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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

The month Google originally bought Nest, I sold my thermostat to someone else and picked up an Insteon thermostat instead. My Insteon thermostat's been a reliable partner since, and doesn't send my data to anyone. I actually turned a profit on it, since I got rebate credit from my electric company originally for buying it.

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I'm really happy with the Ecobee as well. The Alexa integration in the newer model doesn't work well possibly due to inferior microphones, in my experience, but I didn't want that anyway so it fits my needs perfectly.

In a few years, it will also return a profit due to an at-purchase and annual credit that my electricity utility provides.

The Ecobee has been great, simple and just works. I received it for free from some in-home energy program, but I will buy another when I move.

Does Ecobee have a local API option? I thought it was cloud based as well ...

As far as I understand, it is cloud-based as well with no accessible local API, so it unfortunately doesn't eliminate this possibility in the future.

Glad to see a recommendation for the Insteon thermostat. I have a Nest, but Insteon light switches (and other low voltage controls) throughout so that seems like the logical upgrade path.

Another thing I use that's quite handy is the wireless thermostat from Insteon. It's really more of a remote control/temperature sensor, but it integrates nicely. You can see the temperature from both units, and select which one is the master (the one it's trying to get to the set temperature).

I have pets which don't do well above a certain temperature so I keep my wireless unit by them.

My gripe is the design is nowhere near as good. It's like going from an iPhone to a feature phone.

I wish there were an open-source Nest firmware, or at least an open-source backend. Google doesn't need to know when I'm home.

"Design" is far from my key value metric in a thermostat. When I had my Nest, it looked pretty, but I kept having to re-set the temperature because they'd add some new smart feature that didn't behave the way I wanted to. I ended up largely crippling the crud out of it to begin with.

And of course, after I sold it there was the incident where a server error caused everyone's heat to stop working, so the fact that my pets didn't freeze to death that day made a big impact on me too. ;)

Nest is actually far from great thermostate, definitely not "iPhone" of thermostate. It doesn't allow lots of manual settings and it doesn't handle anything more than simple systems well. There is lot of marketing that is blinding but not much substance. You should check out thermostats like Ecobee instead.

Specifics? It does everything a basic programmable thermostat does in a simpler interface.

I would say it is exactly the iphone of thermostate because the iphone is far from a great phone.

All of the complaints you just made about nest can be attributed to apple as well

Google Nest Kin

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