I saw this last night and admit that I've watched the video a couple times. It's a fascinating view into what users are really doing with your product.
<spoilers follow>
And, I'm really impressed with the filmmaking skill exhibited in this short video. The transition between walking with the camera and setting it down to rip the smoke alarm off the ceiling is perfect, and the framing there is great. As the film proceeds, Brad's breathing becomes more apparent and faster, as the tension builds to a climax of automatons screaming "emergency" and "can't be hushed here, can't be hushed here hushed here". I also appreciate the exposure as Brad walks into the garage to find an improvised grave for his machine overlords; completely black, and out of the blackness comes an insulated water cooler, perfectly sized for the smoke alarms. Finally, I like how the anger, tension, and action escalates progressively through the film. It starts off with some walking around, and gradually becomes more violent. The timing is just perfect.
Perhaps not intentional, but it's just so wonderful. This should be submitted to a film festival. It's the most fascinating "home video" I've seen in ages.
(Edit to add one more thing: I think the real genius is the computerized voice, not quite speaking with casual American English rhythm, telling the user that they can't do the exact action they requested by physically pressing a button. Obviously, Stanley Kubrick beat Brad to the punch by a few years, but it still works. And this is real life, not fiction.)
I concur regarding the film. It almost has an atmosphere of a dystopian sci-fi. Can't say whether that reflects poorly or not on the early stages of the IoT.
Interestingly it was telling him the 'master bedroom' was the one that was detecting smoke and yet it was hard to tell if he ever made it to the master bedroom. I've always wondered what a herd of these would do if you loaned one to someone and their house was burning down, you're remaining ones would scream in sympathy or something.
Nest did a great job with their thermostat, but the Protect leaves a lot to be desired. I was vacuuming which triggered the sensor. The alarm went off, and it was really loud.
I looked at how to hush it, and couldn't figure out how. My alarm was too high up to safely climb up and press the button -- I had paid for somebody to install it safely before.
So I called their support, and they told me they couldn't legally add a feature to turn it off. Which is a bit bewildering, considering that wave-to-hush had been a launch feature (albeit removed for apparent reliability issues). So I had to dangerously climb up high and remove the alarm and take out the battery.
But the worst thing? It never alerted my phone.
I have my own theories about why this happened. I had recovered my iPhone and not logged back into the Nest app, which I think is required for notifications to start flowing again.
But the support guy thought Nest engineering would be back in touch with me to discuss this crucial flaw within two weeks. Months later, I've not heard back.
Nest had a ton of options after the thermostat. It feels like they put a smaller B team on the smoke detector, despite it being a critically important safety device. It's really bewildering how the Protect turned out this way.
More generally, the lesson is that the Internet of Things is going to be fraught with complications.
Apparently "dirty" power is a major trigger for the wired Nest Protect's false alarms. It's not surprising that your vacuum cleaner was enough to trigger this.
CloudFlare's CEO was ranting about his ~daily false alarms about 6 months ago: "dirty power common on PG&E SF causes small blips in light emitter. Nest interprets as smoke."
I might add that never alerting my phone was the worst thing simply because it was the only reason to buy a Protect. A regular smoke detector continues to detect smoke just fine.
If the smoke detector function is having false alarms, this should be reported to Underwriters Laboratories, the tech arm of the fire insurance industry. Here's the report form.
The NEXT smoke detector has UL approval number UTGT.S25414. That means UL actually tested the thing. But they may not be testing adequately for electrical noise on the power side, because, until now, smoke detectors were simple electrically and insensitive to power problems.
So report problems to UL. They take fire safety device failures very seriously.
I purchased a Nest thermostat and installed it as per the instructions. Set it to 69°F before going to sleep. I awoke at 3AM with the temperature at 83°F and no way to turn it off.
I had to rip it from the wall. It was one of the most frustrating technology experiences I've had in years, and I'll have to see something REALLY compelling if I'm ever to try home automation again.
It was a fascinating discussion all around with some interesting lessons:
1) No one seems to consider a thermostat as a device which requires safety controls.
2) The built-in safety controls on a consumer HVAC unit tend to be insufficient & kick in well after temperatures in a home can get dangerously hot, if they kick in at all.
3) Because of the custom nature of every HVAC install, with more air going to certain rooms than others, it's not possible to draw any conclusion about the nature of whether a situation with a rogue thermostat can become deadly.
4) It appears a large majority of digital thermostats are built to a "toy grade" standard.
This is likely a topic space that doesn't get enough attention and I hope I opened a few eyes over at Spark. The fact is, such incidents don't happen often so they simply don't get the attention. This is unfortunate, because with the state of modern safety systems and designs an out of control thermostat is something that should never happen.
Nest pretty much says that you and I were doing it wrong.
It worked just fine for heat -- although I later found out that every time it turned on my heat pump it was activating the emergency heat. I tried finding a way to get the unit to be okay with ramping up the temperature over a longer period of time, but that setting was not exposed in their UI. All I wanted was to say "I don't really care what temperature the house is while I'm gone so long as it never goes below 55F or above 80F, but I want you to make sure that when I arrive home at 6PM the temperature has reached the point I set". But...alas, the unit never figured that out. The "learning mode" never actually did anything, no matter what I tried.
Fortunately I was able to get a full refund on the devices from Amazon.
I had exactly the same experience with my Nest thermostat. I think Nest's assertions about furnace compatibility are a marketing wash. The three support people I spoke to were explicitly disinterested in knowing the make and model of my furnace.
I appreciate the company's consumer electronics mindset, but they need to take the business of running HVAC systems more seriously.
My "dumb" thermostat is back on the wall and successfully running my heating system (to the schedule I've programmed it) as it's done for years.
I have such a love/hate relationship relationship with the Nest Thermostats. It took two years of tweaking, but I think I finally got them set.
When I first got them, they worked great in the sumemrtime. No complaints. But they were bloody awful for me in the winter:
* Nest would, randomly, refuse to turn on AUX heat. I woke up one morning and my house was in the upper 50s (the set temperature was 68) and Nest was just sitting there trying to run the heat pump instead of turning on AUX when it wasn't keeping up. At first I thought there was something wrong with my HVAC system, but I've had two different people look my system over, on three different occasions, and found everything working properly. Nest was just refusing to turn on AUX.
The first time it happened it was in the single digits outside and Nest let my house get into the upper 50s (temperature was set at 68, and it was still trying to run the heat pump even though it was in the single freaking digits outside). I finally took Nest off the wall and manually shorted the aux heat on - I didn't want the house to get any colder while we "troubleshooted" it, and Nest was just refusing, no matter how I adjusted it, to turn the aux heat on and warm the house back up.
* Other times, it would use AUX when it doesn't need it. It was 37 outside once, and nest was burning AUX like crazy when the heat pump was having no problems keeping up. I had a nearly $400 power bill last January. Now, in fairness, it was very cold that month, but Nest using AUX when it shouldn't was a big contributor.
* For instance, you can't directly set the AUX lockout any lower than 35 degrees (more on this in a minute) when, for my house, it probably needs to be around 26. You can also only set certain things from the thermostat itself.
* They are very difficult to troubleshoot. How do you manually turn on AUX heat to test if it's even working at all? As far as I can tell, you can't! The only way we were able to test it is to take the thing off the wall and manually short the wires together (and, of course, it worked fine).
This is not some weird setup either. It's a standard heat pump with electric heat strips for aux heat, that's only about 4 years old. Where I live, this is the absolute most common form of heating. Because I can take the thermostat off the wall and short the wires together to turn aux on (and because I've had two different HVAC contractors check my system), I'm fairly certain the problem is not my HVAC system.
The biggest problem was, after three times of waking up to a cold house, I had a very difficult time trust them. I had an infant in the house, and for something that I'm not supposed to have to think about, I was spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about.
So at one point I replaced one of them with a Honeywell (not the Lyric, one of the touchscreen models). And it worked fine for the rest of winter and was much less crazy to deal with, but once summer rolled around the Honeywell wouldn't turn my air conditioning on! In troubleshooting it, we found that the Honeywell was defective and wasn't putting enough voltage to activate the reversing valve. So the heat pump was still running.
So I ended up putting the Nest back on for the summer, but spent a lot of time reading the Nest forums. Apparently problems with AUX heat are SUPER common with Nests (just Google "nest aux heat" to see tons of complaints).
There's a hack that that you can go through (detailed here: https://community.nest.com/ideas/1144#comment-7150) that allows you to set the lockout to a lower temperature. Which I did eventually set to 26. And, sidenote, I really hope they don't close this hole, because a lot of people are relying on it.
So far this winter, no problems. The hack seems to be holding. I haven't woken up to a cold house yet, and Nest is only using AUX when it should. And my power bills are running 25% less than the year before thanks to Nest not constantly using AUX heat.
I'm still very wary of them. If I wake up to a cold house again, they are going right in the trash can.
I'm wondering how much testing Nest did with the photoelectrics in the smoke detector. A teardown [1] seems to show a rather simple design for the led and photodiode beam path, as well as both of those components having places for light to potentially leak in around the diode bases. Other detectors [2], [3], seem to have much more complicated beam paths, with baffles and such, as well as better shielding to ensure the sensitive components are well-protected. Given this, I can see how all the differences in tolerances can lead to gaps which lead to lots of false alarms.
Don't you usually want lifesaving devices to have simple designs? For example, scuba breathing regulators are famously reliable in part because there's very little to them. Same goes for the AK-47, though I suppose I'm getting off the "lifesaving" track now...
(Yes, I know the smoke detection was a malfunction, but occasional malfunctions like that are a fact of life. My ire is directed at regulators forbidding users from silencing their own smoke detectors without physically incapacitating them -- what were they thinking!?)
Or if you have it installed in your master bedroom, with an en-suite bathroom and a steamy shower. Nothing like having all your smoke alarms go off when you're in the shower! We contacted Nest. Their basic response: "Move the Nest Protect further away from the shower." Or, take the stupid thing off the ceiling and switch back to the previous smoke detector, which would detect smoke but was not fooled by water vapor.
Nest had marketed the device as a smoke alarm that you could silence -- because it would have a period where it would warn you that something was wrong before it triggered the alarm, and it would be possible to manually silence it -- but in my direct experience this period never happened. The Protects always went straight from "normal" to "ALARM" without any warning period. Of course the Protect unit in my kitchen never actually detected kitchen smoke, even when I once burned some food quite severely.
I also had a negative experience with the Nest thermostat. I'm still not sure if I had it wired wrong -- I don't believe so, because I had previously installed cheap-o Honeywell thermostats that worked flawlessly -- but one late spring night I turned on the air conditioner to lower the temperature a few degrees, and then went to bed.
I woke up a few hours later, drenched in sweat. Somehow the unit had commanded "EMER HEAT" on my heat pump instead of air conditioning. My bedroom was 91 degrees Fahrenheit! The target temp was 70F, which the unit was never reaching. But it wasn't smart enough to realize "Hey, my actions are just making the temperature INCREASE, I should stop and flag an error." Nest's response: "that's funny, it shouldn't have done that". I took the things off the wall the next day.
I am now very wary of "smart home" technology. I can't imagine the experience that a non-technically inclined user has...
There's a reason that smoke detectors operate the way they do. That reason is that people die when they don't.
The issue I have with the Nest smoke detector is that it is sold as a luxury consumer product. That puts it in the class of "the customer is always right" sales. The Venn diagram of that and things that are designed to save people's lives regardless of their tendency to statistically evaluate the risks and rewards of rare but deadly events inaccurately is disjoint.
If Nest did not comply with the regulations, they could not market their product as a smoke alarm.
I was curious about this. IANAL (or general contractor) but while it was easy to find lots of regulations about required installation of smoke detectors, I couldn't find any restrictions about silencing them. In particular, I turned out nothing in either California or San Francisco fire code.
Of course, Nest is selling to a national market, so I don't doubt that it's required somewhere in the US, but it sure doesn't seem to be that common.
> (Yes, I know the smoke detection was a malfunction, but occasional malfunctions like that are a fact of life. My ire is directed at regulators forbidding users from silencing their own smoke detectors without physically incapacitating them -- what were they thinking!?)
Well for most it just involves pulling the power cord or yanking the battery.
I continually come back to the thought that typical consumer software practices - be it games, apps, cloud services, etc - where you iterate quickly and don't always work out the bugs or design scales well to things like Nest protect, etc. For me, anything that ends up in a consumer home device should be solid from the time it is purchased and not require software updates to work right.
This leads to another concern of mine -- are places like fb, apple, Google, etc. capable of creating stable v1 products for the home.
With Nest, the initial thermostat seemed to work well. Original Dropcam works well. There have been questions since the acquisition of both companies.
I agree ... I was an embedded engineer for many years and we knew that once we released a product to production, it would kill the company if 100k of them in the field had to be replaced.
I don't think it's just Nests, I bought a First Alert smoke alarm a year ago and it just recently started giving me random false alarms. Battery is fine but something is setting it off (not fire or smoke, and yes it has both atomic and photoelectric sensors). I went searching for a good smoke alarm without lots of false alarm complaints and unfortunately every smoke alarm on Amazon has complaints about false alarms.
I think in recent years manufacturers have become paranoid about missing an alarm and being sued so they probably default to fire the alarm if there's absolutely any potential reason, real or imagined, that a fire might be occuring.
I run five of them, three powered and two battery. One of them "falsed" twice in one week about three months after installation, and not at all in the four months since. So I think it wasn't false, I think there was something triggering it. I've had zero other issues.
Note these were all purchased before Nest turned off the waving, but have been updated with e firmware that ignores the wave.
I also run nine of the original batch of thermostats with no issues, and any minor complaints (e.g. turning off heat when in direct sunlight) have all been addressed over the years of updates.
One experience like this would be enough to put me off of home automation for about 10 years. I think its unfortunate that Nest chose a target so fraught with safety implications for their second device. A lot could be done to ameliorate problems like this if the consequences of a false negative were not so catastrophic.
There's a general pattern of trying to dumb things down to a simple, inflexible interface, too often with half-baked "AI" bolted on. Good products still need attentive human supervision.
I installed Insteon motion detectors and webcams after a robbery, but the included software was such undependable and inflexible garbage that I replaced it all with a simple Misterhouse-based Perl script that sends texts via email.
If I see another tech product ad aimed at millenials featuring bright easter colors and indiepop music pitched by Steve Jobs wannabes who are unable to get any angry nerds to make their products actually work, I might snap.
I was a huge fan of the IDEA of the Nest Protect. The reality? Not so big a fan. I think they oversold it. It's still better than my old smoke detector in that the pre-alarm warning is fairly gentle, but I'm still getting on a chair to tap the "shut up" button. Wave-to-turn-off never worked for me even before they disabled it.
My brother bought one, while I was still in the honeymoon period of mine. His false alarmed constantly, and has since been removed.
I've never used Nest Protect so I was curious about this. Why is it location-dependent? The Nest site has some info[0]:
Hushing works differently during an emergency. If Nest Protect detects emergency levels of smoke, it will sound an alarm that can’t be hushed, by regulation. However, you can hush the other Nest Protects in the house by pressing the button on the Nest Protect that detected the problem. So, when you press the Nest button on the Nest Protect in the bedroom, it will continue to alarm, but the Nest Protect in the living room will quiet down. We designed Nest Protect to hush this way so you can more easily communicate with other people in the house during an emergency while still being able to locate and address the source of the problem.
The idea is supposed to be that if you accidentally told your basement smoke alarm that it was in the bedroom, you'd wake up hearing "Fire in the BEDROOM" and then you'd look around and see there's no fire in the bedroom and push the hush button and go back to sleep and meanwhile your basement is on fire.
So networked smoke alarms require you to visit the one that's detecting the fire and disable it locally.
Now, why they would ever make the regulations such that you can't temporarily silence the alarm, even when you're in direct physical contact with it, is beyond me.
It seems like the majority of people who had problems with the Nest Thermostat in these comments had it hooked up to a heat pump system.
Mine is a first-gen, bought the instant they were available to the public, and it's been rock-solid for the past 3+ years. However, I only have a standard central air and central heat (gas furnace) setup here in Texas. Nothing complicated.
I've been debating the Protects myself, the battery operated ones.
[+] [-] jrockway|11 years ago|reply
<spoilers follow>
And, I'm really impressed with the filmmaking skill exhibited in this short video. The transition between walking with the camera and setting it down to rip the smoke alarm off the ceiling is perfect, and the framing there is great. As the film proceeds, Brad's breathing becomes more apparent and faster, as the tension builds to a climax of automatons screaming "emergency" and "can't be hushed here, can't be hushed here hushed here". I also appreciate the exposure as Brad walks into the garage to find an improvised grave for his machine overlords; completely black, and out of the blackness comes an insulated water cooler, perfectly sized for the smoke alarms. Finally, I like how the anger, tension, and action escalates progressively through the film. It starts off with some walking around, and gradually becomes more violent. The timing is just perfect.
Perhaps not intentional, but it's just so wonderful. This should be submitted to a film festival. It's the most fascinating "home video" I've seen in ages.
(Edit to add one more thing: I think the real genius is the computerized voice, not quite speaking with casual American English rhythm, telling the user that they can't do the exact action they requested by physically pressing a button. Obviously, Stanley Kubrick beat Brad to the punch by a few years, but it still works. And this is real life, not fiction.)
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akhilcacharya|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebspelman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brendanr|11 years ago|reply
I looked at how to hush it, and couldn't figure out how. My alarm was too high up to safely climb up and press the button -- I had paid for somebody to install it safely before.
So I called their support, and they told me they couldn't legally add a feature to turn it off. Which is a bit bewildering, considering that wave-to-hush had been a launch feature (albeit removed for apparent reliability issues). So I had to dangerously climb up high and remove the alarm and take out the battery.
But the worst thing? It never alerted my phone.
I have my own theories about why this happened. I had recovered my iPhone and not logged back into the Nest app, which I think is required for notifications to start flowing again.
But the support guy thought Nest engineering would be back in touch with me to discuss this crucial flaw within two weeks. Months later, I've not heard back.
Nest had a ton of options after the thermostat. It feels like they put a smaller B team on the smoke detector, despite it being a critically important safety device. It's really bewildering how the Protect turned out this way.
More generally, the lesson is that the Internet of Things is going to be fraught with complications.
[+] [-] bgentry|11 years ago|reply
CloudFlare's CEO was ranting about his ~daily false alarms about 6 months ago: "dirty power common on PG&E SF causes small blips in light emitter. Nest interprets as smoke."
More detail here: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40eastdakota%20nest&src=typd
[+] [-] brendanr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|11 years ago|reply
http://ul.com/offerings/market-surveillance/
The NEXT smoke detector has UL approval number UTGT.S25414. That means UL actually tested the thing. But they may not be testing adequately for electrical noise on the power side, because, until now, smoke detectors were simple electrically and insensitive to power problems.
So report problems to UL. They take fire safety device failures very seriously.
[+] [-] jmenter|11 years ago|reply
I had to rip it from the wall. It was one of the most frustrating technology experiences I've had in years, and I'll have to see something REALLY compelling if I'm ever to try home automation again.
[+] [-] patcheudor|11 years ago|reply
It was a fascinating discussion all around with some interesting lessons:
1) No one seems to consider a thermostat as a device which requires safety controls.
2) The built-in safety controls on a consumer HVAC unit tend to be insufficient & kick in well after temperatures in a home can get dangerously hot, if they kick in at all.
3) Because of the custom nature of every HVAC install, with more air going to certain rooms than others, it's not possible to draw any conclusion about the nature of whether a situation with a rogue thermostat can become deadly.
4) It appears a large majority of digital thermostats are built to a "toy grade" standard.
This is likely a topic space that doesn't get enough attention and I hope I opened a few eyes over at Spark. The fact is, such incidents don't happen often so they simply don't get the attention. This is unfortunate, because with the state of modern safety systems and designs an out of control thermostat is something that should never happen.
[+] [-] engi_nerd|11 years ago|reply
It worked just fine for heat -- although I later found out that every time it turned on my heat pump it was activating the emergency heat. I tried finding a way to get the unit to be okay with ramping up the temperature over a longer period of time, but that setting was not exposed in their UI. All I wanted was to say "I don't really care what temperature the house is while I'm gone so long as it never goes below 55F or above 80F, but I want you to make sure that when I arrive home at 6PM the temperature has reached the point I set". But...alas, the unit never figured that out. The "learning mode" never actually did anything, no matter what I tried.
Fortunately I was able to get a full refund on the devices from Amazon.
[+] [-] jacobheric|11 years ago|reply
I appreciate the company's consumer electronics mindset, but they need to take the business of running HVAC systems more seriously.
My "dumb" thermostat is back on the wall and successfully running my heating system (to the schedule I've programmed it) as it's done for years.
[+] [-] peckrob|11 years ago|reply
When I first got them, they worked great in the sumemrtime. No complaints. But they were bloody awful for me in the winter:
* Nest would, randomly, refuse to turn on AUX heat. I woke up one morning and my house was in the upper 50s (the set temperature was 68) and Nest was just sitting there trying to run the heat pump instead of turning on AUX when it wasn't keeping up. At first I thought there was something wrong with my HVAC system, but I've had two different people look my system over, on three different occasions, and found everything working properly. Nest was just refusing to turn on AUX.
The first time it happened it was in the single digits outside and Nest let my house get into the upper 50s (temperature was set at 68, and it was still trying to run the heat pump even though it was in the single freaking digits outside). I finally took Nest off the wall and manually shorted the aux heat on - I didn't want the house to get any colder while we "troubleshooted" it, and Nest was just refusing, no matter how I adjusted it, to turn the aux heat on and warm the house back up.
* Other times, it would use AUX when it doesn't need it. It was 37 outside once, and nest was burning AUX like crazy when the heat pump was having no problems keeping up. I had a nearly $400 power bill last January. Now, in fairness, it was very cold that month, but Nest using AUX when it shouldn't was a big contributor.
* For instance, you can't directly set the AUX lockout any lower than 35 degrees (more on this in a minute) when, for my house, it probably needs to be around 26. You can also only set certain things from the thermostat itself.
* They are very difficult to troubleshoot. How do you manually turn on AUX heat to test if it's even working at all? As far as I can tell, you can't! The only way we were able to test it is to take the thing off the wall and manually short the wires together (and, of course, it worked fine).
This is not some weird setup either. It's a standard heat pump with electric heat strips for aux heat, that's only about 4 years old. Where I live, this is the absolute most common form of heating. Because I can take the thermostat off the wall and short the wires together to turn aux on (and because I've had two different HVAC contractors check my system), I'm fairly certain the problem is not my HVAC system.
The biggest problem was, after three times of waking up to a cold house, I had a very difficult time trust them. I had an infant in the house, and for something that I'm not supposed to have to think about, I was spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about.
So at one point I replaced one of them with a Honeywell (not the Lyric, one of the touchscreen models). And it worked fine for the rest of winter and was much less crazy to deal with, but once summer rolled around the Honeywell wouldn't turn my air conditioning on! In troubleshooting it, we found that the Honeywell was defective and wasn't putting enough voltage to activate the reversing valve. So the heat pump was still running.
So I ended up putting the Nest back on for the summer, but spent a lot of time reading the Nest forums. Apparently problems with AUX heat are SUPER common with Nests (just Google "nest aux heat" to see tons of complaints).
There's a hack that that you can go through (detailed here: https://community.nest.com/ideas/1144#comment-7150) that allows you to set the lockout to a lower temperature. Which I did eventually set to 26. And, sidenote, I really hope they don't close this hole, because a lot of people are relying on it.
So far this winter, no problems. The hack seems to be holding. I haven't woken up to a cold house yet, and Nest is only using AUX when it should. And my power bills are running 25% less than the year before thanks to Nest not constantly using AUX heat.
I'm still very wary of them. If I wake up to a cold house again, they are going right in the trash can.
[+] [-] Sanddancer|11 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nest+Protect+Teardown/20057 [2] http://www.accuratebuilding.com/images/publications/educatio... [3] http://st-nso-us.resource.bosch.com/media/us_product_test/05...
[+] [-] raldi|11 years ago|reply
Don't you usually want lifesaving devices to have simple designs? For example, scuba breathing regulators are famously reliable in part because there's very little to them. Same goes for the AK-47, though I suppose I'm getting off the "lifesaving" track now...
[+] [-] raldi|11 years ago|reply
https://nest.com/support/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-...
(Yes, I know the smoke detection was a malfunction, but occasional malfunctions like that are a fact of life. My ire is directed at regulators forbidding users from silencing their own smoke detectors without physically incapacitating them -- what were they thinking!?)
[+] [-] engi_nerd|11 years ago|reply
Nest had marketed the device as a smoke alarm that you could silence -- because it would have a period where it would warn you that something was wrong before it triggered the alarm, and it would be possible to manually silence it -- but in my direct experience this period never happened. The Protects always went straight from "normal" to "ALARM" without any warning period. Of course the Protect unit in my kitchen never actually detected kitchen smoke, even when I once burned some food quite severely.
I also had a negative experience with the Nest thermostat. I'm still not sure if I had it wired wrong -- I don't believe so, because I had previously installed cheap-o Honeywell thermostats that worked flawlessly -- but one late spring night I turned on the air conditioner to lower the temperature a few degrees, and then went to bed.
I woke up a few hours later, drenched in sweat. Somehow the unit had commanded "EMER HEAT" on my heat pump instead of air conditioning. My bedroom was 91 degrees Fahrenheit! The target temp was 70F, which the unit was never reaching. But it wasn't smart enough to realize "Hey, my actions are just making the temperature INCREASE, I should stop and flag an error." Nest's response: "that's funny, it shouldn't have done that". I took the things off the wall the next day.
I am now very wary of "smart home" technology. I can't imagine the experience that a non-technically inclined user has...
[+] [-] brudgers|11 years ago|reply
The issue I have with the Nest smoke detector is that it is sold as a luxury consumer product. That puts it in the class of "the customer is always right" sales. The Venn diagram of that and things that are designed to save people's lives regardless of their tendency to statistically evaluate the risks and rewards of rare but deadly events inaccurately is disjoint.
If Nest did not comply with the regulations, they could not market their product as a smoke alarm.
[+] [-] jrockway|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimlottc|11 years ago|reply
Of course, Nest is selling to a national market, so I don't doubt that it's required somewhere in the US, but it sure doesn't seem to be that common.
[+] [-] asdfaoeu|11 years ago|reply
Well for most it just involves pulling the power cord or yanking the battery.
[+] [-] jmspring|11 years ago|reply
This leads to another concern of mine -- are places like fb, apple, Google, etc. capable of creating stable v1 products for the home.
With Nest, the initial thermostat seemed to work well. Original Dropcam works well. There have been questions since the acquisition of both companies.
[+] [-] smoyer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdicola|11 years ago|reply
I think in recent years manufacturers have become paranoid about missing an alarm and being sued so they probably default to fire the alarm if there's absolutely any potential reason, real or imagined, that a fire might be occuring.
[+] [-] Terretta|11 years ago|reply
Note these were all purchased before Nest turned off the waving, but have been updated with e firmware that ignores the wave.
I also run nine of the original batch of thermostats with no issues, and any minor complaints (e.g. turning off heat when in direct sunlight) have all been addressed over the years of updates.
[+] [-] oloboWd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cxseven|11 years ago|reply
I installed Insteon motion detectors and webcams after a robbery, but the included software was such undependable and inflexible garbage that I replaced it all with a simple Misterhouse-based Perl script that sends texts via email.
If I see another tech product ad aimed at millenials featuring bright easter colors and indiepop music pitched by Steve Jobs wannabes who are unable to get any angry nerds to make their products actually work, I might snap.
By the way, the other HN article about dumb smart homes is a good accompaniment to this. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9043524 )
[+] [-] TrainedMonkey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradfitz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennywinker|11 years ago|reply
My brother bought one, while I was still in the honeymoon period of mine. His false alarmed constantly, and has since been removed.
[+] [-] milesf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kubiiii|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimlottc|11 years ago|reply
I've never used Nest Protect so I was curious about this. Why is it location-dependent? The Nest site has some info[0]:
Hushing works differently during an emergency. If Nest Protect detects emergency levels of smoke, it will sound an alarm that can’t be hushed, by regulation. However, you can hush the other Nest Protects in the house by pressing the button on the Nest Protect that detected the problem. So, when you press the Nest button on the Nest Protect in the bedroom, it will continue to alarm, but the Nest Protect in the living room will quiet down. We designed Nest Protect to hush this way so you can more easily communicate with other people in the house during an emergency while still being able to locate and address the source of the problem.
0: https://nest.com/support/article/What-types-of-alarms-can-I-...
[+] [-] raldi|11 years ago|reply
So networked smoke alarms require you to visit the one that's detecting the fire and disable it locally.
Now, why they would ever make the regulations such that you can't temporarily silence the alarm, even when you're in direct physical contact with it, is beyond me.
[+] [-] 300bps|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdicola|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandon272|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jms703|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbill|11 years ago|reply
Mine is a first-gen, bought the instant they were available to the public, and it's been rock-solid for the past 3+ years. However, I only have a standard central air and central heat (gas furnace) setup here in Texas. Nothing complicated.
I've been debating the Protects myself, the battery operated ones.