Nest Outage for Apps, Thermostats, Protect, and Live Feed | Hacker News Reader

Nest Outage for Apps, Thermostats, Protect, and Live Feed

status.nest.com

66 pointsc17r63 comments

I find it so annoying that Nest devices (thermostats, cameras, and security system) aren't directly accessible via my phone over my local network. Why do I have to transmit my requests from my phone to the cloud and then have it come back down to the device in my home? This means I can't connect during Nest outages or (much more frequently) when my internet is down.

Even when there are no outages, it still takes ~10 seconds every time I open up the Home app for it to populate any information.

By contrast, I can open the app for my Wyze cam and be seeing/hearing the live feed in ~5 seconds. (I still don't love the cloud-first aspect of the Wyze cam, but it was dirt cheap and that's the primary reason I got it. Nest products aren't cheap, so I expect better performance, not worse.)

> Why do I have to transmit my requests from my phone to the cloud and then have it come back down to the device in my home?

Because otherwise you wouldn't be paying an advertising company to have access to the inside of your home.

Fair point! But by slowing everything down, they're constantly reminding me that they're the MITM on everything. I'd think it they could offer a smoother customer experience with direct device connectivity and periodic cloud check-ins that happen behind the scenes. They'd still be able to gather tons of data, but users would get a snappier app.

I have some LIFX lights and they seem to be like this too. The responsiveness of the app is brutal. Sometimes I swear the sliders for dimming are going out to the cloud and back. Have you ever used a high latency slider?

I don't know if I should call it the worst app I've ever used or the worst app I've ever used on a daily basis, but it's definitely one of the worst apps I've ever touched.

Yes. I would like to write an app that pulls images from my cameras and uses them for training data. As near as I can tell, the only way to do this is to sign up as a Google device access, and all that implies.

(If anyone knows of an alternative way, please let me know).

> Why do I have to transmit my requests from my phone to the cloud and then have it come back down to the device in my home?

Because if you could access it locally it wouldn't be in the cloud

But it's not in the cloud - the device is in my house; my phone is in my house.

Ahem - whoosh? I agree with you, only, you know, it's the cloud. All new things should be there whether it sane or not.

We still have awful authentication options on the LAN, so going through the cloud fixes this.

One advantage I like is you can put IoT things on a segregated network.

The reason is security. Like for some new wifi routers, you can't connect directly to it. This approach clearly has the downsides you mentioned but also makes it harder for hackers to mess with your thermostat.

That is a stupid reason. Put your smart devices behind a Tor Hidden Service, so that they're basically invisible to anyone but you, but still accessible from everywhere. Generate a keypair for every device you want to allow access from and you're safe from most credible threats.

That explains why I couldn't turn up the heat before getting out of bed this morning. :P At least the thermostat itself is still working fine.

With all the getting-rid-of-nest-inventory sales (Kohls, Office Depot, Home Depot, etc...) going on at the moment, as well as Google killing off some Nest products and Google's track record of killing of products and services in general, I would be very concerned about tying my house to any Nest product.

On that note, anyone have any good recommendations for Nest thermostat alternatives? I've had ecobees at my last residence and it wasn't too bad, but wondering if there is another compelling alternative?

Ecobee is the only real mass-market competition to Nest. Depending on the specific HVAC equipment one may have, there are other "smart" alternatives from the manufacturers themselves.

Generally speaking, they all offer a portal and an app in which one can adjust the HVAC settings. Also, generally speaking, these apps and portals are being developed by companies for which software engineering is not a primary function, so they're about as good as you would expect.

If you have an ecobee, take a look at beestat.io.

Ecobee's consumer interface hides a lot of the useful trend data, which is the whole point of having these, IMHO. Beestat is a vast improvement on the default.

I've been happy with my Ecobee, but I can't tell you how well it works with the app because I never configured the WiFi connection.

Remember, you can go to Best Buy, buy a bunch of thermostats, keep the one you like best, and return the rest with no questions asked.

Or, do some research, purchase what should work for you. If not, return it and use the reasons it didn't suit you to get the correct one. 'Buying a bunch', just seems shady to me. Is there anything difficult in buying a thermostat? Heating on, off, programmable. Is there something I'm missing?

They have returns for a reason. Not just because products are defective, but because no matter what they're still going to make a net profit since you're likely to buy at least one thing that you purchase. They have an entire system where returns are handled and are either placed back on the shelf slightly marked down or sent to be refurbed. There's nothing "shady" about what I described. It's exactly what they want you to do.

> Is there anything difficult in buying a thermostat? Heating on, off, programmable. Is there something I'm missing?

It's not much different than the nuances of figuring out which phone to buy. A Samsung Galaxy and a Google Pixel might sound like they both do the same thing, but one has a bunch of crap installed and the other one has less crap, but the average person might not be able to figure out the significance of this unless they actually try both.

> but because no matter what they're still going to make a net profit since you're likely to buy at least one thing that you purchase. They have an entire system where returns are handled and are either placed back on the shelf slightly marked down or sent to be refurbed. There's nothing "shady" about what I described. It's exactly what they want you to do.

I would need a source for that. I don’t see how selling 1 item and having to mark down 4 others to refurb price results in a profit.

It’s also been in the news that stores keep track of people returning items, and ban them if they cost the store too much money.

I don't know about hardware stores, but non-grocery retail that I am familiar with targets 50% gross margin (revenue from goods sold minus cost of goods sold).

And they still end up with low single digit profit margins, which means with even more returns, they'd have to try to get even more gross margin.

Best Buy gross margins are 22%, but their net margin is 3.75%. In a good quarter.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBY/best-buy/gross...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBY/best-buy/net-p...

I bought another Nest Hub a few months ago and a significant factor in that decision was the ability to make free UK landline/mobile calls.

My actual mobile spend is about £10 top-up every 90 days (mostly data/texts), I don't have a landline, and the minimum mobile contract with unlimited calls is about £5/m and 12/18 months lockin, so it's a really good deal for me.

Guess what they just cancelled with one month's notice!

I went with Ecobees mainly because they offer the easy export of your data and have an open API to interop with.

I originally planned to use my HomeAssistant install to orchestrate it a little with the Awair products I have, for example, turn the AC fan on if the co2 starts getting high to flush the air, but a while ago the Ecobee app can pair up with Awair itself, so I've had no need.

May I suggest running a small one page web app for this? I tried a bunch of scritps/solutions, but it ended up much easier to mostly build my own thing and some libraries for the tedious stuff.

Hardware was a pi and an inexpensive honeywell that was on a local network and controlled via http.

Ecobee coupled with home assistant is fantastic.

It's frustrating that Nest forces you to go through Google servers to adjust a thermostat on your local network.

Frustrating is far too mild of a word for it. Local network discovery is a solved problem.

Its 2020 and your thermostat now needs to talk to something outside your house to adjust the temperature? No thanks.

No, it still works fine offline. I just couldn't use the app this morning to preheat the house. I actually had to get up out of bed to adjust it. Which, I'm not complaining about at all.

Noticed my Nests were down earlier. They are back up now.

As far as working "fine" offline, I have another gripe about my Nest thermostats: Why is the sample rate on the temperature so damn slow? One of my zones is a small (~500 sq/ft) room and the HVAC can move the temperature there rather quickly. What always happens is the heat/cool usually stays on well beyond the desired set point. This is because the device does not sample the temperature often enough. If the mode is set to heat & cool, the heat and AC will both oscillate on and off forever unless the min and max are more than 5 degrees apart. It's not a matter of the Nest sensor lagging because of its heat capacity because I have tried a heat gun and freeze spray to observe the sample rate. It really sucks.

I think what api is referring to is there isn't a good reason why you shouldn't be able to use your phone to adjust your thermostat on your local network without leaving the internal network.

For now....

I moved into a house with a Nest and no internet connection (when we moved in). The Nest worked fine as a thermostat, it seemed to be smart enough to default into a dumber thermostat mode when it had no internet connection. This is also its behavior today with this service outage.

Now, because someone one day will decide to do a rewrite and cause a feature regression, this could change.

Funny, I spent the past hour on a chat with Nest trying to fix an issue with my thermostat being too dim to see, they had me factory reset it, and then it couldn’t get set back up. Spent an hour chasing that down, to finally have him say Nest is experiencing issues.

Then I come here and see this, life is funny.

> life is funny.

Spending 2+ hours in a chat to debug an internet thermostat is the opposite of funny.

I've had a Nest for ~8 years. This is the first issue I've had with any of their products, and this was with a brand new thermostat, it's likely a light sensor issue which could happen to anyone.

I could have returned it to the store, but I didn't want to deal with going in person and was hoping to get google to ship me a replacement thermostat.

The thermostat works now as a dumb thermostat, so I guess it's the cost of convenience.

No local access and/or physical control => don't buy it. No exceptions.

> No local access and/or physical control => don't buy it. No exceptions.

Are there any thermostats like that? The only mass market product like that that I know of like is Philips Hue lights (their base stations have a local REST API, or at least they did last time I really used them).

My "don't buy it" threshold is unnecessarily cloud-only features or mandatory cloud integration. I should be able to take full advantage of the product's features without that extra dependency.

There are plenty of no name products or chinese brands. I ordered a bunch of sonoff devices not to long ago to be controlled on my rpi with a conbee. My wiz bulbs are also locally controlled, my no name cams exposed via http anyway ...

Its not exactly hard finding such devices these days. Often they require a cloud connection for only the initial setup.

Nest and co was totally out of question for me because of the forced cloud.

I was shopping for a smart socket to turn my pool cover pump on and off from inside the house. I specifically went out of my way to find a Bluetooth one instead of one that uses Wi-Fi. Then when I receive it I find out that I have to install some stupid app (Avi-on) that requires a freaking account to use.

A couple days after I sign up for the account and now I am receiving all sorts of spam. You just can’t win against greed.

We'll buy what we want. No exceptions.

(I mean, I get the point, and I agree, but I don't like people assuming they know better than everybody else what kind of compromises make sense for them)

My thermostat still works fine, it seems. The App doesn't work, but it's back to being a "dumb" thermonstat.

what's a better alternative for home security cameras? Eufy? I'm looking for something I can view from a phone

Leaving about 0 plug and play options left...

Now my wife will have to walk to the thermostat instead of text me it's too hot in the house.

You can always add her as a user (also helps with detection of home/away, if you don't have security/privacy concerns with geofencing).

Still, that approach may still come with its own dangers ;)

9 out of 10 non-techy partners agree: The texting UX works better than the vendor's native app

I'm looking for an alternative to my Nest Outdoor CamIQ. I want a camera that uses as little internet bandwidth as possible (because of LTE hotspot) but will still alert me when there is motion and will allow me to remotely monitor (using lots of bandwidth). Any recommendations?

Have you looked at Wyze?

Last year the wifi functionality broke on my nest thermostat, and I lived without a smart thermostat for months! Google did replace it for free when I finally got around to making a support ticket, so at least for me it was a positive experience.

We inherited a Nest thermostat in the house we bought last year. It's fine. But I certainly never considered hooking it up to the network. And this is why.

It still worked fine as a thermostat even during the outage.

I’m not sure I follow. Does the thermostat become otherwise unusable if there’s a network outage?

No, the thermostat works just fine. Unfortunately the app does not, even when you're on the same network. There is zero local access, everything has to go through the cloud.

I consider it prudent. Back in 2016, a software updated borked all the Nest thermostats causing them to lose power, and thus allow homes to freeze.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g...

My Nest has worked fine for the last 8-9 or so years, I have the original version that came out before Google bought them. It's been solid. That said, I did still keep the old thermostat around in case something happens.

Yep. Having a backup or being able to find one is important. You can also just jump the two wires together.

I've actually found that I keep the temp at a specific one for the season so I've never actually needed any of the remote features except I like the fan scheduling thing.

I thought I would do the whole preheat or cool the house thing and what not but it's actually not a relevant feature for my local climate and house.

So I found that it's way better just to leave the thermostat on and maintain the conditioned or heated air.

It works just fine as a dumb thermostat - you can even set a schedule through the on device UI. Just no app functions

It does not. You get a message stating its "offline". Still works as a normal thermostat.

Expected event expectedly happens.

Dog bites man, cloud bites internet of shit.

The status is now showing OK on the website, but I had to force quit my (iOS) app and re-open it to be able to see anything.

Glad I used an old fashioned Honeywell for my core home security alarm and did the smart cameras on a separate system.

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