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

The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[QuietLagoon]

When you cede control of your world to The Cloud and automatic updates, you should not expect reliability.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[oh_my_080980980]

What part of "you should not expect reliability" did you not understand....

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing wrong with the Cloud for this.

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.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[Anonymous Coward]

We cede of a lot of things to centralized generation and control.

You mean like power, water, sewer, gas? All of those things are run by government or highly regulated industries that are held up to much higher standards than some "technology" company owned by an advertising company.

And if this Google owned company has this kind of access to people's homes, I wonder what data they are collecting and how they are going to monetize it. I for one could use that data to find all the folks who use a lot of energy and sell those names to energy and HVAC companies - just off of the top of my head - and put in some exaggerated claim how much they can save by buying my service and equipment.

This IoT will not end well. I've lost way too much privacy as it is all for the sake of business trying to sell me their shit. And they have the advantage because they know all about me.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[rtkluttz]

Oh there is everything wrong with the cloud for this. Why should anyone have smart devices that are under someone elses control? That is absolutely ludicrous. I would love something like a Nest, but only if I access it DIRECTLY through my firewall and have 100 control of the device and its data flow. Why in the purple fuck would anyone think it is OK to have to authenticate to someone elses servers to control something in your own home? Give us smart connected devices that we don't have to ask permission to use because they are ours. In every sense of the word.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry; the 2.0 version of the light switch software will reboot itself periodically so you don't have to!

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

[bonehead]

The thermostat being the front end in this case, I would expect it to be as reliable as a complex system can be.

See, there's where you get off track.

I would expect something as simple as a thermostat to be "not complex" in the first place.

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

[TWX]

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.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[gstoddart]

For an application like this, if you want a "mature and reliable", you bloody well buy a thermostat which isn't connected, comes from a company which has been making thermostats a long time, and actually know what they're doing.

Because those things are designed to run without ever being updated or connected to anything.

Oh, and they don't upload your information to anybody or provide security holes into your home.

Go buy a Honeywell programmable thermostat or something. You'll find you never have this problem.

I'm afraid I've kind of reached "peak sympathy" for these problems. To a non-tech person they seem really cool, but it's not like this kind of stupidity wasn't entirely foreseeable and predicted.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[afidel]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The correlation is high enough to believe it is causation ;-)

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).

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[Hydrian]

It is not the older is better. It is that tested and vetted is better. That takes time. Never get the newest and greatest unless you are willing to deal with the chance of it breaking or acting in appropriately.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[I'm New Around Here]

You have to realize you are talking to an Ixian here. If it can be made more complex through technology, they are the ones to do it.

It could be worse. He could be Tleilaxu.

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[boristdog]

Well, the "Baby Boomers" didn't name themselves. The previous generation did. But that generation named themselves "The Greatest Generation."

Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0

[DamonHD]

Slippery slope arguments are a slippery slope: how do we know aliens won't force the GOP to run some kind of idiot for president to make that happen?

So, what you are talking about will either not be possible (to impose on you) because you can just stop taking the 'money off for utility control' dollar, or you can't because a politician will have legislated something stupid to force you to take it, in which case your gripe is with them.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Unable to Control != No Heat

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Batteries? in a Nest ?

[rmdingler]

Protip: Almost every home heating and cooling system operates on demand from a t-stat that runs on 24 volts ac low 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.

Re:Batteries? in a Nest ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just put the thermostat you took off the wall to install your Nest back up.

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

[AthanasiusKircher]

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.

Re:Sold my Nest

[edtice1559]

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.

Not as lame as you think

[cat_jesus]

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.

A bunch of whiners

[110010001000]

Nest saved them money by not heating their homes. And still they complain???

I have heard of computers freezing ...

[Alain Williams]

due to a software error, but not the rooms that the computers are in.

Often the simplest tool is the best job.

[kent_eh]

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?

Re:Often the simplest tool is the best job.

[c]

And, really, how much benefit does internet connectivity really add to a thermostat anyway?

I can see use for a *network* connected thermostat. Adjusting the programming on a typical 5-2 with a tiny LCD display and 5-6 buttons is horrible. I have to track down the manual every time daylight savings changes. A web page served up on my LAN would be a far less aggravating user interface, unless the UI designers were from Facebook. I'd also prefer a network of temp sensors throughout the house reporting back to the thermostat rather than having it stuck on the wall of one room. But mostly, it's about the clock. My definition of "smart device" is one where I never need to program the actual time.

Incidentally, the time/program UI issue is what I see as the major advantage of a connected coffee maker.

That being said, there's zero need for any of that information to leave my house.

They finally fixed it

[hawkbug]

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.

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

Re:Lame

[gstoddart]

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 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.

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..