
Twitter / paulg: We installed Nest thermostats ... - ph0rque
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/358420997591941120
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phreeza
The second reply pretty much says it all:

@octal: I don't think they're designed for large/commercial buildings with
single huge rooms w/ lots of windows.

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onion2k
Ignoring the fact the product didn't work for YC for whatever reason, the fact
his experience with the company resulted in a negative tweet shows that their
customer experience is a lot less than optimal sometimes. That's a problem.

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threeseed
No I wouldn't say it's a huge problem. The tweet was bizarrely melodramatic.

I mean how bad can a thermostat be exactly to be classed as a "disaster". Did
it explode ? Did it cause the temperature in the room to approach 50C ? Did it
cause an electrical short that resulted in the wiring needing to be replaced ?

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johnw
Everything I've heard about Nest contradicts this. I'd love to hear in more
detail why this didn't work out.

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brk
I've heard very very mixed reviews. Several direct friends of mine have
installed them and gotten very poor results. I think much of it depends on the
predictability of your time at home/away _and_ the location of the thermostat
itself to sense activity.

My distilled opinion is that they are not significantly better than a simple
programmable thermostat for most people.

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foobarian
I never heard of it before, but it seems like it addresses the major issues I
have with programmable thermostats, which is that their UX is invariably like
something from the 1960s.

Now if you could disable all that learning crap then we'd be talking.

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dm2
My major hassle with my Nest thermostat is the WiFi password. Try entering a
long password into a device with no buttons.

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ceejayoz
You should only have to do it once, though.

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area51org
They're not, as someone else pointed out, intended for large commercial
buildings. I've owned one for about 18 months, and would buy it again.

Snarky remarks like "design doesn't end with the case" are unhelpful,
especially when most people, with homes, find the Nest a valuable product. I'm
sorry PG was so disappointed, but I'd hope for a more measured reaction.

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bcl
This tweet doesn't tell us anything. I'll upvote when there is more than 112
characters of detail.

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j45
Maybe I'm late to realize it, but I'm kind of noticing the sheer number of
opinions and interpretations in this thread, as opposed to the usual
insightful "I just learned so much more about this topic" that HN provides

Edit: My comment wasn't directed to the commenters above me but what I noticed
in this thread.

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bborud
It would have been helpful to know a bit more about what PG expected and what
he got.

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jasonlotito
> It would have been helpful to know a bit more about what PG expected

Mac Pro.

> and what he got

MacBook Air.

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plg
All the Nest marketing rhetoric always compares it to a standard non-
programmable thermostat. Obviously it will be better than that. What I really
want to know it, how much better is it than my fully-programmable thermostat?
I can program 4 times slots x 7 days per week: {"wake", "away", "home",
"sleep"} x {M,T,W,T,F,S,S} on my current thermostat... and I take full
advantage. Until Nest shows me a more meaningful benchmark I'm not sold.

~~~
area51org
The Nest marketing I've seen compares it to a programmable thermostat. The
idea is that instead of just having the heater or AC come on at regular times,
it should behave in a more nuanced way. Your own patterns of turning it up and
down matter, but so does the weather (it checks) and whether or not anyone is
actually home.

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Terretta
It also now handles when the Nest is in a hot spot, for example a wall that a
patch of sun crosses during the day. I was having trouble with that, we talked
about it at length and shared historical temp readings vs other seven zones in
the house, and they even sent me a new unit to make sure it was the sun not
the unit. A few months later, the had an update for this issue.

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LAMike
Has PG ever buried a company with just one tweet?

Like seriously altered the course of a startup's success? What's his most epic
one?

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anu_gupta
You're giving him WAY too much credit. Most of the world doesn't know who PG
is, and couldn't care less.

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TeMPOraL
But investors do, and at the beginning it matters a lot.

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anu_gupta
_Some_ investors do.

On a worldwide scale, the overwhelming majority of investors have never heard
of Paul Graham.

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windexh8er
I find it interesting Paul G fell victim to the pretty product, that's not all
that innovative. I find Nest to be a horrid product if you're at all
interested in advancing your living / working space as a correlated and
complete environment. Where to start? The simple fact that the API is closed
and one is forced to issue reverse engineered request to the cloud is enough
to make anyone with any knowledge of what's out there for HA to run away
screaming.

TL;DR He should have known better.

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Terretta
That he should have known better presupposes he's right. He may be in his
circumstances, but having worked with two dozen Nests, my experience says this
helps almost everyone.

I own nine Nests in two properties, a loft office with one zone and a two
building home with eight zones. The loft is commercial central heat and air.
The home is boiler heat with eight baseboard zones.

The Nest in loft saved me about 30% compared to prior years, and the Nests in
home saved me closer to 50%.

The reason I saved so much in the home is thanks to the energy history view in
the web or iPad app. I was able to see which zones were cycling on and off
when, and adjust relative zone temps until all zones were sharing work
equally. When all zones were naively the same temp, some zones were always on
(lower floors) while others were never on (top floor). Balancing temps
differently until I could see all zones cycling equivalently dropped my boiler
burn time by 50%.

Based on this, I recommended these to a number of friends and family. Those
with conventional central heat and air have all commented on savings they can
see on their electric bill.

The one exception is a friend with commercial office properties. He switched
to Nest and was having trouble, bill shot up! Turned out his tenants were mis-
training the Nest, with the classic misunderstanding that turning it higher
than our goal makes it adjust temps up faster. Nest was letting temps drop
farther, then tenants would turn it to 85 thinking that would make it heat
faster. It learned that, and was hitting 85 every morning then tenants trained
to let it drop back to 75 during day. We tweaked the Away temps to stay closer
to normal, switched off learning, and set a nice schedule. Now he's saving 30%
or so as well.

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jhawk28
We have had good success with our Nest at home. We have seen that it has lower
energy costs 30% consistently over the year for our sunny home in Florida. The
UI on unit leaves much to be desired, but I rarely use it as I can just log in
to the website or use the iPad app.

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mmuro
I've had nothing but good things to say about my Nest and have no trouble
recommending it.

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Bjoern
I don't really follow. Does he mean those?
[http://nest.com/](http://nest.com/)

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krmmalik
Yes

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af3
OP sounds like a guy in this quote: "Linux sucks cause iptables it's so hard
to configure compared to Windows Firewall". And we, hackers, know the truth ;)

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mattvot
urmm, "OP", runs this website...

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nolok
... Which really doesn't change anything to the comment you're replying to.

Not that I agree with it because I think his understanding of Nest selling
point is wrong.

