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Nest Thermostat Bug Leaves Owners Without Heating (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on from the bit-chilly-in-here dept.

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.

15 of 432 comments (clear)

  1. The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by oh_my_080980980 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    2. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by rtkluttz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
    4. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by fnj · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by bonehead · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by jenningsthecat · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    7. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    8. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by Hydrian · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      No good deed goes unpunished.
    9. Re:The Cloud: 1, Users: 0 by boristdog · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. Batteries? in a Nest ? by rmdingler · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  3. Sold my Nest by trout007 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  4. A bunch of whiners by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  5. Often the simplest tool is the best job. by kent_eh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  6. Online Review.... by bobbied · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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