flawlessly. You can adjust the temp from anywhere you have a Wi-Fi or cellular signal. Little did I know that my ex had found someone that had a bit more money than I did and decided to make other travel plans. Those plans included her no longer being my wife and finding a new travel partner (Carl, a banker). She took the house, the dog and a good chunk of my 401k, but didn’t mess with the wireless access point or the Wi-Fi enabled thermostat.
Since this past Ohio winter has been so cold I’ve been messing with the temp while the new love birds are sleeping. Doesn’t everyone want to wake up at 7 AM to a 40 degree house? When they are away on their weekend getaways, I crank the heat up to 80 degrees and back down to 40 before they arrive home. I can only imagine what their electricity bills might be. It makes me smile. I know this won’t last forever, but I can’t help but smile every time I log in and see that it still works. I also can’t wait for warmer weather when I can crank the heat up to 80 degrees while the love birds are sleeping. After all, who doesn’t want to wake up to an 80 degree home in the middle of June?
And after laughing myself sick, decided I'm not going to have a thermostat that goes 'online' in my home..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It functions during a power outage (it's screen makes a decent emergency light in a hallway when you pass by). Its circuitry doesn't run on 24V (or AC) and is actually designed to charge from a range of low-voltage systems (not just a single voltage). Much easier to have a variable input charger for a battery.
And if it loses power but your home doesn't, it can even alert you to the fact.
I just 3D printed a new thermostat... Privately! In space!
I think Nest thermostats are even more popular in vacation homes than regular homes due to the remote control and monitoring aspect. Especially since vacation homes are afforded by the people who won't think twice about $200 for a thermostat.
Never did like Nest. I use Ecobee 3 thermostats and love them.
NEST global alliance to investigates decepticons posing as thermostats and other households objects.
Not of much use if you don't have control power, as you won't have HVAC functionality. Yes, you can get warned of a power outage, which 99.9% of the time will not just be control power, unless of course your wifi is not working...
24V with enough power on it isn't anything to scoff at. 3D printers usually run at 12V and people have burnt their houses down with them. That being said, I can't imagine either what you'd have to do to screw up an off-the-shelf low-voltage thermostat install to generate that sort of sustained heat. I think you'd need a faulty furnace controller.
Log in or piss off.
I have an Emerson "semi-smart" thermostat. It works, and it responds to my internet-based commands. Here's the part that caused some trouble: It has a nice big "Off" button on the front panel. One day, a relative who was house-sitting (in the winter) figured that "off" meant "don't heat to the setpoint." -- which is true in a bad way. Luckily I checked the status remotely and turned the thermostat back "On," with a proper low-temp setpoint.
This would never happen with a single-purpose mechanical thermostat. Then again, maybe I'm deep into my GetOffaMyLawn years and all sorts of climate-control devices have an "off" state that should be used with care.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
If the circuit breaker for the furnace gets tripped, this would at least tell you something's up rather than just staying dark.
For as much of a technophile as I really am; for as ready as I tend to be to adopt new technologies and connect things to the internet.... there really are a few things I am perfectly happy to use older tech for....and my home heating is one of them.
A bit back I needed to shop for a new water heater and saw some with an optional feature to wifi enable the water heater....all I could think was..... NOPE!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If it was the old, classic, manual thermostat I bet she'd have zero trouble.
I think you underestimate the technical illiteracy of older people.
For months after my grandmother first had central AC installed in her house, we'd come over to visit and find her shivering in a house that was in the mid-60s F.
We'd then reset it, but it happened again. Eventually we figured out that she didn't understand the concept that the thermostat regulates temperature. Instead, she was used to using her thermostat only to regulate heat before, and she assumed that when you turned it up higher, it caused the system to work more.
So, when the manual thermostat regulated AC, she assumed that when the AC was working too much, she just needed to "turn it down," like you'd turn the volume down on a stereo or something. Of course, that just caused it to work harder.
And I've seen otherwise intelligent people fiddling with thermostats to do similar things -- I've seen lots of people end up with a hot house in the middle of winter. What happened? "Well, I felt cold, and the furnace didn't seem to be heating fast enough, so I turned it up to 85." Somehow they think the furnace goes "faster" if you turn the manual dial further up.
Bottom line -- you'd be amazed at how (1) people don't understand how temperature works, and (2) people don't understand how thermostats and heating/cooling systems work.
Lesson of the day... probably should have bought the honeywell.
Lesson of the day... probably should have connected an old bimetallic mercury switch thermostat in parallel
Lesson of the day: design your battery-powered thermostat to FAIL ON. Or at least have a bypass-on physical switch.
What kind of cockamamie thermostat solely relies on batteries to operate? Batteries in thermostats should be for backup power to maintain the settings during a power outage.
The real question is why doesn't the Nest remain powered when there is power to the furnace. It's nice to have backup power to report to the mother ship that the power is off or the furnace isn't maintaining the setpoint.
mandatory arbitration clause...
our language had a static type system HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN
You turn the AC on in about mid to end of April, and it usually shuts off about early to mid November.
That's pretty much it. I like to keep the house about 69-70F at night, and about 72-74F during the day.
From mid-Nov I occasionally need a little heater, and that's setting it to keep it same temps during the day, but it rarely clicks on.
So, no real complex thermostat needed here.
I run my computers and a server here in my home office 24/7...so occasionally I need to crank the temps a bit lower or set up a fan to blow cooler air circulating back here, but that's about as complex as it gets.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'll keep my mercury switch, thanks.
Absolutely! I've never had the pipes burst, but I did have some freezing, and that was in a house with working heat. There was a cold snap where the temp dropped from near 70F to near 0F in a 24 hour period, and the pipes closest to the outside wall froze. Luckily, it wasn't enough to break anything.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
You mean the fugly rectangular ones (which would look like ass in the center of my existing circular escutcheon).
For a brief window early on, there were programmable thermostats in the classic round form factor (even a Honeywell, IIRC), but I haven't seen any for years - no doubt killed off by bean counters claiming the production costs were too high compared to a comparatively huge rectangular slab of circuit board. I think some folks are overlooking or down-playing this facet of the Nests' appeal.
This all does cry out for a F/OSS solution, though I suspect the potential liabilities of frozen pipes (or worse) are scaring everyone off.
But no, I don't have a Nest (too Apple / Hipsterish for me), and this (non-optional?) cloud control garbage will make sure I never do.
Taking a simple mechanical switch (that can easily be diagnosed, replaced, or even repaired should it fail) and replacing it with THE WHOLE INTERNET is fucking dumb. Could we stop calling these things "smart X", when the "smart" just means "can now be broken in a whole shit lot more ways"?
Of course, this doesn't even replace the physical parts, which can still break. You just now have issues with the wifi, the router, the firmware on the router, the latest backdoor into the router, the problem SSL had five years ago but you can't update, some issue with an app store, whatever javascript zero days will be discovered in 2018, etc.
Fucking noise.
All the comments about Nest not really learning your schedule or setting comfort levels wrong and nobody's mentioned a big competitor yet? I purchased my Ecobee about 10 months ago and am very pleased. It does connect to the internet and you can control it from your phone so put it on a different wifi network that your other devices if you're concerned. It has sensors you can put around your house so during the night it will make your bedroom comfortable at the expense of the other rooms being less comfortable. It will control humidifiers, dehumidifiers, 2 stage heating and cooling, auxiliary heat, etc. Scheduling is easy to set up and vacation scheduling is excellent. With the gas company giving me a $100 rebate for smart thermostats the price was right.
I'd like to find a single house that ever caught fire due to improper thermostat installation. Because you certainly can't electrocute yourself with that 24V circuit, so what other reason could there be for government meddling?
You are missing the point about requiring a licensed electrician. It's about jobs (usually union jobs). The safety aspect is just a ruse...
Although that doesn't always explain everything. In Oregon and New Jersey, you aren't allowed to pump your own gas. Although service stations in those states are all for allowing self-serve gas pumping (to reduce labor costs), disability activists have effectively torpedoed any bills to change these laws and keep the status quo.
Nest programming with respect to humidity is not good.
You can tell it to kick on the AC even when temps are below you're cool set point but it refuses to run the AC once temps are more than a couple of degrees below the set point. So if you'd be comfortable on dry days at 80 degrees turn on extra humid days it will only run the AC to extract humidity until inside temps get to maybe 76/77 ... even if that means it detects a humidity of 78% at that temp.
The Nest has all the tools it needs to do the right thing, but the company won't let it because then its behavior wouldn't deliver the energy reductions they want to advertise.
If you live someplace like Colorado in a relatively new house like the algorithm developers do, then it's perfect. Bottom line is you should always remember that the Nest was built for Tony Fadell's house and it's just gravy if it helps you too.
Yeah - it does get cold up here in Michigan. Also, not all homes here are "vacation cabins", mine certainly isn't! The Nest thermostat has lithium batteries that are, indeed, charged from the 24VAC wire from the HVAC system and is, ironically, the primary reason I bought one as the "smart" thermostat I had before uses 4 AA alkaline batteries that you have to change a couple times a year :/
I wondered why my Nest shut down, when I happened to be walking past it, due to low battery. I unplugged it from the wall, plugged a USB cable in the USB port to charge it and it restarted. then I plugged it back in and it's fine now. I wondered why that happened, now I know.
Vacation homes cost more than $250. So not everyone with a nest has one...
I hope they don't have pets
Twinstiq, game news
I want a nice Wifi thermostat, but I _DONT_ want it to be cloud centric. AKA I want it to present its own web interface and only _OPTIONALLY_ connect to a cloud service. I want to be able to pull heating/cooling history/etc from it, as well as remotely reprogram it, and have it monitor remote temp sensors.
There isn't a single product like that on the market for less than $1k.
I'm betting they rolled out this software update in an attempt to correct for the problems described elsewhere regarding heaters staying on too long causing overheated rooms (and increased risk of fires). Apparently some Nest engineer(s) thought it would be a good idea to harvest power from two-wire thermostat systems but did not account for the fact that by harvesting power, they might lower the impedance of the load sufficiently for the heater to turn on. This fix should reduce the (significant) risk of fires associated with using the Nest thermostats, but now users will need to deal with dead batteries because of the reduced power harvesting.
And possibly others, because they are too cool to use normal relays. Instead they use only solid state components in their thermostats which have been known to fail closed and burn up peoples AC systems (running the compressor without a fan).
Plus the ecobee's SSRs use so much power they get warm to the touch and cannot accurately sense the temp around them without the remote thermostats.
Bad design, but I guess that is what you get from a company that puts all the "smarts" in their cloud servers...
Huh. That old thermostat was common in the 40s, 50s, and 60s - and I've not seen or met a single person who couldn't figure it out or didn't already know how to use it. Kind of like a rotary or pushbutton telephone. I guess you have a higher grade of illiterates around you (I'm not sure I'd call it really technology, given it's about as complex as an oven knob).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Most people with vacation homes in Michigan would know to turn their water off in the middle of the winter if they aren't going to be there. More of a problem for a primary dwelling.
As for those saying that having access to your thermostat remotely is a useless feature, you obviously don't have such access. Been using a Nest for over a year and I actually access it from outside the home on a very regular basis (multiple times a day). It is also very helpful to get an analysis of how efficient your settings are so you can tweak them for efficiency (Nest provides monthly reports with detailed usage info). I am definitely saving money with my Nest and I have a much more comfortable home to boot.
made by Robertshaw. Two twisted wires no internet. Very simple to set. Only failed when the fucking governor, a carpetbagger from Texass, shut of our gas when it was -26F, so her friends in the southern part of the state could have heat at -5F. Three days without gas and the nat'l gard had to turn it on.
How did it leave them unable to heat their homes? No override, no bypass?
Maybe I'm a tinkerer or a control freak, but I fucking hate shit like that.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There are people that connect something as critical as their home heating system to the internet and allow the manufacturer to automatically push out firmware updates to their thermostats?
And there are people who design (and other people who buy) a thermostat that requires f***ing batteries when most homes with thermostats controlling the central heating system are also wired for AC power?
WTF? x1e6
Hey shills, come here! Right here! Call this guy "old". It's 2016, after all. When you don't have an argument, an ad hominem will do nicely!
You lost any sympathy I might have had when you wished for people to die...
Throw another log on the fire. I like to keep it simple. We grow our own fuel, dead trees, and built a high thermal mass wood stove. Uses less than a cord of wood a year for all our heating. Feed it in the morning and it's golden. Our house is high thermal mass and well insulated with some passive solar gain so even without heat it never freezes even in our cold northern climate. Build appropriately. Design simple systems. Dumb works.
Yeah because it would be way better to have random python hackers or random java hackers making software...
I'll tell you what, I used to ride a bike and have a beard not just before they were trendy, but when they were practically illegal.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That was a mistake.
Two weeks ago my Mom woke up without heat and some sort of battery message on the Nest. She lives 700 miles away so I wasn't able to go over and fix it (this battery problem had not hit the news at that time). The Nest was disconnected from the WiFi so it was "offline" and I couldn't adjust the temperature remotely. She ended up calling a furnace guy to do a house call and replace the Nest with a simpler thermostat.
I still like my Nest (particularly the "automatically turn down heat if it detects you are not home" feature), but I'm an IT guy and can handle problems. The Nest was not the right product for my Mom.
My father's like 284 years old now and still alive. (Slight exaggeration.) Over the summer he asked if I'd help him replace the HVAC. Being a good son, I told him, "Hell no." But I also told him that I'd pay someone to do it. I told him to pick out anything he wanted, get the quote, let me know who to pay. So, he picks out this industrial quality bugger rated for something like 280,000 BTU or some crap, all digital, and every fancy thing on it that you wanted.
As I'm the one paying, the installers seem to think that I have some control. *sighs* They do not know crotchety old men who spent too many years in the Marines. (I'm not half as crotchety as he.) It seems, they've got a problem. He will not part with his round thermostat from Honeywell. Nope. Not happening. Solution, I love the old man but I just had them disconnect it and put up the regular thermostats in every room and tell him that they're just to ensure that the real thermostats are working. So, he happily fiddles with the old unconnected ones (I assume) while the real thermostats do their thing.
I kind of felt bad but, well, if you knew my dad, you'd understand. I guess there's literally no way to use those old thermostats with the new system. He wasn't gonna budge one inch. So, I guess he can spin 'em around all he wants but he is very impressed with his overpowered system and he's happy he got his way with the installers and still has his old thermostats.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."