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Comment by madhadron | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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

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.

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