<story><title>Hidden tech of the Nest Thermostat</title><url>https://www.scanofthemonth.com/scans/nest-thermostat-evolution</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>I wish they could solve the basic use case of &amp;quot;Let me set a temperature and thermostat keeps the house at that temperature.&amp;quot; I tried several versions of Nest, and they all inevitably decided on their own that they were smarter than me and generated some weird schedule despite my never commanding them to operate on a schedule. I just want my thermostat to hold whatever temperature I set it at, until I set it at another temperature. This shouldn&amp;#x27;t take AI wizardry to achieve.</text></item><item><author>AlbertCory</author><text>When I was in Google Patent Litigation, I volunteered to work on Nest because it sounded cool. So I spent a couple days over there (they weren&amp;#x27;t on the Mountain View campus) and sat in on some deposition preps. They were being sued by a Texas company called Allure, which was &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a troll; they actually had a product that, at one time, you could have found on the Home Depot web site. I&amp;#x27;m not going to reveal any legal secrets here, sorry.&lt;p&gt;I did a ton of research on this space, and dove into their source code. Literally all over the world, companies have been working on this problem for decades. How you know when someone is coming home so you can turn on the heat or A&amp;#x2F;C, or how the utility company can do it for you: all that is very, very well covered. I don&amp;#x27;t think there&amp;#x27;s anything fundamentally new about the Nest, and I don&amp;#x27;t have one in my house.&lt;p&gt;I actually stayed in someone&amp;#x27;s house that had two, so it&amp;#x27;s not as though it&amp;#x27;s completely foreign to me. I don&amp;#x27;t think that web-ifying your whole house is ever a good idea and I&amp;#x27;m never going to do it. YMMV.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wycy</author><text>&amp;gt; I just want my thermostat to hold whatever temperature I set it at, until I set it at another temperature.&lt;p&gt;You can set your own schedule with Nest, you don&amp;#x27;t have to let the AI take over. Mine is fully on my own manual schedule.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hidden tech of the Nest Thermostat</title><url>https://www.scanofthemonth.com/scans/nest-thermostat-evolution</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryandrake</author><text>I wish they could solve the basic use case of &amp;quot;Let me set a temperature and thermostat keeps the house at that temperature.&amp;quot; I tried several versions of Nest, and they all inevitably decided on their own that they were smarter than me and generated some weird schedule despite my never commanding them to operate on a schedule. I just want my thermostat to hold whatever temperature I set it at, until I set it at another temperature. This shouldn&amp;#x27;t take AI wizardry to achieve.</text></item><item><author>AlbertCory</author><text>When I was in Google Patent Litigation, I volunteered to work on Nest because it sounded cool. So I spent a couple days over there (they weren&amp;#x27;t on the Mountain View campus) and sat in on some deposition preps. They were being sued by a Texas company called Allure, which was &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a troll; they actually had a product that, at one time, you could have found on the Home Depot web site. I&amp;#x27;m not going to reveal any legal secrets here, sorry.&lt;p&gt;I did a ton of research on this space, and dove into their source code. Literally all over the world, companies have been working on this problem for decades. How you know when someone is coming home so you can turn on the heat or A&amp;#x2F;C, or how the utility company can do it for you: all that is very, very well covered. I don&amp;#x27;t think there&amp;#x27;s anything fundamentally new about the Nest, and I don&amp;#x27;t have one in my house.&lt;p&gt;I actually stayed in someone&amp;#x27;s house that had two, so it&amp;#x27;s not as though it&amp;#x27;s completely foreign to me. I don&amp;#x27;t think that web-ifying your whole house is ever a good idea and I&amp;#x27;m never going to do it. YMMV.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pdonis</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; I just want my thermostat to hold whatever temperature I set it at, until I set it at another temperature.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it only takes one of heating or cooling to do this, not both, a standard &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; thermostat can of course do this just fine. Just set it to &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;heat&amp;quot; mode and set a temperature. But of course you will need to change modes as the season changes (unless you live somewhere where only one mode is ever needed).&lt;p&gt;If you want to not have to change modes when the season changes, it gets more complicated, because the simple control system in the standard thermostat is too dumb for that. For example, suppose you set your temperature to 75. The actual temperature rises to 76, above the setpoint, so your A&amp;#x2F;C comes on. It cools the house to 74 and then the thermostat shuts it off (you have to have some buffer so the A&amp;#x2F;C doesn&amp;#x27;t come on again almost immediately). Now the temperature is below the setpoint, so your heat comes on. It heats the house to 76 and then shuts off. Now the temperature is above the setpoint... You can see what&amp;#x27;s going on.&lt;p&gt;From a pure design perspective, the right way to solve this problem is an outside temperature sensor (and probably a sun sensor as well since sunlight is a significant heat input to your house), so the system can predict what will happen when both cooling and heating are off. Given reliable sensors, the control algorithm is fairly simple (automatic climate control systems in cars already do it). I have never seen this in a house, though. I&amp;#x27;m not sure why.</text></comment>