[xattt]

My wife and I worked a six-week shift work schedule for a long time. We got second-gen nest thermostats when they first came out (2012) thinking they were neat.

Nope! The smart learning feature was the biggest pain in the ass. You’d be sleeping during the day for a night shift, only to find yourself freezing because it decided no one was home.

[JoshTriplett]

I like the Nest, but I absolutely turned off all the "smart" features and just set a fixed temperature range and change it when desired.

[uptown]

You can turn off the feature that changes temp based on presence. Or disable dynamic scheduling altogether.

[xattt]

I ended up having to manually changing the schedule week-to-week.

[ssl-3]

Mine works OK as long as presence detection (using people's phones and Google Home) is operating correctly.

Everyone leaves, and the thermostat adjusts.

Someone comes home (or walks in front of it), and it goes back to the normal setpoint.

Sounds easy. Isn't always easy.

The reliability of this seems to be highly dependent on the phone(s) themselves simply succeeding at not killing useful processes.

Overall, I'm not entirely displeased with it. I procured it very inexpensively by buying it from one of my energy provider's online store in conjunction with a substantial rebate from my other energy provider. I'm confident that it paid for itself very quickly, and it's nice to be able to set the thermostat remotely.

My lament is that there seems to be approximately nothing I can do to improve the presence detection function without gymnastics or spending real money. What I want is a local API that I can enable and do stuff with; what I get is "Good luck! Have you tried buying Nest Protect subscription motion detectors? (Oh lol, we stopped selling those.)"

(I'm OK with the privacy and security aspects of what I'm trying to do. I'm not OK with having a connected device that I can't bend to my will. I'm even less OK with more recurring expenses. The next thermostat I buy will have local control over the LAN, but it probably won't pay for itself quite as quickly as this one did.)

[note: I've never played with the auto-schedule "learning" function at all. It always seemed like a complete waste of time, since I for one do not have a regular schedule.]