Twitter / paulg: We installed Nest thermostats ... | Hacker News Reader

Twitter / paulg: We installed Nest thermostats ...

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62 pointsph0rque51 comments

The second reply pretty much says it all:

@octal: I don't think they're designed for large/commercial buildings with single huge rooms w/ lots of windows.

I agree. However, I haven't been able to find anything on the nest website that lists the types of rooms that it is compatible with. They should state that it won't work well with huge rooms w/ lots of windows. The site only mentions 'homes' though.

Ignoring the fact the product didn't work for YC for whatever reason, the fact his experience with the company resulted in a negative tweet shows that their customer experience is a lot less than optimal sometimes. That's a problem.

I agree, it was pretty big smackdown for a single tweet. He sounded like he meant it when he used the word "disaster".

No I wouldn't say it's a huge problem. The tweet was bizarrely melodramatic.

I mean how bad can a thermostat be exactly to be classed as a "disaster". Did it explode ? Did it cause the temperature in the room to approach 50C ? Did it cause an electrical short that resulted in the wiring needing to be replaced ?

I had the exact opposite experience when my unit shorted out.

My support experience was well designed from the beginning when I did not need any human interaction where I just used the website. To the automatic support ticket generation that brought in human involvement and I had to replace of the unit.

At each support stage I found clear instructions for what to do as well as a smooth and clear path to the next step. Granted I am used to opening up my walls, moving around electrical outlets to suite my own tastes, but installing any thermostat is pretty easy.

From the tweet I can't tell if he could not get it installed or had issues getting it set up or issues diagnosing problems. Either way, my experience with the Nest product has been very different.

I've appreciated extraordinarily positive customer experience to the point of having a new feature released to solve an issue.

They sent me a replacement unit without billing me, giving me a month grace period to send back the old one. Turned out it wasn't the unit at all, but an environment issue (direct sun on sensor), that they then patched.

Everything I've heard about Nest contradicts this. I'd love to hear in more detail why this didn't work out.

I've heard very very mixed reviews. Several direct friends of mine have installed them and gotten very poor results. I think much of it depends on the predictability of your time at home/away and the location of the thermostat itself to sense activity.

My distilled opinion is that they are not significantly better than a simple programmable thermostat for most people.

What is a direct friend?

A friend, as opposed to a friend of a friend or someone on the internet

They do have a sensor that can detect and compensate if the unit is in direct sunlight. Maybe that feature needs tweaking.

I never heard of it before, but it seems like it addresses the major issues I have with programmable thermostats, which is that their UX is invariably like something from the 1960s.

Now if you could disable all that learning crap then we'd be talking.

My major hassle with my Nest thermostat is the WiFi password. Try entering a long password into a device with no buttons.

You should only have to do it once, though.

You can disable that stuff. Once you turn learning off you can use it either as a normal thermostat or as a pre-programmed one.

I actually use our Nest as a normal thermostat that just looks great and can connect with my phone. It's awesome. I also like that it tells us our energy usage relative to everyone else.

I bought it because it's far and away the best looking thermostat out there and because it can connect with my phone. LOVE it for those reasons.

> My distilled opinion is that they are not significantly better than a simple programmable thermostat for most people.

I'm only one data point, but my bill's been down by about a third over the last year.

I have two Nest thermostats (one upstairs, one down) and they're one of the best things I've done to my home. Beyond easy programmability and learning, I can easily put it to away via the phone app from anywhere. The AirWave feature has saved me some money too. I have had nothing but a great experience.

It's probably because the Nest is designed for use in a residential building. The use case of commercial HVAC is not even close to the same. Most commercial HVAC systems are designed, sized, and ran in a completely different manner than a typical home.

They're not, as someone else pointed out, intended for large commercial buildings. I've owned one for about 18 months, and would buy it again.

Snarky remarks like "design doesn't end with the case" are unhelpful, especially when most people, with homes, find the Nest a valuable product. I'm sorry PG was so disappointed, but I'd hope for a more measured reaction.

This tweet doesn't tell us anything. I'll upvote when there is more than 112 characters of detail.

Maybe I'm late to realize it, but I'm kind of noticing the sheer number of opinions and interpretations in this thread, as opposed to the usual insightful "I just learned so much more about this topic" that HN provides

Edit: My comment wasn't directed to the commenters above me but what I noticed in this thread.

It would have been helpful to know a bit more about what PG expected and what he got.

> It would have been helpful to know a bit more about what PG expected

Mac Pro.

> and what he got

MacBook Air.

All the Nest marketing rhetoric always compares it to a standard non-programmable thermostat. Obviously it will be better than that. What I really want to know it, how much better is it than my fully-programmable thermostat? I can program 4 times slots x 7 days per week: {"wake", "away", "home", "sleep"} x {M,T,W,T,F,S,S} on my current thermostat... and I take full advantage. Until Nest shows me a more meaningful benchmark I'm not sold.

The Nest marketing I've seen compares it to a programmable thermostat. The idea is that instead of just having the heater or AC come on at regular times, it should behave in a more nuanced way. Your own patterns of turning it up and down matter, but so does the weather (it checks) and whether or not anyone is actually home.

It also now handles when the Nest is in a hot spot, for example a wall that a patch of sun crosses during the day. I was having trouble with that, we talked about it at length and shared historical temp readings vs other seven zones in the house, and they even sent me a new unit to make sure it was the sun not the unit. A few months later, the had an update for this issue.

> What I really want to know it, how much better is it than my fully-programmable thermostat?

For us, the key bit is the away detection. My wife and kids have an irregular schedule during the week - they might go to the zoo, they might take a nap at home - that can't be programmed, and most people (us included) aren't interested in adjusting the thing a dozen times a day.

Nest has been quite good at noticing that we've been out for a while and adjusting accordingly.

Has PG ever buried a company with just one tweet?

Like seriously altered the course of a startup's success? What's his most epic one?

You're giving him WAY too much credit. Most of the world doesn't know who PG is, and couldn't care less.

But investors do, and at the beginning it matters a lot.

Some investors do.

On a worldwide scale, the overwhelming majority of investors have never heard of Paul Graham.

Have you invested into Birkenstock yet? No? Why? They will be multi-billion dollar company in the near future...

This is terribly insulting to investors. And probably true.

I think Nest is far beyond the beginning. They have a shipping product in use with 1000+ reviews on Amazon. Investors aren't going to care if one investor had a problem with the unit.

People on here think he's a demigod, and most of the world shouldn't have a reason to give a damn because he isn't all that important.

I have a Nest and the only thing I wish it wouldn't do is turn off the air at all when the weather system knows that it's very hot outside (perhaps this has to do with poor insulation, though). Otherwise, if you turn off auto-away during heat waves, it's great. The home I live in has pets and the thermostat is located on the top floor (it's old and the layout is less than efficient) so having access to it from anywhere in the world in an easy-to-use manner is incredibly useful.

All he did was say it didn't work for him. Maybe his case wasn't handled well by the company, but it doesn't mean that just because he said that he's burying a company that's (as far as I know) been proven to sell a good product.

a couple of 1-star reviews on amazon have about 99% more impact on sales of a product than some dude tweeting a rant.

More importantly you probably shouldn't care or worry about investor/user who reacts on a single tweet without knowing much context.

The tweet says nothing about what was the problem, or details about why he might have any particular problem while others didn't, it could be the way his office is designed.

He just expressed his opinion in as few words as he could, it could be for legitimate reasons or it could something silly he overlooked.

THIS DEMANDS A VIRGIN SACRIFICE!

I find it interesting Paul G fell victim to the pretty product, that's not all that innovative. I find Nest to be a horrid product if you're at all interested in advancing your living / working space as a correlated and complete environment. Where to start? The simple fact that the API is closed and one is forced to issue reverse engineered request to the cloud is enough to make anyone with any knowledge of what's out there for HA to run away screaming.

TL;DR He should have known better.

That he should have known better presupposes he's right. He may be in his circumstances, but having worked with two dozen Nests, my experience says this helps almost everyone.

I own nine Nests in two properties, a loft office with one zone and a two building home with eight zones. The loft is commercial central heat and air. The home is boiler heat with eight baseboard zones.

The Nest in loft saved me about 30% compared to prior years, and the Nests in home saved me closer to 50%.

The reason I saved so much in the home is thanks to the energy history view in the web or iPad app. I was able to see which zones were cycling on and off when, and adjust relative zone temps until all zones were sharing work equally. When all zones were naively the same temp, some zones were always on (lower floors) while others were never on (top floor). Balancing temps differently until I could see all zones cycling equivalently dropped my boiler burn time by 50%.

Based on this, I recommended these to a number of friends and family. Those with conventional central heat and air have all commented on savings they can see on their electric bill.

The one exception is a friend with commercial office properties. He switched to Nest and was having trouble, bill shot up! Turned out his tenants were mis-training the Nest, with the classic misunderstanding that turning it higher than our goal makes it adjust temps up faster. Nest was letting temps drop farther, then tenants would turn it to 85 thinking that would make it heat faster. It learned that, and was hitting 85 every morning then tenants trained to let it drop back to 75 during day. We tweaked the Away temps to stay closer to normal, switched off learning, and set a nice schedule. Now he's saving 30% or so as well.

We have had good success with our Nest at home. We have seen that it has lower energy costs 30% consistently over the year for our sunny home in Florida. The UI on unit leaves much to be desired, but I rarely use it as I can just log in to the website or use the iPad app.

I've had nothing but good things to say about my Nest and have no trouble recommending it.

I don't really follow. Does he mean those? http://nest.com/

Yes

OP sounds like a guy in this quote: "Linux sucks cause iptables it's so hard to configure compared to Windows Firewall". And we, hackers, know the truth ;)

urmm, "OP", runs this website...

props!

... Which really doesn't change anything to the comment you're replying to.

Not that I agree with it because I think his understanding of Nest selling point is wrong.

Yeah, talking of design ...

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