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Comment by murbard2 | Hacker News Reader

I bought a Nest thermostat and I've been extremely unimpressed with it. It's not just the bugs that will have you wake up in the middle of the night in a freezing home. Even when it works as intended, the product is poorly thought out.

- Instead of trying to learn when to apply heat and when not to, which depends on many contextual factors, it seems to be targeting learning a calendar. A calendar does not fully capture the knowledge about your schedule that a thermostat could gain.

- It would be trivial for the thermostat to figure out if your phone is connected to your home network, indicating that you might be home and don't want to be cold. AFAIK, it doesn't bother doing that. I live on a different floor from my thermostat, and thus it often concludes that I'm away.

I don't get it... Google clearly has more than enough in house talent to get those things right. Why aren't they? Why don't they seem to care?

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> It would be trivial for the thermostat to figure out if your phone is connected to your home network

Which is exactly what the Honeywell Lyric thermostat does (albeit with geofencing) and it works great. My dad has a Nest, and I knew it would never work for me - my schedule is too erratic. I got the Lyric and I love it. The model of how it sets up triggers is also very simple to understand:

(some event occurs) -> (set thermostat temp)

where "some event occurs" can be a scheduled time of day, or tapping a button in the app, or the first person's phone arrives at home, or the last person's leaves, and "set thermostat temp" can be + or - some number of degrees, or set to an "away" temp.

Since I have 3 of the Lyrics, it also makes it possible to keep some areas of the house at a different temp. E.g. just tap one button and the "bedrooms" section of the house goes to a good sleep temp, while the other sections go to "away" mode. Another trigger turns everything to a good temp ~30 mins before my scheduled wake up time.

I've always wondered if sometimes it's worth it to keep the furnace/AC on. And if so, at what point is it worth keeping it on?

I figure it's a bit like the car ignition where if you're stopped for more than x seconds, it's worth it to turn the car off. Is it like that with heating/cooling? I wonder if so, if we'll have a Thermostat that'll tell us "no it's better for you to keep it on rather than stop for the amount of time you're wanting to turn it off for"...

Anyone got helpful numbers/anecdotes?

Furnaces shouldn't excessively "short-cycle" but what that means depends on a lot of factors. You can read a bit, e.g. here:

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/appliances-gadgets/2713-minimu...

I've started using IFTTT to work around some of this. For example, I have it set home/away based on an IFTTT geofence.

Unfortunately, IFTTT doesn't do home/away yet, but you can write your own trivial "app" to do it simply by registering as a dev and using the Maker channel in IFTTT.

This type of workarounds would make sense if we were dealing with a product built by a few makers and released as a set of blueprints online...

This is produced by a company that Google, the most valuable company in the world, bought for $3.2B. It's weird that one needs to script around these issues.

That's a workaround of IFTTT limits not Nest

But the use of IFTTT itself is a workaround of issues/limits with the Nest.

Not really a limit so much as a feature that you wish it had.

If you're an iOS user, check out Skylark. Does up to five devices for geofencing. My partner and I have it, and when both of our devices are outside the fence, it goes Away. When one ones back in, it comes Home.

>I don't get it... Google clearly has more than enough in house talent to get those things right. Why aren't they? Why don't they seem to care?

I think it's because "Google" aren't involved at all. Google has it's own approach to IOT called Brillo/Weave that they're focused on. Nest is doing its own isolated thing.

I have a Nest. There's a 3rd party app called Skylark[1] that integrates with the Nest API allows you to set Away/Home according to your phone's location and your own geofences.

http://www.skylarkios.com

Works really well.

Nest always sounded weird me. How can it predict my schedule? Some days I work from home, or take the day off, and so on those days need heat; some days I come home early, or leave late. All of those instances happen constantly, but they aren't predictable. Who really has a schedule that is predictable enough that a thermostat can learn and predict it?

>Who really has a schedule that is predictable enough that a thermostat can learn and predict it?

Actually a lot of people probably do (though I certainly don't either). But a simple programmable thermostat will handle at least the 80% case. I use one and I just bump up the temperature on the weekdays when I'm home and set it to a constant lower temperature when I'm going to be away for a few days. It's really not a big deal.

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