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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.
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 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.
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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.
Trouble is, this thermostat is both a user interface and a control device, so it needs to be robust. If it isn't, there are 5+2 day and 7 day thermostats from Honeywell that can be programmed to expected occupancy schedules and can even be programmed to reverse the heatpump when the seasons change (basically if temp below low-setting, apply heat, if temp above high-setting, apply cool) and these only need a pair of AA batteries to run for more than a year.
I've had to deal with EMS controller woes in the past- the HVAC people programmed the EMS controllers to basically require a network connection back to their HQ in order to function, else they went into an error-state. When it was pointed-out that there were innumerable points of failure including the LAN at the facility, the WAN, and worst of all, their own HQ's LAN or WAN that could take the entire organization down, only then did it dawn on them that it was a bad idea to so centrally-control the EMS, and they've migrated back to a more sane policy where EMS just runs its set programming until interrupted by the HQ controller.
We've seen a lot of failure-mode problems lately, to me this points to a lack of quality assurance testing. The trend in having the programmer QA their own code is obviously not providing us with the results that we need and should be stopped.
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Demand control for high drain devices are fine and most users never even notice because the cycle periods where they are shaving peak load are short enough that it makes no difference to the conditions in the house under control (ie if your heat pump runs 15 minutes from now or RIGHT NOW makes little difference to the temp in the house since even relatively crappy houses have enough insulation that delta t is less than one degree per hour). The tradeoff is that we get to build fewer transmission lines and peaking plants which means lower bills for everyone.
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