Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats no longer supported from Oct 25

Connected thermostats are great in theory! But they should not have to rely on a cloud connection. A local network with the option of internet connectivity would be awesome; but, it seems, no company is going to become uber successful if there isn't the option of forced upgrades and cloud subscriptions. Look at Ring...

They are so shady about this stuff

I have a Honeywell t6 that I got when they installed a new unit - Honeywell INSISTS that you create an account and download the app to connect it to your home network

Thankfully this is bullshit and you can connect it directly from the thermostat to HomeKit - you will not find a single piece of documentation on this though and will be told it’s not possible

The real kicker is that there is a notification to register your device that you can’t get rid of unless you register your device

You can only snooze it for a couple weeks at a time

How I’d love to have one on one conversations with the evil people who approve this type of crap

Honeywell's z-wave thermostat basically does all of the shiny shit you'd want out of a connected thermostat while making basically impossible to lock the user out because Honeywell decided it didn't like the product anymore. Why people have to keep relearning this with IoT devices baffles me, and that Z-wave or maybe Zigbee isn't what's insisted upon.

EcoBee is happy to work without WiFi.

I bought a $20 Zigbee thermostat from AliExpress and it has been fantastic. It turns on when it's cold, and off when it's hot. Anything else, I can do with software, because it's just Zigbee.

My Insteon thermostat is a great dumb thermostat that I can also send commands to over a serial connection to a powerline/RF modem. (Very similar to Z-Wave's RF, though proprietary.)

The key is do not buy smart devices with Wi-Fi. There are better products for serious people. Everyone here with a Zigbee or Z-Wave product probably learned that the hard way first. ;)

If you're VC-funded then the valuation is the most important thing. The only way to juice your valuation is to get recurring revenue, because it comes with an 8x to 10x multiple. So you don't want to be in the hardware game, you want to use hardware to get a foothold in someone's home and then get them to pay you a subscription to maintain that hardware.

I think the valuation thing is what drives 90% of this stuff. Whereas an established company like Honeywell is more interested in building products and selling a lot of them, so they're going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest for the same feature set but with a local-first implementation instead of a cloud-first implementation.

I don't think I would ever buy a hardware product from a company billing themselves as a VC-backed startup.

Also, FWIW the Nest is a perfectly functional thermostat even if you never hook it up to their app. We found the scheduling and learning features to be really annoying so we turned them all off and never connected ours to the cloud.

I agree almost entirely, but I gotta quibble a point:

> so [companies like Honeywell] are going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest for the same feature set but with a local-first implementation

"Established" companies also see the long-term value of subscriptions and are also hopping on that bandwagon.

Additionally, customers are extremely sensitive to up-front price, so a product that's more expensive up-front but with no subscription fee and longer-term value will have trouble finding a foothold in the market compared to cheaper but subscription-based alternatives. Especially if the alternatives are "1 year free!" as they usually are.

I go for Zwave by choice but Zigbee comes a close second. It does share 2.4GHz with wifi but its many tiny bands fit within the "edges" of the wifi bands. If you stick to 1,6,11 for wifi, Zigbee will co-exist very happily. Even if you don't, it will still work fine - the messages are tiny.

Both Zwave and Zigbee build mesh networks with multiple routes. Wifi devices ... don't. Wifi is fine for IoT but it isn't optimised for it. My fridge/freezer uses wifi as does my oven and microwave. It doesn't matter if they lose comms sometimes and there is no choice anyway.

My light switches are Zwave. Thanks to way modern UK wiring is done, most of my switches end up with an extra conductor and so are permanently powered and act as hubs for the battery powered window sensors and the like.

My cameras are all PoE ethernet, including the door bell. All Reolink.

I have two UPSs with at least 30 mins run time. I could easily put in a genny or a battery or even use my car (EV) but its not important enough (yet). So far everything will work without the internet.

I have deployed two VLANS for IoT - THINGS, and SEWER for the really worrying gear on it!

Home Assistant runs the show.

Plenty of companies are successfull and don't rely on forced cloud. Reolink for example. Plenty of others.

The real difference is that these are not american sv vc backed companies like nest or ring. they are chinese companies set on disrupting those vc backed companies using this local first mindset as the differentiator.

No forced cloud should be a home automation feature that’s advertised and reviewed.

Just because someone found them annoying doesn’t mean others do.

Nests performed well in unique spaces with different heating and cooling profiles, not to mention different kinds of shoulder seasons.

It usually is for those companies. Reolink for example are pretty proud of their local first subscription free model in their product advertising.

> Whereas an established company like Honeywell is [...] going to charge you 5-10x of the cost of a Nest

A Nest is ~$150, so I'm curious where these $750-1500 thermostats are...

Seems like you get a Honeywell thermostat for almost exactly the same price, if you don't care about cloud connectivity.

> If you stick to 1,6,11 for wifi, Zigbee will co-exist very happily.

I worked for a company that converted a legacy wire protocol with no QoS guarantees to be used over a proprietary modification of Zigbee. One of the managers complained that their volume control would randomly climb to the max loudness. The protocol used press/release packets for button presses and if the volume-up release packet was lost due to interference, you got a runaway increase in volume from the system assuming it was still held down. This usually happened when the channel assignment was in a band used for active wifi.

Google have done that with two of the Nest thermostats, providing support for Matter.

If you have the latest models you’re not dependent on the cloud, and it’s unfortunate Google didn’t add this functionality to these retired models.

Insteon is the GOAT IMO. I trashed my smart hub because the darned light switches talk to each other with no middle man, I love living "hubless".

I do like a PLM for computer control but I wrote the software myself. It was originally like ten lines of Visual Basic to implement turning on a light. It's really nice how minimal you can start with Insteon stuff.

Same, serial packets are pretty easy to assemble and get things going. I think at one point i linked an exterior motion sensor to beep the light switch in the night (There are beepers in the switch!).

That is pretty daft. Surely, you should always send the intention rather than the mechanism when a dodgy medium is involved!

If the medium was ATM or hard wired ethernet then sure why not send button presses. Those are reliable media.

The obvious fix would be transmit "vol+1/Pressed" on button press and "vol+1/Release" on button release. On receipt of v+1 do just that and no more. Note a /Release to colour a widget correctly, perhaps. Holding down V+ would transmit multiple v+1 or use a wheel as an old school Walkman did to send actual values.

Nothing new is old or something 8)