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Comment by Urgo | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts exactly! I've had outdoor nest cameras for a couple of years now and was expecting at some point it'd learn that the trees moving or bugs flying across the camera were not interesting but nope...... we get this...

It seems like I'm not the only one annoyed at nest lately though. I actually backed a indiegogo last week called Camect that hopefully will fix a lot of these issues and you don't even need to replace the nest cameras, though you can if you want to. I recommend checking it out!

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Nest thermostats are also very stupid. The 'smart' mode tries to build a schedule of activity based on how much you walk past the specific spot on the wall where your thermostat is, and predict when to heat the house based on that. It's garbage, we (and everyone else I know) just sets a schedule like a normal thermostat.

Given Google has access to my and my partner's calendars, why not link them and use that instead, and cut the AI shit?

I'm always shocked by the lack of integration among Google's various products. The amount of time my Google Home replies to a simple question with "I'm not sure how to help with that" is mind-boggling. Some variation of "I don't have a great answer, but I've sent some Google search results to your phone to review!" seems like an infinitely better (and obvious) alternative for the global leader in search, but they've for some reason ignored this for years.

It kind of gives me some comfort that even Google can't get cross team collaboration right. Makes me feel less bad about the dysfunctions at the places I've worked at...

The dumbest thing is they show us 10 days worth of temperatures when in fact year over year is what matters the most. It is a stupidly neutered product due to stupidity and could be so much more useful than it actually is. As I said before, Google can’t produce consumer products. They are turning into the Microsoft of the 21st century, with one good product (search) and a host of shitty products.

Or the weather. Or the real time price of electricity. Or high-demand periods. Or the learned heat retention capability of a particular home. Or a ton of other things that have never been implemented.

Given how much potential there is to make a vastly superior Nest-like thermostat, why hasn't anyone done it?

Because the market is actually pretty small for expensive thermostats. I bought the original version of the Nest thermostat because I wanted to remotely control it via my phone. Most of the smart features are horrible, the AI is dumb, and the fact that controlling it depends on a server that may be EOL'd scares me.

Most thermostats are in the neighborhood of $25-$50, so $250 for a thermostat that offers marginal utility is a hard sell.

I think at some future the point the utilities are going to be more involved than they are right now.

At this point in time you see some utilities offering setback thermostats (smart and non-smart) as a way to help smooth demand during peak usage periods.

Some of the better ones run promotions and offer rebates on Nests and Ecobees, but these units still are completely dumb when it comes to talking to the utilities. My electricity provider has real-time pricing and smart meters (with Zigbee interfaces) that are connected to HQ, but there is still no way to move that information to the wall unit. They offer a 3G-connected modulation unit for A/C compressors, but that's directly connected to HQ and the consumer has no other way to interact with it other than overriding it.

If things really start getting bad out there (e.g. Texas this week^), that will be the motivation to improve this ecosystem.

^ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/searing-t...

Everybody who gets a smart thermostat needs to keep their old one in a box for the day the server gets EOL or the device and/or network gets hacked. When that happens, you aren't going to be able to go to HomeDepot and buy a new dumb thermostat.

Dumb thermostats will always exist. You could also preemptively wire one up right now in series with your smart thermostat to act as a safeguard against extreme settings.

One in series and one in parallel!

I actually dropped my Nest thermostat for an Ecobee. With the temp sensors it’s been vastly superior.

My house has two floors but a single Hvac zone. The ecobee is set to consider temp from both upstairs and downstairs during the day but only cares about upstairs at night. It also circulates the air in the house every hour for a bit.

The end result has been far and away better than before in terms of efficiency and comfort.

I'm an Ecobee user as well, what I really want is better vent control room-by-room and I want it integrated into the thermostat.

There are companies like Keen selling net-connected vent baffles, but the price is still really prohibitive. Like $1500 to do a house prohibitive. And then it's still not integrated with the thermostat.

An Ecobee-compatible vent baffle for $30-$50? That would be a no-brainer.

Because no one actually gives a shit about $0.50 savings per day.

Nest isn't popular because of its functionality, it's popular because it's associated with Google and trendy to own. It's going to be hard for another company to break into that market.

The Honeywell Lyrics actually geofence you via their mobile app- it works so much better, its literally set and forget. We have our geofence ring at a 10 block radius around our home. You can combine that with preferred day and night temperatures, and never have to worry about it again. It paid for itself the first month I bought it (I had a dumb thermostat prior). Come home early? No worries. Come home late and don't want to heat/cool an empty house? No worries. Go on vacation? No worries.

I actually just moved a few weeks ago and have nests, and aside from looking a bit prettier on the wall, they are far inferior. I kind of want to replace them, but am hesitant since people coo over them.

The fact that no one talks about Honeywell reminds me of Zune back in the day. It was (ok arguably) a better product, everyone that had one loved it, but it just didn't seem "cool" since it was made from an old-school company and died on the vine.

I've only recently purchased a Nest doorbell... but the comments here and some quick searching suggest I'd be far better off purchasing the remainder of my cameras from somewhere that is in the business of selling hardware like Ubiquiti, and then either using local storage (with sync to personal cloud) or something like this Camect thing.

At the very least, it looks like the lack of exposed onvif / rtsp on Nest cameras is an issue that will mean I can't avoid the high subscription price and bandwidth use (and it's the bandwidth that bugs me, I'd rather store HQ to disk locally whilst transcode to a lower def for the cloud, and then have it be my cloud accounts).

Have a look at Ring also. I’ve been a happy user of their doorbell, cameras and security system. The app is updated regularly and they come out with new products all the time.

Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, in a job unrelated to Ring

This[1] is why I will never have a Ring doorbell camera. The slippery slope is becoming a vertical drop; Amazon (with the best of intentions, surely) is conditioning people to allow warrantless wiretaps and searches as if they are the new normal.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019/08/06/ring-coaching-police-foo...

A product owned by Amazon would be the bottom of my list.

I have concerns with how Amazon love to collect data, mine data, use it to find new profit areas.

Applying this logic to Ring produces not-nice outcomes.

As a nest cam owner, I would recommend taking a look at Wyze cams. They’re around $30usd on amazon and use SD cards for storage and playback. They have alerting/zones, night vision and voice capabilities. The ux for playback isn’t as polished as nest, but no subscription fees or third-party storage plus affordability make it compelling IMO.

I just cancelled the ~$11/mo, 10-day playback subscription for all but one of my nest cams.

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