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.

Comments

Sold my Nest

[trout007]

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.

Re: Sold my Nest

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Florida too. I never understood what problem the Nest was trying to solve. A programmable thermostat that has been correctly set up is much more efficient and much less expensive, at least in our climate. Having only lived in the southern most states, the reasoning behind buying Nest always baffled me.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[rtkluttz]

Internet of things is not the problem. Connected things that we control directly.. i.e. punch a hole through our own firewall and access our stuff directly from our other stuff could be a great time saver and make things easier. I will NEVER authenticate to other peoples servers to ask permission to access something in my own home. Number 1, I'll control my own access, thank you very much, and the company I bought the equipment from will not be on the list of authorized users. To do otherwise is the equivalent of buying a house and the real estate agent never giving you the keys.. and insisting that he be the one that comes and unlocks the door every time you come home. Oh and he'll periodically repaint your house a color of his choosing. Fuck that. Internet of things = Good. Current tie to cloud implementations = Hell fucking no.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[fnj]

Found the millenial. ^^^

When I recently encountered a person who thought it was normal to have to reboot their light switches (some brand of automated switch) I finally realized that what old people say is true: sometimes the old way of doing things is better.

Hear, hear. Billowing, rickety complexity and interdependence for its own sake leads to only one logical conclusion. This was all foreseen in 1909 by E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[jenningsthecat]

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 with the IOT unit, set to 10 degrees Celsius or so... "Doesn't go that low", you say? Then simply tilt the thermostat a bit...

Old, simple, no-active-component technologies still have their place, even if only as a fail-safe for shiny-but-vulnerable microcontroller-based gadgets.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[mrchaotica]

FYI, "millennial" is not a synonym for "dumbass." There's plenty of us who know better than to buy into "IoT" and "Cloud" shit.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[mrchaotica]

Georgia Power will give you a "free" Nest thermostat if you sign up for the "smart usage" plan (which means paying more for peak usage, and paying based on the peak power usage rather than only the total power usage).

Poor QA is the problem

[StayFrosty]

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.

Re:Poor QA is the problem

[slew]

The problem is that Nest is a bit *too* smart for it's own good. Smart things require power and native power requirements of such a smart controller are larger than that can be supplied by common thermostat wiring schemes.

Older thermostat wiring (in 70% of houses) can only really deliver power through the wiring when the heat (or ac) is on/active, so a thermostat must sip power when it is active, and save when it is idle. Ironically, the wire in the wiring scheme that can be used to deliver continuous power is called the "common" wire even though it is actually not too common** ;^)

Being "smart", the Nest device (as with most "smart" controllers) likely attempts to use various power savings tricks to reduce their native power requirements to a lower average power so it can survive between active times on a battery with this typically wiring. Apparently this update wasn't as smart as it thought it was about conserving power and the energy received during the active time and their efforts were not enough to keep all the smarts going on the battery...

Of course the older "dumber" smart thermostats, drew such a small amount of power that they didn't need to apply smart power savings tricks to keep things alive between active cycles. Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good and I think the Nest falls into one of those situations...

** common as in common voltage potential in AC transformer thermostat wiring systems

Online Review....

[bobbied]

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..