So last week there was this story going around about Nest thermostats dying overnight and leaving people's houses freezing cold, and I cant stop thinking about it. If you missed it: a software update Nest pushed back in December quietly drained the battery on a bunch of Learning Thermostats over the following weeks, and once the battery got low enough the things just shut off. Not "display looks weird," not "reconnect to wifi," just off. Furnace stops. House gets cold. Nick Bilton wrote it up for the Times a little over a week ago and it was full of people describing coming home to 40-degree living rooms in the middle of January, which, given where a lot of these people live, is not a small thing.
Nest's response was basically "yeah we know, we're pushing a fix, sorry." Which is the correct response! I'm not trying to dunk on them for having a bug, everybody ships bugs. Im stuck on the bigger thing, which is that a $249 thermostat can now brick itself via an update you didnt ask for and didnt know was happening, and the fix for a lot of people was either wait for a patch or physically flip a breaker and manually reset the unit. Thats a rough position to put a homeowner in, especially the ones who bought this thing specifically because it promised to be less fiddly than a regular thermostat, not more.
Why I still have a dial on my wall
I've got a plain mechanical thermostat. Its ugly, it has a little lever you slide, and it has never once needed a firmware update. I know, I know, its not "smart," it doesnt learn my schedule, I cant adjust it from my phone at the airport. But it also cannot be bricked by a bad push from a server somewhere in California while Im asleep. There is something to be said for a device whose entire failure mode is "the batteries are dead, replace them," versus a device whose failure mode is "an engineer somewhere shipped code that slowly drained your battery without you knowing, and now your furnace is off and you dont find out until the pipes are already cold."
Im not a Luddite about this stuff, to be clear. I use a ton of connected junk in this house and I like most of it fine. But heating is one of maybe three categories (the others being locks and smoke detectors, in my opinion) where I think the calculus is different, because the cost of a software failure isnt "annoying," its "your pipes freeze and now youre calling a plumber at 7am on a Saturday." A buggy update to your smart bulbs means your living room is dark for a day. A buggy update to your thermostat in January can mean actual property damage. Those arent the same category of risk and I dont think companies always treat them like they are.
The other thing that bugs me is how invisible the failure was. Your dumb thermostat, when its broken, tells you immediately, because the house gets cold and you notice. The Nest situation was worse in a specific way: the battery drain happened slowly, over days, so by the time it actually died there was no warning sign to catch. Thats a design problem as much as a code problem. If youre going to put a computer between me and my furnace, the thing owes me a very loud, very early warning before it goes dark, not a silent slide into "off."
None of this means the smart thermostat idea is bad, and Ill probably end up with one eventually, mostly because I am lazy and the app control is genuinely convenient when it works. Ive just moved it from "obviously worth it" to "wait a year or two and let other people find the bugs first" in my head, which is roughly where I already keep my opinions about buying anything with a version 1.0 next to it. My uglier, dumber thermostat is going to keep doing its one boring job in the meantime, and honestly, after this week, Im kind of fond of it.