[thomaslord]

When I read the headline, I assumed that this was going to be a negative review from a user.

We got a Nest thermostat for free as part of a SolarCity solar panel installation, and I spent months fighting with it to try and make it do what I told it. The Nest has a motion sensor on it, which is how it determines whether to turn on the energy saving mode - if it senses that you're home it will run at the set temperature, otherwise it will disobey your commands and go to the configured energy saving temperature. There were 2 problems with this, one universal and one application-specific: first, if you live in anything other than a small apartment your thermostat may be in a different room from you. In our 2-story house, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're specifically in the living room. The 2 2nd-floor bedrooms, the 1st-floor bedroom, the kitchen, the basement, the dining room, and the 1st-floor office all don't count. In our house specifically the thermostat was installed behind a wall-mounted TV, which only makes things worse - even if you're in the living room, the Nest thinks nobody is home unless you're actively playing with it.

Trying to make the Nest ignore whether you're home and disable the eco mode is an exercise in futility. I found a setting to disable eco mode, but the house was still never the temperature we set it to. When I checked the thermostat I saw the green leaf icon, indicating that the Nest completely ignores the setting that disables eco mode. When I called Nest support, they couldn't figure out what was going on either. The only way I could get it to function semi-reasonably was to manually set the eco mode temperature to the temperature we actually wanted the house at, which means that you have to set the temperature twice to actually set the temperature.

The idea of a thermostat that tries to save power automatically is great, but it falls apart when you rely on a single motion sensor to determine if an entire house is occupied. This bad assumption was a letdown, but the fake setting to disable eco mode turned me off of Nest completely.

[xyzzyz]

I know exactly what you’re talking about, as I’ve had a share of my own struggles against Nest which thinks it knows better. However, right now, I have it set like the following:

https://postimg.cc/D8YBfB4x

And it works just like a normal thermostat, which makes me happy. I’d never buy a smart thermostat now, I keep using Nest because previous owner of the house installed it, and after lobotomizing it, it works good enough.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Interesting. Someone had told me that the Nest figures out if you're home by recognizing the presence of your phone. I wonder if that information was wrong or only applied to a specific version of the Nest.

At one point, I had a cheap WiFi thermostat. No smart features, just allowed remote control via app or web page. At one point, I had reverse-engineered the web app API and wrote a script to implement "away" detection and shut the thermostat off if both phones were away.

The problem was two-fold. First, it detected the phones being away by simply pinging the phone's local IP address. If the phone was in a power saving mode that disabled WiFi, the script would detect the phone as away. Second, I ran into the problem the article author had: If everyone was away, it got cold in the winter, and an absolute oven in the summer, and my aging A/C unit couldn't get the temperature back down until the sun went down.

[fgonzag]

The ecobee3 solves this particular problem by having remote sensors. I'm absolutely in love with it since it takes an average of all the sensors as the temperature.

[giarc]

My nest once asked if I wanted it to "learn" my habits and adjust accordingly. I clicked Ok thinking it would create a nice schedule. Instead it set temperatures to 14C at random times and be all over the map with when to heat the house and when to leave it cooler.

[TedDoesntTalk]

I thought it also used the bluetooth aspect of the app to know if you're home? IOW, if the app can ping Nest over bluetooth, the Nest knows you're home.

[withinboredom]

How does it know who’s phone belongs to the people who live there?

[TedDoesntTalk]

I think you have to pair the app. Otherwise anyone could control your thermostat, even from outside your front door.

[withinboredom]

But what if you leave your kids at home? How would it know their phones? I wouldn’t give my kid the power of the thermostat, the pranks would be endless…

[TedDoesntTalk]

It also has a motion sensor, as OP mentions.