Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I have a Nest V3 Thermostat (my second one, after I moved recently I installed one in the new house again, it's still the most beautiful OpenTherm thermostat out there, not that there are any other good options, just read the reviews).

I've been reading "Build" by Tony Fadell. It's just painful to read what Nest could have been. The V3 is nice, but there are still rough edges, the app loads slowly for example (no doubt because it needs data from the device via a cloud). And it is absolutely ridiculous how much trouble it is to let it talk to Home Assistant. Of course Tony is focused on the normal users (who just want stuff to work together, they don't care about open local APIs or Matter for example), which is a shame but understandable.

At this point: Please Google just opensource the firmware or something, add a local api and be done with it. It feels like they just don't want to support the device. Such a shame, it's such a nice thermostat (hardware-wise an ethernet cable to the heatlink would have been nice, to optionally drop the dependency on wireless, I'd pay for that).

After using a 3rd gen for 8 years, I just replaced my Nest 3rd gens with Ecobee Premiums. Used to be a proud Nest user, they even shaped my choice of a new home HVAC system to be something compatible. However, they (and their software) haven't changed since I bought them, they are stuck in 2015. Meanwhile Ecobee has been producing beautiful hardware and software that has not only caught up but surpassed the 5+ year headstart that Google/Nest squandered.

Also read Build and I'm sure Tony is just sad at seeing the opportunity lost as Nest becomes a shell of itself.

Ecobee was one of my first choices indeed, nice stuff. Sadly they don't serve the EU, and they have (consequently) no OpenTherm options.

We got Ecobees as part of an HVAC overhaul; they're nice and it's impressive how many situations they handle out of the box, whereas we had to run a new wire to get the (pre-Google) Nest to work correctly when it was already supposed to work with our existing setup. I do have issues with the software, though: we have two zones and it just doesn't handle that situation conveniently. (I don't know how the Nest would have done because we had only one zone with it.)

> Meanwhile Ecobee has been producing beautiful hardware and software that has not only caught up but surpassed the 5+ year headstart that Google/Nest squandered.

Ecobee released their first smart thermostat 3 years prior to the first Nest Thermostat. (Not that that's a fault, I've been a happy ecobee user for years.)

I emailed Ecobee years ago if they were available here in the Netherlands and if they were considering it. They said they were looking at it...

It's a shame, Fadell was right to go into the thermostat market. Honeywell still has nothing that looks nice, and, according to the reviews, nothing that functions well. The stuff that comes with HVAC systems are generally expensive but cheap feeling and imho ugly.

In the EU all manufacturers have to support OpenTherm, an open standard, so you'd think this is a big homogeneous market to enter...

Google WiFi had a local API for config and status etc. But it appeared to be single threaded and some API calls took 30s+, while all others queued up behind.

Nobody can build a nice app based on such an API. The official app tried - there were spinners on every part of the UI. Even simple things like 'give me a graph of network bandwidth' would have gaps in the graph where the single threaded service was bogged down with other requests.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com