Nest sounds nasty

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Excellent rant.

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Alphabet > Google > Nest > Revolv

You can't just buy a tech company like you can buy a load of lumber.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin
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internet-things/

When we got our new hvac they put in a nest. What a waste of money. My wife and I work from home so the house is always occupied. The nest is useless in this environment. We have programed it to keep various temps and it always decides it knows better. The nest has actually made our electric bills go UP.

We would have been better off with a simple Honeywell programmable unit. I just want a thermostat where I can set a min temp and max temp and walk away.

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Chisolm 
Republic of Texas
Reply to
Joe Chisolm

Our cabin in the mountains is used by a lot of guests. It had a fancy digital thermostat that guests were always leaving in weird states. I took it out and put in a plain dial thermostat. It's analog electronic inside but behaves like an old-fashioned Honeywell.

(I have a hidden Internet link that parallels the thermostat, so I can warm up the place remotely.)

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

I've always said that relying on any kind of "cloud" is foolish unless it is your own. And even then it's critical because you are often at the mercy of some link provider.

Last weekend I ripped out the remaining parts of our X-10 home automation stuff. All of it. Sometimes going back to the basics is very refreshing and liberating. I also don't have a smart phone, don't have a GPS, don't have cable or satellite TV. Don't want any of it.

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Regards, Joerg 

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Joerg

In my experience a very effective way of reducing cost is not to have a thermostat. Instead have a single button in another room which turns the heating on for an hour.

If you can't be bothered to get up and press it, clearly it isn't cold enough to worry about.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

Cable is OK. Mo watches some shows and I get 30 mbit internet and email and Dropbox, and phone service is free. Dropbox lets me work anywhere without managing memory sticks.

I don't want a smart phone, but the GPS apps are cool, especially the ones that spot traffic jams and guide you around them on the back roads. Most of this cloud and IoT stuff is silly, but some of it is great.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

Just burrow deeper in the covers.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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John Larkin

It ain't free. They factor the phone service into their $99.99/month or whatever they charge.

Since AT&T has become a bit inflationary on their 6M DSL which is now up at $54/mo I'd be tempted to switch to cable. Only for Internet. Way faster but also closer to $70/mo. What I do not like is the way they "install" their infrastructure. A Dremel style "trench" across a road, cable drops in, some caulk, done. On my bicycle I sometimes have to dodge ripped out loops. On properties the coax is often just slobbered through the bushes and lays on the surface. Box covers sit cattywompus and nobody does anything about it. An outage waiting to happen.

Except when people rely on it too much and, like one German cyclist, become stranded.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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Joerg

What drove the cost way down for us is to get rid of third party fuel dependency, and most of all anything that smells like a utility. Installing a wood stove was one of the best decisions we ever made WRT our home.

A very nice side benefit is that we now also often cook over real wood fire. Pizza and bread was never that good before. Nothing beats independence. Except more independence.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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Joerg

AT&T was charging me $50 or something for POTS, plus long-distance costs and all sorts of nonsense. DSL was more, and I had to pay for a second pair because the phone pair was flakey when it rained. Pitiful.

Comcast did a nice install, but maybe because I "helped" the lady.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  
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John Larkin

Just so, especially when watching the telly or reading a book.

Unfortunately gloves and chattering teeth don't help when soldering or probing SMDs of any size.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

Good idea. I heat the house with a wood burning stove (except for the bathroom electric wall heater). I use your system as a "thermostat" of sorts. If it's not cold enough to justify throwing another log on the fire, it's probably just easier to add another layer of blankets or just ignore the problem until morning. For extremely cold nights, I have a down sleeping bag nearby.

Drivel: After the 1973-74 energy crisis, I decided to investigate energy related products. All the resultant ideas eventually failed after oil again became plentiful. One of them was a wearable wireless thermostat. Instead of controlling the temperature of the entire house, the temperature would be set to the convenience of the wearer. At the same time, the ducting that controls the HVAC air flow, would recognize which rooms are occupied, and only heat those rooms. I built two demonstration systems, both of which flopped because nobody would wear the device, nobody wanted to wait for a room to heat up, and the noise of the ducting baffles opening and closing was deemed too loud. Note the year, which was before the microprocessor was commonly available (Intel 8080 was introduced in 1974) and well before fuzzy logic "comfort" algorithms.

Lesson learned: Just because it works, doesn't automatically make it useful.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

I get near that. I have a wireless thermostat that is not attached to anything, and I adjust the setpoint "in real time" to turn the heating on/off.

Unfortunately that breaks the "...if I can't be bothered to get up..." precondition :(

Reply to
Tom Gardner

The great part is that a lot of those home automation devices run embedded Linux versions which are controllable via Android/web interfaces.

And some of the requests you can send to the device don't require authentication, and don't properly sanitize the requests and use fixed-length arrays in C to store the data.

So, good old fashioned stack smashing root access to the device is easily done:

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Reply to
bitrex

You aren't married, right? ;)

Round here, the pipes could freeze while I was sleeping. We had a very warm winter (thanks to El Nino), but had a few days of record cold in February--5 below zero. It virtually never gets below 0 F here.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Phil Hobbs

My homebrew cabin automation system works by bouncing files through Dropbox.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
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John Larkin

I bought the first Nest when we had an unoccupied house out of state. It was great to be able to monitor and change the inside temperature that Winter. When the house sold, I moved it to current house and bought another for the upstairs heat pump. I still like them but use them more as programmable thermostats. I do control them from my phone, occasionally. Heat pump recovery is so poor that I often change the program if it's going to be unusually cold. It's nice to be able to do it remotely (wouldn't get done otherwise).

There's no reason a Nest can't do that.

Reply to
krw

The problem with these implementations is that they opted to provide their own pseudo DynDNS service -- as an excuse to keep themselves in the loop. There's no underlying NEED for another party to be involved in those sort of real-time transactions -- except, of course, for a revenue and DATA stream!

[We can cut our internet cord and *still* have remote control over the HVAC, etc.]

Obviously, something very wrong in the implementation (or in your choice of temperature scheduling). The only role a "smart" thermostat should introduce that a "dumb" programmable doesn't fulfill is anticipating transition times (instead of blindly implementing changes at specific times).

Ours turns on just early enough to ensure the house temperature has reached the desired setting *at* the desired time. So, instead of turning the heat *on* at 8:00A, the house is "at temperature" at 8AM. Likewise, the heat stops kicking in at night if the temperature hasn't fallen below the minimum defined by the "comfort factor" at 10P (instead, relying on the expectations programmed for "after 10P").

That's what we have with the exception that the min and max vary depending on our usage habits. E.g., some days, SWMBO has activities scheduled for early morning (out of the house before 8A). On those days, the house warms up earlier so she doesn't awake to a cool bedroom, kitchen, etc. And, in anticipation of her departing, the house once again cools until I roll out of bed -- or she is expected to return.

On days when our schedules don't require early morning "comfort", the heat is delayed.

So, you can hear the heat come on (in "winter") and know that your alarm clock will be going off, soon -- essentially once the heat turns back *off* as the house reaches the desired temperature!

WinterSummer transition is more involved as heat and cooling can see use in the same week. And, the swamp cooler can be called in to provide that cooling instead of the ACbrrr.

Reply to
Don Y

Because the developers didn't think about what they NEEDED and, instead, looked for an "easy" solution. Same reason you see PC's doing work that could be done with far less hardware (and software)!

Things like security are afterthoughts to these implementations ("Shirley it MUST be secure, right? After all, it's Linux!")

Or accept requests from arbitrary IP's over unencrypted tunnels, etc. Security by obscurity. ("Gee, hopefully none of the million units that we sell will ever fall into the hands of an adversary intent on sorting out our deceptions...")

Using a COTS platform (Linux, MS, etc.) is just silly-thought when you're concerned about these things.

Reply to
Don Y

On Thu, 07 Apr 2016 13:31:27 -0700, Don Y wrote:

Yep. "He who owns the data, owns the customer". (Me, 2009).

If you think Nest is bad, you should see how some of the grid tied solar systems operate. Even though the solar controller, located on your premises, stores a month of more production statistics, the homeowners access to the data is through the company web pile. The web pile will generally deliver anything that you might possibly want from the processed data, except the raw data so that you can do your own calculations. The service is often free to the homeowner, but the installer pays for the privilege of limiting and massaging the data to insure that a frustrated homeowner will return to the original installer for interpretations, modifications, and additional services. One local solar installation company seems to have each installer produce a different idea of what data the customer is allowed to view and monitor. Trying to bypass the installer and going directly to the manufacturer that maintains the web pile is futile. The result is trash like this. (I've seen worse): Note the funny trend line for the month of May 2015. The data logging was so badly misconfigured that the installer just wiped the data and replaced it with a contrived constant value. He then blocked my access to the raw data so I couldn't produce any more embarrassing graphs. Most installers will claim that if I redirect the data stream, they will refuse to honor the system warranty even though they obviously never even look at the data. I haven't tested this yet.

Another monitoring company tries to be helpful by scaling the data to an "appropriate" time period. In other words, it spoon feeds me the data. If I look at 2 months of data, I can get hourly statistics for each individual panel. This is good. However, if I try to look at more than 2 months, it switches to daily data and drops the per-panel records. Anything more than 1 year gives me monthly data with no per-panel statistics.

Nest could easily have been exactly like this, but wasn't. It was probably originally intended to be sold to installers and home automation companies, who would use it as a "hook" to snare customers into their maintenance schemes. Home security camera and alarm systems are a good starting model. For example: If Nest had a more extensive line, it could have been like this: where the thermostat and cameras are just a small part of the installation. But, Nest didn't have an extensive dealer/service network or product line. Nest hardware was simply too expensive to pay for the middlemen installation companies. So, Nest was forced to sell direct to the end users in home improvement stores. To pay for the necessary flooring and advertising, Nest sold for what I consider far too high a price. With Apple and Google expressing an interest in the company, there was plenty of hype available to inspire the confidence of the buyers. That caught the attention of the early adopters, which was expected to eventually translate into mass sales. It didn't happen. What was left was a device that didn't really do very much, was not particularly smart, that cost far too much, offers little end user support, which (previously) owned all the data, and has a few security issues: If Nest had expanded their offerings, reduced prices, and offered service in trade for a customer lock-in (like the home automation and solar power vendors), I think it might have done better.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Jeff Liebermann

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