Problems with the Nest batteries

DanHolohan

http://gizmodo.com/nest-thermostats-are-having-battery-problems-and-theres-1751800309

KC_Jones

Not much love around here for the Nest, that article is just going to add fuel to our fire. When I worked at the power company a "brilliant" engineer had this idea of using windows based PC's to control a substation. After a bunch were installed they initiated a maintenance program to go around and restart these computers on a weekly basis because of lock ups. When I left there we were in the midst of a project to remove all the computers and either revert back to the electromechanical controls or use PLC's. That article reminds me of that. Sometimes our technology seems to get ahead of itself, or is mis-applied.

ChrisJ

More Nest fun.
Lovely.

It's a great looking product, feels solid, real nice finish.
It's a shame it seems to continue to be unreliable and buggy.

iix

I feel like all of this is nests fault for not requiring a common wire on every install. They pushed too hard with the power stealing circuit so they could advertise it would work with any equipment without modifications.

I'm surprised they don't include or offer a product like the add-a-wire or common maker kits.

hot_rod

iix said:

I feel like all of this is nests fault for not requiring a common wire on every install. They pushed too hard with the power stealing circuit so they could advertise it would work with any equipment without modifications.



I'm surprised they don't include or offer a product like the add-a-wire or common maker kits.

I know of the add a wire kits, is there a way you know to "add" a common? I didn't think that was possible with a two wire?

iix

http://www.fast-stat.net
Saw it in a local supply house a few weeks ago, haven't had the chance to try it out yet.

tim smith

I have been getting a fair amount of calls on nest battery probs. Of course my 1st comment to them is you need a common wire. That's it, period. I just talked one of my clients through exactly this last night. He pulled a new wire from stat to furnace and now will have not only a C wire but never had a G wire for his fan on furnace and that's done now. He's quite handy. In the

Sal Santamaura

Beyond privacy concerns, there's no way I'd have a Nest in my home. Or, for that matter, any battery-dependent thermostat.

The mercury-wetted Honeywell will stay right where it is while I'm still around.

iix

Sal Santamaura said:

Beyond privacy concerns, there's no way I'd have a Nest in my home. Or, for that matter, any battery-dependent thermostat.

The mercury-wetted Honeywell will stay right where it is while I'm still around.

It seems privacy always comes up when people discuss the nest, I understand google's main revenue is in advertising but what privacy concerns do you have?

Anything they could possibly monitor from the thermostat can be monitored from a smart phone and most people aren't too far from their phones nowadays.

Jamie Hall

It isn't what Google can monitor, it's what anyone else can monitor. Unless the security options on the Nest (or any other WiFi or internet thermostat) are set as high as they can go, and the password is strong, most reasonably competent crooks can monitor when you are in the house -- and when you are not. Why not just post a sign on the front lawn saying when the house is unoccupied and available?

Paul48

Don't look now, but Google knows you're home. You're on HeatingHelp.com.

SlamDunk

i receivd a nest as a gift and installed it. It performed very well but data is sent to google and google sends back usage reports in the guise of savings reports. but I pay the bills and i dont need a report. over the internet, it senses when you are home. That's more data than I want to share. That means, as long as i have wifi, i could be over ridden. So I removed it.

I didnt always feels this way.

Sal Santamaura

iix said:

Sal Santamaura said:

Beyond privacy concerns, there's no way I'd have a Nest in my home. Or, for that matter, any battery-dependent thermostat.

The mercury-wetted Honeywell will stay right where it is while I'm still around.

It seems privacy always comes up when people discuss the nest, I understand google's main revenue is in advertising but what privacy concerns do you have?

Anything they could possibly monitor from the thermostat can be monitored from a smart phone and most people aren't too far from their phones nowadays.

Others have posted excellent responses that cover privacy concerns. One conflates me with "most people" at one's peril. I have no smart phone. In fact, the only cell phone I have (at my wife's insistence and obtained by her for me) is a pre-paid flip phone for "emergencies." It sits, completely powered down, in the center console of my car. I've no more interest in being "connected" or monitored when out and about than I do in having Google (or any other entity) tracking my thermostat.

This attitude comes to you from a retired electrical engineer who also declines to participate in the large-scale clinical trial wherein we determine whether brain cancer can be induced by cell phones.

iix

Jamie Hall said:

It isn't what Google can monitor, it's what anyone else can monitor. Unless the security options on the Nest (or any other WiFi or internet thermostat) are set as high as they can go, and the password is strong, most reasonably competent crooks can monitor when you are in the house -- and when you are not. Why not just post a sign on the front lawn saying when the house is unoccupied and available?

There's so many other opportunities for a criminal to monitor when you are home then just a thermostat. It seems like a cop out when you point at a thermostat and cry privacy. Do you park around the corner from your house so people don't know when you're home or not? All your lights are on all day to make it look like you're home?

Lets be real, if someone was going to take the effort to hack in to your thermostat they are going to need at the very least your personal email information. If someone is going to go through all the efforts to target you specifically there are plenty of other ways go about it.

Sal Santamaura said:

iix said:

Sal Santamaura said:

Beyond privacy concerns, there's no way I'd have a Nest in my home. Or, for that matter, any battery-dependent thermostat.

The mercury-wetted Honeywell will stay right where it is while I'm still around.

It seems privacy always comes up when people discuss the nest, I understand google's main revenue is in advertising but what privacy concerns do you have?

Anything they could possibly monitor from the thermostat can be monitored from a smart phone and most people aren't too far from their phones nowadays.

Others have posted excellent responses that cover privacy concerns. One conflates me with "most people" at one's peril. I have no smart phone. In fact, the only cell phone I have (at my wife's insistence and obtained by her for me) is a pre-paid flip phone for "emergencies." It sits, completely powered down, in the center console of my car. I've no more interest in being "connected" or monitored when out and about than I do in having Google (or any other entity) tracking my thermostat.

This attitude comes to you from a retired electrical engineer who also declines to participate in the large-scale clinical trial wherein we determine whether brain cancer can be induced by cell phones.

Times are changing, more then half of the population under 65 have smartphones now.

http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/u-s-smartphone-use-in-2015/pi_2015-04-01_smartphones_07/

Fred

Hey! More than half over 65 have smart phones too. (I'm just not one of them )
I don't care what that report says.

BobC

I'm with Sal, I have a kyocera flip phone that I bought refurbed 6 months ago - I've used it 3 times. Mostly I use the dial phone on the wall.

Bob

hot_rod

One issue with the Nest, maybe other brands, is buying it from an unknown source.


http://www.computerworld.com/article/2476599/cybercrime-hacking/black-hat-nest-thermostat-turned-into-a-smart-spy-in-15-seconds.html

Sal Santamaura

iix said:

Times are changing, more then half of the population under 65 have smartphones now.

http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/u-s-smartphone-use-in-2015/pi_2015-04-01_smartphones_07/

So what? Who cares how many people do something? The vast majority of US homes are heated by scorched air systems. Does that make furnaces something to admire and adopt? Newer isn't necessarily better, a fact which applies equally to cell phones and VOIP "land line" phones. When there's an extended utility electrical outage, my copper land line ("plain old telephone service" or POTS) is still fully functional, powered from the central office, initially by backup batteries and then by a diesel generator. As long as trucks get through with more diesel, the system continues to work indefinitely. When cell towers and Internet backbone go down after brief battery backups run out, I'll continue to have a mechanism for summoning first responders, if necessary. Safety is the most important reason for a phone, not incessant, nonsensical babbling, which is what the majority of cell phone use involves, whether voice or text.

I'll rue the day if/when regulators permit telecom companies to do what they've wanted to for a long time now, namely shut down their copper POTS systems. AT&T has a really big pair of brass ones to run TV ads boasting about its U-Verse reliability being 99.9%. Copper POTS systems run at 99.999% reliability. That means the whiz-bang U-Verse is down an average of 10 minutes each week. POTS goes out an average of 6 seconds each week. How long would you prefer to wait when needing to call 911 for someone having a heart attack? That doesn't even consider power outages.

Before someone touts the good cell phones do by enabling fast reporting of incidents away from home, consider how many injuries and deaths have occurred as a result of distracted drivers talking, texting and surfing on their "smart" phones, laws prohibiting the same notwithstanding. Don't go there.

We never know what we had until it's gone.

Jamie Hall

I too still have a good old fashioned copper wire land line in the house, and I will keep it until I am forced to give it up. I told that to an insistent VOIP type a while back, adding that when the VOIP goes down -- your 99.9% reliability for the internet is high for my area -- how do I call for service?

And one of the 'phones connected to it is a dial instrument which we acquired in 1945, when dial service came to these parts... Still works just fine, thank you.

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one out there!

Sal Santamaura

Jamie Hall said:

...one of the 'phones connected to it is a dial instrument which we acquired in 1945, when dial service came to these parts... Still works just fine, thank you...

Something I forgot to mention is that, in order to take advantage of POTS' reliability, one must not depend on a battery powered phone. Therefore, we have one instrument on each floor that's powered solely by the phone line. The one in our kitchen is, like yours, a dial type. However, it's a bit newer, an oak-cased old-fashioned reproduction acquired from an "AT&T Store" in the 1980s. I'm afraid to look up what it cost to satisfy my wife by purchasing that; adjusted for inflation, it must have been more expensive than the latest iPhone gadget today. The internal mechanisms are just as rugged as what's inside your1945 model.

Jamie Hall said:

...I'm glad to know I'm not the only one out there!

We're few and far between, but then the IQ bell curve gets mighty shallow at its right end.

SWEI

Heads up. Your POTS line is only POTS from your phone jack to the nearest FXS port on the virtual distributed switch that is our modern network. That physical port could be located in your network interface device, at the neighborhood B-box, on top of a nearby pole, or in the basement of the empty building that used to be your local central office.

Sal Santamaura

SWEI said:

Heads up. Your POTS line is only POTS from your phone jack to the nearest FXS port on the virtual distributed switch that is our modern network. That physical port could be located in your network interface device, at the neighborhood B-box, on top of a nearby pole, or in the basement of the empty building that used to be your local central office.

Perhaps where you are, but here it's copper all the way to the (still) central office. Dispatch for 911 is also still connected to that central office.

SWEI

E911 is in the midst of another rethink and a lot of things are changing there as well.

Most central office now have just a rack or two of terminal equipment at this point.

Fred

It is copper back to the CO, but virtually all CO's have been modernized and the switches convert the signal from analog to digital, via the port card. At that point, the CO can and do still gather info. The call detail reports have every bit of info about the call, minus the actual conversation BUT the CO has the ability to record the conversation, usually requiring a court order, if everyone in the chain is honest/legit/trustworthy. Even VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is carried from the residence to the CO over copper. The nature of what a CO looks like has certainly changed, however. It is no longer a Huge facility. The CO may be a small switching device in an unmanned/remotely monitored space. That, in and of itself is cause for concern, from a security perspective. Having said all this, I to have a landline service into my home and use my cell phone minimally.

Sal Santamaura

Fred said:

It is copper back to the CO, but virtually all CO's have been modernized and the switches convert the signal from analog to digital, via the port card....Even VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is carried from the residence to the CO over copper...

Not all VOIP is copper. Completely fiber ISPs run VOIP over optical connections right from the home. Also, even if considering a copper cable ISP, the Internet connection over which those VOIP data travel usually goes down very quickly after a utility power failure when battery backups run out.

Here (Orange County California), AT&T, irrespective of whether it has modernized the switching inside its COs, continues to power them and the (completely copper) POTS telephones it services in residences and businesses without interruption using batteries and diesel generators. See figure 12-1 on page 12-37 in this document

https://ebiznet.sbc.com/sbcnebs/Documents/TP76400/ATT-TP-76400-12.pdf

which was last updated only six days ago. No VOIP provider I'm aware of has any infrastructure that rides out utility power failures for more than a short time. Within the last year, San Diego Gas & Electric, our electric provider, had an outage that lasted more than a day. Our POTS phones continued to function throughout that period. Neighbors who'd been seduced by the cable company's VOIP "bargain" were completely incommunicado after an hour or so. Cell phone towers also stopped functioning within two hours.

Fred said:

...the CO can and do still gather info. The call detail reports have every bit of info about the call, minus the actual conversation BUT the CO has the ability to record the conversation, usually requiring a court order, if everyone in the chain is honest/legit/trustworthy...

There's nothing anyone can do, short of changes through the political process, which ultimately affects makeup of the courts, about the NSA and what it has going with telecoms. I avoid Nest and its ilk to preclude gifting Google, etc. undeserved data. Not to mention detesting adding unnecessary battery dependence to what should be a simple device.

Fred said:

...Having said all this, I to have a landline service into my home and use my cell phone minimally.

Smart moves!

Fred

You are correct. Voip is best carried over fiber. I should have said "carried over some physical medium".

LarryK

In Brooklyn Verizon decided to do the minimum possible maintenance on the copper wires while they were trying to get FIOS installed. We had to go to VOIP over cable to get reliable service. There was a massive cable going from the CO to the pole on the next block. Every time we got a good rain they would have to send someone out to find a working wire in the cable and re-connect it.

Jamie Hall

LarryK said:

In Brooklyn Verizon decided to do the minimum possible maintenance on the copper wires while they were trying to get FIOS installed. We had to go to VOIP over cable to get reliable service. There was a massive cable going from the CO to the pole on the next block. Every time we got a good rain they would have to send someone out to find a working wire in the cable and re-connect it.

We've had that problem -- except that in our case it's 2 and a half miles from the nearest junction box. The company has had a bad time of it.

It's really rather clever, though. Skimp on the copper maintenance, then the customers complain to the Public Utilities people. Then the company says it's obsolete stuff, let us raise the rates and install the newest whiz-bang stuff. The Public Utilities people, who don't know a grounded plug from a telephone pole, say sure. Rates go up, copper disappears, service goes to the lower place in a handbasket... company makes a bundle and sells out to some other investor.

Don't get me started...

SWEI

It's somewhat more devious than it even appears. The Telecom Act of 1996 required ILECs to lease their infrastructure out to competitors in the form of Unbundled Network Elements in order to provide competition in the local loop space. When they began building 'fiber to the neighborhood', many of the ILECs filed those elements under FCC tariffs instead of state tariffs. Since these were "new" elements they were not obligated to offer them to competitors. Once the fiber is in, they tear out the copper, thus rendering all the remote copper (from the fiber cabinet downstream) inaccessible to the competition.

Free markets? Ha!

Sal Santamaura

SWEI said:

...The Telecom Act of 1996...

The second worst piece of legislation in recent decades. Worst was repeal of Glass-Steagall.

KC_Jones

Deregulation of power companies is up there too.

SWEI

The Act itself was imperfect, but well intended. The judicial and political maneuvering that followed it? Yikes...

Fred

I do believe the utilities have become more competitive (rates lower) since deregulation. Telecom, not so much. More price manipulation that anything else.

Lance

What I love about the nest thermostat is it gives me an opportunity to save lives. A call from a Nest owner lead to a gas pipe leak and a bad gas control valve. Sure the nest won't work on all wiring but there are ways to run new wires. And if that doesn't work get a wireless T-stat. Or set the stat at the boiler and use the two wires to connect a button sensor.
Oh and as far as POT. I love my 1950 telephone. It has the lowest life cycle cost than any phone built after it and always will. I even have the metal dialer stylus.
Best regards to all,

ChrisJ

Lance said:

What I love about the nest thermostat is it gives me an opportunity to save lives. A call from a Nest owner lead to a gas pipe leak and a bad gas control valve. Sure the nest won't work on all wiring but there are ways to run new wires. And if that doesn't work get a wireless T-stat. Or set the stat at the boiler and use the two wires to connect a button sensor.
Oh and as far as POT. I love my 1950 telephone. It has the lowest life cycle cost than any phone built after it and always will. I even have the metal dialer stylus.
Best regards to all,

How is the Nest related to that scenario?

Regarding the 1950s phone, I've had a few Western Electric 500s, in fact there's one sitting by my bed right now though it's a later one with a modular jack and plastic dial. I've also had a wall hung one and several metal dial hard wired ones.

IMO, I don't like them. The carbon button microphone has an awful sound though the speaker in the handset sounds really good.

Sal Santamaura

ChrisJ said:

...I've had a few Western Electric 500s...The carbon button microphone has an awful sound...

As opposed to what passes for sound quality from cell phones?

Fred

I was going to ask the same question but I thought, "To each his own"

ChrisJ

Sal Santamaura said:

ChrisJ said:

...I've had a few Western Electric 500s...The carbon button microphone has an awful sound...

As opposed to what passes for sound quality from cell phones?

Most modern cell phones sound better than any carbon button

ChrisJ

Fred said:

I was going to ask the same question but I thought, "To each his own"

See my response above.
Carbon buttons have a "distant, distorted, tinny" sound, is the best way I can describe it. Most if not all payphones used them as well.

Fred

They are a bit tinny but the clarity seems so much better than the cell phones. Many cell phones, including the iPhone also sound distant to me.

ChrisJ

Fred said:

They are a bit tinny but the clarity seems so much better than the cell phones. Many cell phones, including the iPhone also sound distant to me.

Are you sure you're talking about old carbon button phones like this?

All modern phones use a condenser mic, and yes they are better then most if not all cellphones.