The smoke detector goes off all the time -- without rhyme or reason. With a normal detector, you can just pull the battery if it refuses to shut off. With Nest, you actually need a screw driver to open the battery compartment to turn it off.
So, when it decides to wake up the entire house at 3am (yes, the entire house, since they all go off in unison) you'll need to go find a screw driver to get it to shut up.
The one flippin' reason I bought a Nest Protect was so I could "wave to silence" an alarm. Well, every time it goes off, it tells me that "this alarm cannot be silenced" - even by pushing the power button. Not once have I been able to turn off an alarm without removing the batteries.
The worst feeling is when you get an alert on your iPhone while nobody (but your pet) is home. "Alert: your house is on fire." Then you rush home and realize it's a false alarm.
After our fourth or fifth false alarm we returned them all and replaced them with the old-fashioned alarms.
Watch this hilarious video if you're considering buying a Nest Protect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY (warning: loud alarms in video)
But, to be fair, many newer structures have all their smoke detectors wired together so when one goes off, they all go off. I experienced that in my house, built in '97, which was extremely disorienting and stressful when it first happened. Growing up in a house built in the 80s, only the kitchen's smoke detector would go off if you burned something. I understand the perceived safety enhancement, but waking up the sleeping baby because dumb ol' dad smoked too much oil when stir frying something... Ugh.
Edit: formatting.
So why can't Nest meet that standard of performance?
It announces where the "alert" is, you can wave to dismiss it, it has the app for your phone to alert you if you are away from home, and they all link together (without needing any wiring in the house, making it easy to retrofit).
Sadly in practice it's a mess, nothing works, so much so that I've lost all confidence in the product to do it's minimal function, detect smoke...
Literally all that was needed to get 100% of the reliability of the billions of detectors out on the market, while working out all the kinks on the "cloudy" sort of stuff.
I have to admit I re-invent the wheel more than I should, but man. This one seems simple :)
(1) smoke detector in kitchen goes off, only sets off in kitchen
(2) after 1 minute, other rooms start saying "smoke in kitchen"
(3) after 2 minutes, alarm goes off in other rooms
Timeline could be shortened if necessary for safety, but this doesn't seem like it would be difficult to implement.
I'm surprised you were a protect owner and didn't hear about wave to silence being disabled completely: https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-Safety
This is both hilarious and horrible from my point of view reading this
I had a similar issue with our Gen 1 Nest Protects and false alarms. After talking to tech support, they replaced all of them with Gen 2 units. They actually replaced them twice as the first set of replacements were stolen from my doorstep.
When I was ready to switch to a programmable thermostat to save money, I really, really wanted to like the Nest. It was cool, whizzbang, etc., etc. But then I started reading the 1-star reviews on Amazon, and the support forums. And it worried me. People came home to apartments that were 90* because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer. All sorts of people bought $300 Nests, only to discover their 8-year-old equipment was apparently not compatible with it. People spoke of Nests being fried by voltage surges in "old" (a scant 4 years!) HVAC systems. EEs were comparing the Nest's voltage regulators to that of a generic $20 thermostat and finding the generic more reliable in every aspect.
Nervous that my 14-year-old system would annihilate a very expensive toy, and that my wife staying at home would make the thing pointless, regardless, I bought a $100 Wifi Honeywell with a traditional 7-day calendar. It's fantastic. I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company, but their Android and web apps are simply excellent. Easy to use, well-designed, and it just works. I saved about $120 in utility bills in the first 8 months I had it, living in the nebulous division of the continental climate and humid subtropical climate in the midwest.
When we moved to San Diego to a house with only central heat, no AC, I still dropped $70 on the same thermostat just to have access to the "what temperature is it in my house right now" feature.
On the other hand, my simple Honeywell thermostats do wonderfully because I can program them to my actual schedule and only need to adjust things twice a year. Sure, it's probably not as efficient as a dynamic algorithm, but I'd rather to do this than worry about waking up freezing in the middle of the night, or worse, having my condenser unit fried by an over-eager thermostat by starting/stopping it constantly.
I am thinking of getting something Wi-Fi compatible though because setting the temp from my phone would be really nice. Too bad not many work with multi-zone systems.
That's my big problem with Nest. A basic programmable thermostat with manual override and a delayed blower feature is probably an 85% solution. Machine learning on top of that, for a single-family residence, is ridiculous overkill for very little gain.
The heat was set to go back to the daytime temperatures at 6 AM, and I began to wake up at about 5:47 every morning when, like clockwork, the furnace kicked on to reach 64 degrees before I rolled out of bed. Well played, Honeywell engineers.
Honeywell has been in business for 110 years. If you are in business that long you gotta be doing something right! I would assume.
When I was in grad school, I wired a temperature controller to an experiment, set it, satisfied myself that it was working OK, and went away. Guess what. The relay failed, and the heater was stuck on, until it melted the experiment.
As a grad student in physics (not even EE or embedded systems), I could chalk it up to a beginner mistake.
But if you design a commercial product that controls the release of large amounts of energy, you can't make beginner mistakes. There many not be many remaining reasons why age and experience are valuable traits in a engineer, but this is one of them. Germane to one of the other comments, this may also be why a 110 year old company still has a reason to exist.
The honeywell is simple, but works well. Has a vacation mode, and tells my kids how warm or cold it is outside.. cool!
It hit me when I was in bed and wanted to turn the heat up, so I grabbed my phone and launched the Nest app. Not sure what segment of the network was having issues, but it wouldn't connect to the thermostat. After about 3 minutes of fiddling, I got up, turned the heat up on the thermostat itself, and went back to bed. The whole situation was just really dumb.
The only smart thermostat feature that's at all tempting to me is the Ecobee's remote sensors (which the Nest doesn't have). I've lived in places where uneven heating is a legitimate problem.
Additionally, it's pretty good at handling things when I'm not around to manually tweak things or something changes. If I'm off one day during the week it detects that I'm at home and doesn't fall back to the "away" schedule/settings and on the flip side, if I'm away at work or somewhere else, when I start my drive home, it can start heating or cooling early so the temp is where I want it when I arrive.
It's definitely a bit "gee whiz" but so far I've had no glaring issues with it but I've had several positive ones. My main feature request is the one you mentioned with the remote sensors. I'd love to see them come up with little night-light-sized "Nest Eggs" that you can plug into outlets in different rooms, maybe act as "smart" outlets for whatever you plug into the Nest Egg (my imaginary term, not a real product) in order to manage non-smart lighting or other minor appliances, and help build a more accurate heating/cooling model of the house.
If I was working at Nest that would definitely be the new product I'd be pushing for.
Maybe each Nest is a remote sensor, and everyone who has one has their house temperature set to the same temp, the result of some super-duper averaging algorithm running on Nest's cloud.
I missed the edit window: I meant "with more sensor data than I believe it actually has."
After some investigation, I found that it had automatically set up a bunch of temperature schedules without my knowledge (I guess it thought it was smart and could learn my weekly patterns from my past usage). That's all fine if it actually cared to take my manual adjustments more seriously than trusting its own "intelligence," but I'm pretty sure it just thought my adjustments were irrelevant suggestions :)
Anyway, after clearing all the schedules that it added (and turning off auto-schedule in the settings), it now works as I would expect.
And this has been my problem with all of Google's products. They can be really smart, but when I want to override something, they treat that as irrelevant.
Is their API local to the unit or "in the cloud?"
Is that the one this it's supposed to do? I thought it's main feature was to be connected to the internet. Why you'd want that I have no idea.
I have about as cheap a programmable as you can get. It has four time ranges per day. I set them for morning, away, evening, sleep. It always works, all the time. If I come home and it's cold, or if I'm up late and it's cold, I hit the button a few times and go back to the couch.
It always works. Always. Always.
I would love to find some hackers who would love to collaborate and do something here.
Funny story: When I was working on the smart home stuff, it was called BeAtHome and the VCs some how got national attention as an energy smart/saving device. We had an office building that was physically connected to a barber shop next door. We shared the same entrace into the building. During the prototyping phase of some of the hardware, we got permission to put a pressure sensitive mat at the front door which would trigger when someone stepped on it. A web cam was then used to snap a picture and we would email this a test account, etc... We had a lot of fun on the project. The idea was a door mat or doorbell could be used to capture pictures of who is at at the front door.
One of the VC guys had a relationship with a company called Icebox which made these under the cabinet flip down screens where you could watch TV & surf the web. We were trying to connect CCTV and WebCams to their screen.
anyway, times have changed and there are so many new technologies out there that I think Nest and Smartthings (Samsung?) is ripe for some serious competition.
(The installation can be tricky; I put mine in myself and did it wrong at first because the existing wiring was mislabeled)
* Nest would, randomly, refuse to turn on AUX heat. I woke up one morning and my house was in the upper 50s (the set temperature was 68) and Nest was just sitting there trying to run the heat pump instead of turning on AUX when it wasn't keeping up. At first I thought there was something wrong with my HVAC system, but I've had two different people look my system over, on three different occasions, and found everything working properly. Nest was just refusing to turn on AUX.
The first time it happened it was in the single digits outside and Nest let my house get into the upper 50s (temperature was set at 68, and it was still trying to run the heat pump even though it was in the single freaking digits outside). I finally took Nest off the wall and manually shorted the aux heat on - I didn't want the house to get any colder while we "troubleshooted" it, and Nest was just refusing, no matter how I adjusted it, to turn the aux heat on and warm the house back up.
* Other times, it would use AUX when it doesn't need it. It was 37 outside once, and nest was burning AUX like crazy when the heat pump was having no problems keeping up. I had a nearly $400 power bill that January. Now, in fairness, it was very cold that month, but Nest using AUX when it shouldn't was a big contributor.
For awhile they wouldn't even let you set an AUX lockout lower than 35! There was a complicated "hack" you could go through that involved juggling the thermostat and the smartphone app and taking advantage of some timing flaw to set it lower. The most recent update in November or December allowed you to set a lower lockout, but the gremlin returned and Nest would be burning my AUX heat again when it was 40 outside.
How did I finally solve this? For now, until there's a better solution, I;ve set my location to somewhere 50 miles south. Really.
* They are very difficult to troubleshoot. At the time there was no way to manually turn on AUX, even to test if it's working. The only way we were able to test it is to take the thing off the wall and manually short the wires together (and, of course, it worked fine).
This is not some weird setup either. It's a standard heat pump with electric heat strips for aux heat, that's only about 5 years old. Where I live, this is the absolute most common form of heating. Because I can take the thermostat off the wall and short the wires together to turn aux on (and because I've had two different HVAC contractors check my system), I'm fairly certain the problem is not my HVAC system.
The biggest problem was, after three times of waking up to a cold house, I had a very difficult time trusting them. I had an infant in the house, and for something that I'm not supposed to have to think about, I was spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about.
So at one point I replaced one of them with a Honeywell (not the Lyric, one of the touchscreen models). And it worked fine for the rest of winter and was much less crazy to deal with, but once summer rolled around the Honeywell wouldn't turn my air conditioning on! In troubleshooting it, we found that the Honeywell was defective and wasn't putting enough voltage to activate the reversing valve. So the heat pump was still running.
So I ended up putting the Nest back on for the summer, but spent a lot of time reading the Nest forums. Apparently problems with AUX heat are SUPER common with Nests (just Google "nest aux heat" to see tons of complaints).
I'm still very wary of them. If I wake up to a cold house again, they are going right in the trash can and I'm getting another Honeywell or an ecobee3. I like being able to monitor and control from my phone or the web, but not at the cost of having to constantly worry about either my house getting too cold at night or a $400 power bill.
I like the ability to control them from the app as well as the Nest Report I get every month.
My absolutely ugly, crappy old thermostat with a needle on it works WAY better than the nest (thankfully we have it upstairs where we sleep). When it's cold, we turn that needle up, and we get warm.
With the nest, which is downstairs, when we're cold, we turn the nest up, we get weird "+2 hour" things, and nothing happens. The heater doesn't come on, we're freezing and the thing has a mind of its own. I have taken photos where I've set the thermostat at 90 degrees, the room is at about 60 degrees, and the Nest hasn't turned the heating unit on.
This is a the worst kind of sin of user experience, when a user feels like the machine controls them, and not the other way round.
As big a nerd as I am, and loved that the Nest shook up the thermostat industry, I absolutely regret buying a Nest. I wanted to love this product, but it fails spectacularly at the ONE thing it's supposed to do, which is to let us set a comfortable temperature for our house.
Because of this experience, I absolutely avoid their smoke detectors (I was ready to buy three of them before buying the thermostat). I've told family and friends to stay away as well.