So it's Saturday afternoon, there's a travel ban in effect in about six states including mine, and I've been staring at my Nest thermostat for the last hour like it owes me money.
Quick catch-up if you haven't looked outside: this storm that's been all over the forecasts all week finally landed, and it landed hard. New York pulled cars off the road this afternoon, non-emergency vehicles banned starting 2:30, which I don't think I've seen happen for snow before, only hurricanes. Friends in DC are texting me photos of drifts up over their knees on streets that are usually just, you know, streets. Some of the metro shut down entirely. I saw one number floating around for Central Park that sounded made up (something like 26 inches) until three different people confirmed it independently.
None of that is really "tech news" and I'm not going to pretend I have anything smart to say about blizzards. What I do want to talk about is the thing sitting on my wall that I have spent the last two hours quietly not trusting.
You might remember, or might have seen it go around, that story from a couple weeks back about Nest thermostats bricking themselves. A software update messed with the battery drain on a bunch of units and people woke up to houses in the 40s because the thermostat had just died overnight: screen blank, no heat, no warning. There was a whole New York Times piece on it, people with actual infants in actual cold houses, which is the kind of headline that sticks with you a lot longer than the usual gadget-review nonsense.
I have a Nest. I've had it since 2013 and honestly I've liked it fine, it's saved me some money, the app is nice, the little leaf icon makes me feel like a good person for setting it to 65 when I leave the house. But sitting here today, snowed in, watching the wind do something genuinely violent to the tree outside my window, I kept getting up to physically check that the thing was still on. Not check the app. Check the actual device. Because I don't fully trust the app anymore, and that's a weird thing to admit about a $250 piece of hardware I bought specifically so I wouldn't have to think about my heat.
That's the part that bugs me (pun sort of intended). We've spent the last few years being sold on "smart" home stuff on the promise that it's more reliable than the dumb version, not less. A regular mechanical thermostat from 1985 does not receive a firmware push. It does not have a battery that can get confused. It just sits there and does the one thing, forever, badly if you're unlucky but predictably. My Nest is lovely 51 weeks out of the year and then there's this one week where it's -20 windchill outside and I'm thinking about whether an update three weeks ago quietly wrecked its battery curve.
I'm not saying rip them all out. I'm saying the timing here is almost too on the nose — the exact kind of week where you'd really want your thermostat to not be a computer, is the exact kind of week we just had two dozen headlines about thermostats failing because they're computers. Somebody at Nest is having a rough January, I'd guess, on top of however things are going over there generally since the Google/Alphabet reorg.
(Small unrelated aside because I can't help myself: I was also thinking about the SpaceX landing attempt from last week, the one where the booster came down on the droneship, stuck the landing, and then tipped over because a leg didn't lock. Different scale of problem entirely, obviously, nobody's living room got cold because of it. But it's the same flavor of thing — incredibly close, working right up until the one part that wasn't, and then a very public, very visible failure. This has just been that kind of month for hardware.)
Anyway. Power's still on, thermostat's still alive, I've got the fireplace going as backup because apparently that's where my trust actually lives right now. If you're in the storm zone too, stay off the roads, check on your neighbors, and maybe glance at your thermostat tonight before you go to sleep. Couldn't hurt.