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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.
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.
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.
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.
due to a software error, but not the rooms that the computers are in.
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?
Even a non-Nest thermostat will fail to operate when its battery dies (though they usually give plenty of warning).
In most instances, the batteries are unnecessary if there is a 24v neutral wire run to the thermostat from the furnace.
Often, even if there's not one, there are extra wires inside the cable that can be commandeered to provide power to the t-stat in the form of 24v ac. The batteries are still recommended to keep your setting preferences in case of power outage.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
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....).
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.
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.
Self driving cars are easy... now thermostats... those are hard.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
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."
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.
My mercury switch thermostat did fail; it would turn the furnace on and off but not at the set-point (and not at a fixed offset either; it would change).
I have a Nest now, but I'm paranoid enough to keep a Honeywell Round (new non-mercury version) around just in case.
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.
The VAST majority of thermostats in North America are 24V with millivolt and line voltage (like yours) being a tiny fraction of installs.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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
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
Auto-away has worked okay except when the Christmas tree is in the way and it goes to 64 F while we are home.
Their big downfall is not allowing remote sensors or a remote sensor API other than buying another nest (and what - hooking it up to a 24VAC outlet?) or getting one of their smoke detectors.
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.