We have a Nest thermostat, we have now turned off every single smart feature and just use it for a schedule and turning it on/off remotely when away (we gave up with the automatic away detection). I should also point out we are in the UK. I’m completely unconvinced that “smart” thermostats achieve anything for the majority of homes in the UK, despite most energy suppliers pushing customers to purchase them for years.
For those unaware, the majority of homes in the UK have a gas boiler central heating system with TRVs on each radiator. This means that you end up with two competing temperature control systems in your home, which result in some rooms regularly being too cold/hot, it literally worse than have no central thermostat.
We now have the Nest set to about 5deg higher than we want, then have all the TRVs set to what we want each room to be.
In our last house we had the Tado system with “smart” electric TRVs, you would think that would solve the problems, but it was flaky, noisy and very expensive.
If I was doing it again I would get whatever the cheapest boiler controller with remote (internet) control I could find. But then I would probably not be putting in a gas boiler again, I'm hoping that by next time we need to overhaul a heating system heat pump systems have dropped in price in the UK.
I'm sure that in countries where people tend to have forced air HVAC systems these thermostats make a lot more sense. And I do love the industrial design, it is a "beautiful" thermostat.
When I moved into my current house we had painters working on one floor. They cranked the newly programmed Nest that was in learning mode to 90 degrees for one night to keep the paint warm while it dried. I, of course, had no idea they had done something that silly, but for weeks afterwards this smart thermostat will crank the heat to 90 and I have to manually turn it down. I'm convinced that it will not be able to unlearn and I'll have to delete the profile and recreate it. I should set it on a schedule as you mention.
Am I the only one who sees "learning" features for things like this as nothing more than overcomplicated ways to engineer in unexpected, unwanted behavior?
My heating/cooling desires are straightforward: unless I'm gone, stay in this range. I am not gone on a predictable schedule, any pattern it picks up will be incorrect.
The only thing the "ugly beige box" doesn't do that I want is remote access, and that would only have been handy a couple of times in the last 11 years I've been in this place. And that is not worth the surveillance or the freakishly buggy behavior some people report.
I'm increasingly convinced the major effect of "AI" will be to ensure that instead of bugs not being fixed because ultimately they aren't considered worth fixing, bugs will not be fixed because nobody understands them.
I have an Ecobee. Agree with you that the killer feature definitely isn't the self learning stuff.
It's simply:
- Has WiFi (update from phone)
Then also:
- Being able to link with Alexa or similar to do things like turning off when you leave automatically
- Custom programming modes. So instead of setting a temperature at a single time during the day (home/away), you could do (morning/home/home2/afternoon/night/away)
- Can run my fan once an hour automatically for just 5 minutes
The remote functionality is nice, as is the auto-away part. Those alone make it worthwhile, but I agree that the "smart" functionality leaves much to be desired.
Ours, somehow, has gotten into a state where it thinks we like to bounce between 68 - 70 degrees all day, and doesn't "learn" when I try to adjust it back to the same temperature it was. The weekly schedule has over 70 different temperatures on it and there is no (obvious) way to reset it, so I haven't bothered to go clean it up. I think it could do better there.
You might enjoy some videos from HeatGeek on youtube. Something they cover that if you design the heating system correctly (with appropriate temperature compensation on the boiler) you only need TRVs or thermostats as limiting controls. Which sounds similar to what you are saying, aka set the thermostat to the maximum temperature you would ever want then just let the system run.
TRVs have barely been developed. They’ve existed for about 4 years so far and most Chinese sellers have already gone through 4 - 5 design iterations. Any TRV relying to auto adjust based on temperature of the thermals from the TRV head are wrong. It’s a stupid design and was never going to work.
The only way to reliably set temperature is by reading it elsewhere in the room. With radiators that’s really inconsistent because they’re slow to heat up and slow to cool down if you “over heat”.
Also the window detection feature on any TRV should be disabled. It’ll only cause you issues.
I simply have a “fully open” or “off” control from a Zigbee gateway per room. I’d consider adding sustained motion sensors to each room but to be honest just having a timer to turn them on in the morning, off at bed time and the ability to adjust and view what rooms are on manually from my desk or phone is more than enough.
There’s value in electric TRVs but not in the automating part beyond scheduling.
Thermostatic Radiator Valves for anyone wondering.
The "smart" feature in the UK seems to be add a temperature change every time you adjust the temperature, so your "smart" schedule is just the temperature yo-yoing throughout the day between 14 and 20C based on what you did in winter.
Then to edit it you have the worst possible UI and end up, like you said, turning all off the smart features.
I lived in a Georgian (so built somewhere in 19th century) flat in London with Nest, gas boiler and thermostats on radiators. My experience was similar.
In a while I realized that to make the experience smart would not be to add a different thermostat but to change the windows and have some proper insulation. To get that I had to ditch the whole country tho. It's just abysmal how much gas is fired to heat the streets.
Insulating an old house in the city is expensive but it had been there for 150ish years .. the breakeven from adding insulation would be what? 10 years? 20?
I find even here that the “smart” features basically come down to “I can bump the temperature from my couch” and not much more.
Ever since work from home the “away” hasn’t mattered much and the house has so much thermal mass that letting it cool down a bit when we are actually away doesn’t seem to do much at all.
I'm reading his book Build right now - it came out last week, so assuming that's why he's appearing all over all the feed). About 2/3rds of the way through currently.
My thoughts:
1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation.
2. Some advice goes heavily against current startup orthodoxy. He rejects fail-fast / figure it out later mentality, and argues for a lengthy product design process (for both atoms and bits!).
3. Lots of good details about how to think about managing people, managing and scaling team, and issues with scaling, etc, taken from his days building Nest.
Both (2) and (3) stand out to me as functions of his specific background. Building a company like Nest is obviously wildly (!) hard, but doing it after building the iPhone is a different game. I don't think his advice about lengthy design processes make a ton of sense for my startup [1], for example.
Generally, I always try and remind myself when I'm reading company-building advice books: this is probably good advice for someone in the same context as Tony Fadell (e.g. someone who is launching a second company after building... the iPhone). For me, it may or may not be relevant.
The good thing about failing fast is that you can use it at a strategy-level, aka fail fast _at_ failing fast, and switch to longer product cycles if you think that might work better. Starting with a long-product cycle doesn't give you much of a chance to try again if your first swing is a miss (which Mito's first attempt was...).
> My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation.
He's been doing a lot of history rewriting.
Don't get me wrong: Building and shipping Nest was a great accomplishment. However, he was a famously terrible leader in many regards and drove a number of great employees away.
When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring.
Nest didn't go on to revolutionize the space after Tony Fadell arrived with his hard-hitting management styles. Nest cameras haven't really evolved much and the Nest security system was abandoned.
I don't doubt that there are some lessons to be learned in his book, but in practice Tony Fadell hasn't been a great leader in the past decade. I'd take his book with a grain of salt.
> When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring.
I worked on a team that spent months designing an API, database tables, architecture, etc before implementing a single line of code. It was quite a different experience and we ended up with a far better product than we would have otherwise (faster too!). We also took three weeks working on planned work and then one week to work on “unplanned work” between iterations. “Unplanned” was basically anything goes. Fix a bug that annoyed you, refactor code because you wanted to be able to extend it later, etc.
We had a git repo that /only/ contained design docs and recorded decisions as PRs. Nothing was discussed “offline” so everything was recorded. In meetings we would make the final decision and actually merge the said PRs.
It was so different from working on any other project, and actually more fun.
Seriously give a team at your startup to try that route. I think you’d be surprised after a few months to a year. The quality of the work we output was light years beyond any other team at the company, IMHO.
There's many good gems here and his philosophy hits close to home.
I don't think you need to be of his fame to apply it. Many of these tips are applicable. I find lots of his product & marketing advice to be very useful for new PMs to tech too.
When I read the headline, I assumed that this was going to be a negative review from a user.
We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperature, otherwise it will disobey your commands and go to the configured energy saving temperature. There were 2 problems with this, one universal and one application-specific: first, if you live in anything other than a small apartment your thermostat may be in a different room from you. In our 2-story house, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're specifically in the living room. The 2 2nd-floor bedrooms, the 1st-floor bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, the dining room, and the 1st-floor office all don't count. In our house specifically the thermostat was installed behind a wall-mounted TV, which only makes things worse - even if you're in the living room, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're actively playing with it.
Trying to make the Nest ignore whether you're home and disable the eco mode is an exercise in futility. I found a setting to disable eco mode, but the house was still never the temperature we set it to. When I checked the thermostat I saw the green leaf icon, indicating that the Nest completely ignores the setting that disables eco mode. When I called Nest support, they couldn't figure out what was going on either. The only way I could get it to function semi-reasonably was to manually set the eco mode temperature to the temperature we actually wanted the house at, which means that you have to set the temperature twice to actually set the temperature.
The idea of a thermostat that tries to save power automatically is great, but it falls apart when you rely on a single motion sensor to determine if an entire house is occupied. This bad assumption was a letdown, but the fake setting to disable eco mode turned me off of Nest completely.
I know exactly what you’re talking about, as I’ve had a share of my own struggles against Nest which thinks it knows better. However, right now, I have it set like the following:
And it works just like a normal thermostat, which makes me happy. I’d never buy a smart thermostat now, I keep using Nest because previous owner of the house installed it, and after lobotomizing it, it works good enough.
Interesting. Someone had told me that the Nest figures out if you're home by recognizing the presence of your phone. I wonder if that information was wrong or only applied to a specific version of the Nest.
At one point, I had a cheap WiFi thermostat. No smart features, just allowed remote control via app or web page. At one point, I had reverse-engineered the web app API and wrote a script to implement "away" detection and shut the thermostat off if both phones were away.
The problem was two-fold. First, it detected the phones being away by simply pinging the phone's local IP address. If the phone was in a power saving mode that disabled WiFi, the script would detect the phone as away. Second, I ran into the problem the article author had: If everyone was away, it got cold in the winter, and an absolute oven in the summer, and my aging A/C unit couldn't get the temperature back down until the sun went down.
The ecobee3 solves this particular problem by having remote sensors. I'm absolutely in love with it since it takes an average of all the sensors as the temperature.
My nest once asked if I wanted it to "learn" my habits and adjust accordingly. I clicked Ok thinking it would create a nice schedule. Instead it set temperatures to 14C at random times and be all over the map with when to heat the house and when to leave it cooler.
I thought it also used the bluetooth aspect of the app to know if you're home? IOW, if the app can ping Nest over bluetooth, the Nest knows you're home.
Heads up for privacy minded people in the Apple ecosystem... if you buy a HomeKit thermostat (or generally any HomeKit compatible device), you can usually set it up without the vendors app, or making an account, or accepting the ToS or Privacy Policy. There are some well established boring HVAC thermostat makers that have HomeKit compatible devices, and they are available for under $100. If you are a renter, you may need to get a 100-240VAC -> 24 VAC power brick to supply adequate power if your HVAC is not wired up properly.
I love my honeywell thermostat. It has wifi, a touch screen, schedules, and that's it. I can control it from my phone, google home, and no smarts. It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year. The single pane to double pane window showed just how much energy I was saving. I wouldn't touch a "smart" thermostat with a stick, but this dumb wifi thing is incredible.
We have a Nest in which we turned off all smarts and scheduling, but it was still turning itself on and smoking us out of the house. We could not find any setting, any schedule, or anything that indicated why it was turning on. We ended up having to do a factory reset, and we never connected it back to the WiFi to get rid of these "smart" scheduling features. If anything, the Nest wastes money when using its smart features, as it's never on or off when it needs to be. The most stable room in the house is the basement controlled by a dumb, admittedly ugly thermostat.
The only nice thing about Nests is the overall look, but they're really poor devices. The OS on them constantly lags, causing dial inputs to suddenly "catch up". Each one of our Nests has its own personality: one lags, one turns on when it wants to (prior to factory reset, probably the third or fourth time we've had to do so), and the other one seems to actually just work.
This is the one I have. It came with my house that I bought so I didn't even pick it out so I'm not some shill. The app is kind of old and ugly but I honestly don't even care because it just works. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Honeywell-Home-Wi-Fi-Smart-Color...
"It gives me energy reports from the same month of last year."
I have 2x Nests in my house and I don't know if I'm missing something, but I only get a usage history for the past week. I feel like a "smart" thermostat should tell me a lot more about my usage and it should be pretty trivial to develop.
> Shipping the Nest thermostat with a screwdriver "turned a moment of frustration into a moment of delight"
I must be in the minority then. I end up with a ton of these product-specific screwdrivers and get a little frustrated that I have to throw it away, contributing ever-so-slightly to the pile of consumer waste.
It'd be cool if you could select a "need tools" option sort of like how take out now has a "need utensils" option.
Just send it to your local goodwill. Some single mother just scraping by in a rotting-out apartment who suddenly needs to fix a sink or lighting fixture that duct tape just isn't working on any more will be delighted to find your nest brand screwdriver with a fifty cent sticker while looking for a pair of shoes her growing kid's feet might fit in.
And that's just here in the US. Our working poor are the world's one percent. If our definition of consumer waste is things no one would like to hold on to, then even what we consider the most banal tools are not consumer waste, and it will be a very long time until they are.
Check out the picture - it's not a product-specific screwdriver, it's just a screwdriver with standard Philips and flathead bits. Some of the products used outdoors have security bits, but even those are just Torx bits most of the time. I am delighted to not need additional tools, and feel no pressure to keep it since I have a good set of screwdrivers already. Plus, this makes a handy small one to keep in the kitchen for random uses.
The zinus bedframe I bought came with a mini ratcheting wrench instead of a flat wrench. The wrench is just the right size to fit hex shank screwdriver bits, and so I've used it many times when I couldn't find my screwdriver or I needed just a little bit more torque. I have even used it to repair my John Deere tractor since it's small enough to fit where a regular size ratcheting wrench couldn't.
The wrench definitely made the product feel higher quality, and I have a tool I will keep for a long time, if I don't wear it out.
For me it's kind of a wash. For years I avoided buying any imperial allen keys because I had a pile of free ones that were good when I infrequently needed them. I also got this combination 2.5mm hex / Phillips screwdriver which is actually quite convenient as those are the sizes of screwdriver I need most frequently.
The rest go into the landfill unfortunately, and I agree the waste isn't really worth the 3 random sizes of allen key I once needed.
I'm a little wary of those cheap hex keys -- I've been burned a few times by them stripping out a hex head when the key was just a little loose. I know I should invest in some quality hex keys, but you are right -- it's hard to justify the purchase when I already have so many lying around.
His new book Build was an excellent read. Highly recommend it, really picks up after Chapter 2 with lots of good advice and anecdotes. It also contextualized where our startup is for me and helped me visualize what to anticipate in the future really well.
Readit News
For those unaware, the majority of homes in the UK have a gas boiler central heating system with TRVs on each radiator. This means that you end up with two competing temperature control systems in your home, which result in some rooms regularly being too cold/hot, it literally worse than have no central thermostat.
We now have the Nest set to about 5deg higher than we want, then have all the TRVs set to what we want each room to be.
In our last house we had the Tado system with “smart” electric TRVs, you would think that would solve the problems, but it was flaky, noisy and very expensive.
If I was doing it again I would get whatever the cheapest boiler controller with remote (internet) control I could find. But then I would probably not be putting in a gas boiler again, I'm hoping that by next time we need to overhaul a heating system heat pump systems have dropped in price in the UK.
I'm sure that in countries where people tend to have forced air HVAC systems these thermostats make a lot more sense. And I do love the industrial design, it is a "beautiful" thermostat.
When I moved into my current house we had painters working on one floor. They cranked the newly programmed Nest that was in learning mode to 90 degrees for one night to keep the paint warm while it dried. I, of course, had no idea they had done something that silly, but for weeks afterwards this smart thermostat will crank the heat to 90 and I have to manually turn it down. I'm convinced that it will not be able to unlearn and I'll have to delete the profile and recreate it. I should set it on a schedule as you mention.
My heating/cooling desires are straightforward: unless I'm gone, stay in this range. I am not gone on a predictable schedule, any pattern it picks up will be incorrect.
The only thing the "ugly beige box" doesn't do that I want is remote access, and that would only have been handy a couple of times in the last 11 years I've been in this place. And that is not worth the surveillance or the freakishly buggy behavior some people report.
I'm increasingly convinced the major effect of "AI" will be to ensure that instead of bugs not being fixed because ultimately they aren't considered worth fixing, bugs will not be fixed because nobody understands them.
It's simply:
- Has WiFi (update from phone)
Then also:
- Being able to link with Alexa or similar to do things like turning off when you leave automatically
- Custom programming modes. So instead of setting a temperature at a single time during the day (home/away), you could do (morning/home/home2/afternoon/night/away)
- Can run my fan once an hour automatically for just 5 minutes
- Looks cool
Chinese branded and produced ones like Tuya and MoesHouse are really the only option.
Even Honeywell aren’t producing them.
Ours, somehow, has gotten into a state where it thinks we like to bounce between 68 - 70 degrees all day, and doesn't "learn" when I try to adjust it back to the same temperature it was. The weekly schedule has over 70 different temperatures on it and there is no (obvious) way to reset it, so I haven't bothered to go clean it up. I think it could do better there.
The only way to reliably set temperature is by reading it elsewhere in the room. With radiators that’s really inconsistent because they’re slow to heat up and slow to cool down if you “over heat”.
Also the window detection feature on any TRV should be disabled. It’ll only cause you issues.
I simply have a “fully open” or “off” control from a Zigbee gateway per room. I’d consider adding sustained motion sensors to each room but to be honest just having a timer to turn them on in the morning, off at bed time and the ability to adjust and view what rooms are on manually from my desk or phone is more than enough.
There’s value in electric TRVs but not in the automating part beyond scheduling.
Thermostatic Radiator Valves for anyone wondering.
Then to edit it you have the worst possible UI and end up, like you said, turning all off the smart features.
In a while I realized that to make the experience smart would not be to add a different thermostat but to change the windows and have some proper insulation. To get that I had to ditch the whole country tho. It's just abysmal how much gas is fired to heat the streets.
Insulating an old house in the city is expensive but it had been there for 150ish years .. the breakeven from adding insulation would be what? 10 years? 20?
Ever since work from home the “away” hasn’t mattered much and the house has so much thermal mass that letting it cool down a bit when we are actually away doesn’t seem to do much at all.
My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation. 2. Some advice goes heavily against current startup orthodoxy. He rejects fail-fast / figure it out later mentality, and argues for a lengthy product design process (for both atoms and bits!). 3. Lots of good details about how to think about managing people, managing and scaling team, and issues with scaling, etc, taken from his days building Nest.
Both (2) and (3) stand out to me as functions of his specific background. Building a company like Nest is obviously wildly (!) hard, but doing it after building the iPhone is a different game. I don't think his advice about lengthy design processes make a ton of sense for my startup [1], for example.
Generally, I always try and remind myself when I'm reading company-building advice books: this is probably good advice for someone in the same context as Tony Fadell (e.g. someone who is launching a second company after building... the iPhone). For me, it may or may not be relevant.
The good thing about failing fast is that you can use it at a strategy-level, aka fail fast _at_ failing fast, and switch to longer product cycles if you think that might work better. Starting with a long-product cycle doesn't give you much of a chance to try again if your first swing is a miss (which Mito's first attempt was...).
[1] https://trymito.io
He's been doing a lot of history rewriting.
Don't get me wrong: Building and shipping Nest was a great accomplishment. However, he was a famously terrible leader in many regards and drove a number of great employees away.
When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring.
Nest didn't go on to revolutionize the space after Tony Fadell arrived with his hard-hitting management styles. Nest cameras haven't really evolved much and the Nest security system was abandoned.
I don't doubt that there are some lessons to be learned in his book, but in practice Tony Fadell hasn't been a great leader in the past decade. I'd take his book with a grain of salt.
^^ This.
Aamir Virani, who was the co-founder of Dropcam, has his take on this here: https://aamusings.substack.com/p/who-lives-who-dies-who-tell... (also https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1522280960984707072.html)
We had a git repo that /only/ contained design docs and recorded decisions as PRs. Nothing was discussed “offline” so everything was recorded. In meetings we would make the final decision and actually merge the said PRs.
It was so different from working on any other project, and actually more fun.
Seriously give a team at your startup to try that route. I think you’d be surprised after a few months to a year. The quality of the work we output was light years beyond any other team at the company, IMHO.
There's many good gems here and his philosophy hits close to home.
I don't think you need to be of his fame to apply it. Many of these tips are applicable. I find lots of his product & marketing advice to be very useful for new PMs to tech too.
We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperature, otherwise it will disobey your commands and go to the configured energy saving temperature. There were 2 problems with this, one universal and one application-specific: first, if you live in anything other than a small apartment your thermostat may be in a different room from you. In our 2-story house, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're specifically in the living room. The 2 2nd-floor bedrooms, the 1st-floor bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, the dining room, and the 1st-floor office all don't count. In our house specifically the thermostat was installed behind a wall-mounted TV, which only makes things worse - even if you're in the living room, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're actively playing with it.
Trying to make the Nest ignore whether you're home and disable the eco mode is an exercise in futility. I found a setting to disable eco mode, but the house was still never the temperature we set it to. When I checked the thermostat I saw the green leaf icon, indicating that the Nest completely ignores the setting that disables eco mode. When I called Nest support, they couldn't figure out what was going on either. The only way I could get it to function semi-reasonably was to manually set the eco mode temperature to the temperature we actually wanted the house at, which means that you have to set the temperature twice to actually set the temperature.
The idea of a thermostat that tries to save power automatically is great, but it falls apart when you rely on a single motion sensor to determine if an entire house is occupied. This bad assumption was a letdown, but the fake setting to disable eco mode turned me off of Nest completely.
https://postimg.cc/D8YBfB4x
And it works just like a normal thermostat, which makes me happy. I’d never buy a smart thermostat now, I keep using Nest because previous owner of the house installed it, and after lobotomizing it, it works good enough.
At one point, I had a cheap WiFi thermostat. No smart features, just allowed remote control via app or web page. At one point, I had reverse-engineered the web app API and wrote a script to implement "away" detection and shut the thermostat off if both phones were away.
The problem was two-fold. First, it detected the phones being away by simply pinging the phone's local IP address. If the phone was in a power saving mode that disabled WiFi, the script would detect the phone as away. Second, I ran into the problem the article author had: If everyone was away, it got cold in the winter, and an absolute oven in the summer, and my aging A/C unit couldn't get the temperature back down until the sun went down.
The only nice thing about Nests is the overall look, but they're really poor devices. The OS on them constantly lags, causing dial inputs to suddenly "catch up". Each one of our Nests has its own personality: one lags, one turns on when it wants to (prior to factory reset, probably the third or fourth time we've had to do so), and the other one seems to actually just work.
I have 2x Nests in my house and I don't know if I'm missing something, but I only get a usage history for the past week. I feel like a "smart" thermostat should tell me a lot more about my usage and it should be pretty trivial to develop.
I must be in the minority then. I end up with a ton of these product-specific screwdrivers and get a little frustrated that I have to throw it away, contributing ever-so-slightly to the pile of consumer waste.
It'd be cool if you could select a "need tools" option sort of like how take out now has a "need utensils" option.
And that's just here in the US. Our working poor are the world's one percent. If our definition of consumer waste is things no one would like to hold on to, then even what we consider the most banal tools are not consumer waste, and it will be a very long time until they are.
The wrench definitely made the product feel higher quality, and I have a tool I will keep for a long time, if I don't wear it out.
The rest go into the landfill unfortunately, and I agree the waste isn't really worth the 3 random sizes of allen key I once needed.
Deleted Comment
I bought three Nests and while the thermostats are pretty annoying, I really love the screwdrivers.
They are really pleasant to hold.
For the past four and a half years it's been on a shelf in the basement, in its box. Gonna throw it out someday.
What crappy tech. Its problem: its backing plate heats up. Causing the house to be perpetually cold.
Three Nest backing-plate replacements later, we gave up.
We presently have a much dumber thermostat that can be remotely controlled. We're happy now, but we'll never purchase another Nest product again.
Either way - she hasn’t installed it and it’s worked fine. It’s possible you had a dud unit?