"Up to this point, installation was so complicated that it required a professional. "
Not even remotely true. The Nest wires the same as any other thermostat. Prior to the Nest there were plenty of inexpensive to high end devices with simple instructions included .
It wasn't hard, but it did ask a lot of questions that your average homeowner may or may not know. Do you have a humidifier on your furnace? A dehumidifier? How is the emergency heat configured? Is the fan DC or AC coupled? Questions like that. I self installed mine no problem, but I can see how people could be intimidated.
For what it is worth, I think the Nest has been generally worse than a dumber programmable thermostat, especially after Google took it over. The App only allows a single phone to be connected now which is a problem when both me and my wife want access. There is also no way to run the fans without switching it on heat or cool. The fans can also only run for a maximum of 12 hours before it needs manual intervention to restart. All of which are a problem if you have say a pellet stove providing heat in one part of the house and want to circulate the air to the rest of the house using the furnace fan. On my old thermostat I could even switch the fan to low speed mode when the heat pump wasn't running, which is something the Nest seems to have no concept of. There is an API, but it's all Googlefied and requires a subscription and kind of assumes you're already a full stack Google developer.
My wife has an iPhone and is able to use her Nest app at the same time I'm able to.
But we generally don't use the Nest app much any more, except to use its horrible scheduling interface (horrible because Google's UI for changing the schedule is way too finicky and non-standard).
Everyone in the house uses HomeBridge which has a fantastic Nest plugin. The plugin uses the API you mention. Much faster than opening the Nest app. Less than 1 second to update the temperature and hear the furnace kick on via the iPhone's control center.
Back when we first did the switch I couldn't find a way to do this, but apparently now it is possible by adding the other person as a family member in the Google Home app, although we have not actually been able to make this work yet. Supposedly it is easier on Android phones, but we have iPhones. The old Nest app was much less confusing.
It seemed crazy to me from day-1 they didn't have a "I want to always run my furnace fan" option since it is such a common requirement. And it seems to not exist to this date so when I want to turn my furnace off and circulate air I have to set the temperature to some goofy setting so the fan will run.
The last time I used the Google Home app I couldn't set my fan to continuous but the Nest app still allowed it. Seems wild to me that they don't have this basic stuff nailed down.
I have an Ecobee which I mildly hate and was considering a nest. You’ve managed to make me rethink it.
My ecobee has connectivity issues over HomeKit and the API requires the cloud (which is annoying for something like home assistant). I’m also convinced it’s intentionally dumb in its scheduling. I always felt I needed to manually update the settings and could never trust it to just maintain temperature.
It does let you manually control the fans and stuff, which is a feature I really liked when I had air filtration built into the HVAC. I would miss it on a Nest I guess. Edit: it seems others are contradicting this claim.
That said, the API doesn’t require a subscription, just a one-time $5 fee (which is likely less than server and ops costs to run the API). And the API seems like a pretty standard rest api based on the docs. Similarly, the ecobee api seems roughly as complicated. The only difference is auth with a Google account or ecobee API key.
I also have an ecobee and find it extremely frustrating how hard it is to get a complete dump of _my_ data from their servers. You have to manually download a bunch of files and piece them together (which would be fine if they documented it some way), but even their web UI to see charts wont let you see very much at a time.
I have a couple Nests and a couple Ecobees. In summary, they're both frustrating. An HVAC contractor told me (and it rings true), the ecobee is like hvac peeps figured out the interwebs, and the nest is like internet peeps figured out HVAC.
I don't think the Nest has any options for local control though, so HomeKit on the Ecobee seems like a win, but I got distracted before I figured out how to do what I want with HomeAssistant.
The Nest does better fan scheduling IMHO, although neither one does anything smart with sequencing multiple units, which is really frustrating.
I went with Venstar because there is an on device API that can be switched on. I don't use it (a schedule and their cloud app do what I need), but I like knowing it is there.
They seem to have been hit pretty hard by supply chain problems too (most online prices 2x or more than what they were).
I had actually bought a Nest but never installed it. I sold it on eBay when it was announced that Google was requiring people to use Google accounts with Nest products.
What I installed instead (myself) was an Ecobee 3+. I've been very happy with it. I have it set to run the fans 10 minutes of every hour to move air around a little bit. With a previous dumb thermostat, using the fan more often caused a noticeable spike in the electric bill. We live in a 1914 house with multiple levels and minimal air returns so there tends to be variations in temperature (top hot in summer, cool in winter; basement coldest in summer even with vents closed but exposed pipes are full of cold air, etc.) that aren't easily fixable.
Ecobee has started selling security cameras, which I haven't looked into. I really do like the idea of having a best-of-breed thermostat and I hope that Amazon doesn't buy them. I'm a little surprised that they haven't.
> The App only allows a single phone to be connected now which is a problem when both me and my wife want access.
Polar opposite of our experience. We have two Nest thermostats in our home and both my wife and I can connect to and manage each one with our respective phones.
> There is also no way to run the fans without switching it on heat or cool.
Also not our experience. We can run the fans independently of heat/cool. That could be a consequence of your HVAC system opposed to the Nest itself.
Is one of you (saidmasoud vs. jandrese) using the Nest app and the other using Google Home maybe? I tried out a Nest thermostat briefly and found it confusing that there were two different apps with different featuresets.
I originally had the Nest app where we could both access it using our phones, but my wife clicked "yes" when the Nest asked her to "upgrade" to the Google interface and there's no way to switch it back.
Sounds like this piece was written by someone who doesn't really know the space and follows along with Nest marketing.
> These leaf springs allowed for the self-configuration of the unit, saving the time and troubleshooting that would have prevented a regular person from tackling installation. And it worked! It was so simple that grandparents were making YouTube videos of themselves installing it.
Did Nest sponsor this article? It's a Google property and they managed to reference another Google property.
I saw a lot of presentations in engineering school that were effectively distilled marketing copy, wouldn’t surprise me if some people never outgrew that behavior.
My parents had a nest and I will say that there are failure modes that are not found on a normal standalone thermostat.
I remember my very cold mother calling me because there was a message about a wifi problem and she didn't know she could somehow bypass it and turn up the thermostat.
And funny enough, it probably caused more issues because installations without a common wire would trigger short-cycling of the HVAC as it tried to draw power from the furnace wires.
Can you elaborate? I installed my nest years ago without a common wire and it…seems to work but I have horrendous gas bills and the system cycles often, but I attributed both of these to the poor insulation of my 120 year old building.
If you have no common wire you have no return path for current so that you can power a consuming device. Original thermostats were entirely electromechanical switches with no power requirements.
The Nest gets around the common requirement by cheating - it charges a rechargeable battery by leeching current into the signal wires. If the endpoint is a coil on a relay or solenoid, this usually causes no problem, it often causes no problem if the relay is solid state, but on some equipment that return current will switch on the equipment when it tries to charge its own battery. In other cases it won’t charge at all. Usually it’s quite clear if this happening as the equipment will be cycling even with no call for heat.
Yes, what happens is that the power draw is large enough to cause the heater to see that as a demand for heat. There are little converters for this that ensure that the thermostat has enough power to run and the heater only sees a potential free switch when there is actual demand. Google 'Nest Thermostat C-wire adapter'. This is especially convenient if you'd otherwise have to run new wiring which can require a lot of work.
I had a frequent cycling problem and the issue was that the air conditioning A-frame in my furnace was plugged.. it was causing a constriction that caused the natural gas furnace to overheat when it went into the second stage and cycle.
(I thought it was a shortage of return but once I eliminated that I cut open the furnace and found the problem)
Not even remotely true. The Nest wires the same as any other thermostat. Prior to the Nest there were plenty of inexpensive to high end devices with simple instructions included .