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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.
Or just put the thermostat you took off the wall to install your Nest back up.
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?
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
A programmable thermostat that has been correctly set up is much more efficient and much less expensive
Agreed. Now, if we could only take the next step -- making coupled thermostats with humidity monitors more common.
In my experience, in humid climates the most useful measure of comfort is NOT temperature (or even relative humidity), but rather dewpoint. Comfort is a little more complex than that, but I'd much rather have a device that kept my house in the summer at roughly constant dewpoint (essentially constant absolute humidity), rather than constant temperature. With low humidity, 80+ degrees F can be perfectly comfortable. With 100% humidity, 70 degrees F can be unbearable and led you to be awash in sweat with even minimal exertion. A humidistat is also not quite an answer either, particularly if it tries to maintain static relative humidity -- again, that's not the best measure of comfort either across wide temperature ranges.
When seasons change, I'm often making on-the-fly adjustments to my programmable thermostat over several weeks, trying to strike a balance between, "I don't really need to have my AC running continuously at 70F just to remove humidity on some days" and "If I set the AC at a high temperature that would work when it's 100F, it isn't warm enough outside to make the AC run and the house will be unbearably humid."
(I know the Nest does measure humidity and can react to it, though I don't know how effective its programming is in this regard. And I would never use one anyway.)
I'd save more energy and effort adjusting my programmable thermostat if we just ignored temperature altogether. It's easy to measure, but it's simply not a good measure of human comfort.
Insulation doesn't make that much of a difference here in Florida. The reason is that we just don't have much of a temperature gradient. In a residential setting, you don't need much cooling at all. Mostly just a way to reduce humidity but the AC unit is the only means available. I have a pretty plain vanilla system and I set it just a few degrees below ambient to ensure that the thing runs and keeps humidity down. Sure there a a few hundred degree days but even then it's only terribly hot for a few hours. Most of the time, my house is within about 5F of the outside temperature so you just can't save much with insulation. My house is about 15 years old. Newer models are adding efficiency features and guaranteeing an average heating / cooling cost of about $100 for the same size unit. I can't measure my heating/cooling cost in isolation since I also do things like cook and do laundry but it's probably around $140 or so. There just isn't a lot to gain in heating/cooling in this area. On the other hand, in the Northeast, I remember $300 gas bills for a place half the size and a smart thermostat might make sense.
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.
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.