It was 3:00 AM. It always seems to be 3:00 AM when these things happen. My wife nudged me rather hard and said “I’ve been up for an hour, the AC just keeps turning on for a few minutes, then turning off, then back on again. I’m afraid it’s going to break the compressor.”
I looked at my Nest app. The air conditioning was set to 73, but the sensors in each of our bedrooms and the thermostat were all registering 68 degrees. It shouldn’t have been running at all. We turned the air up to 75 and I said I’d look at it in the morning.
As it turns out, our third generation Nest thermostat, which controls our whole house air conditioning and upstairs heat, was doing something called “short cycling” our AC. It’s not something that’s desirable, and it could damage your compressor. What I found as I searched the internet, were many other users complaining of the same thing happening years after installing their Nest, and no real fix for the issue. In almost every response from Nest, they blame faulty wiring, which doesn’t at all answer the reason it starts happening after years, but does allow Nest support to close the case.
With no help from Nest support, I tried to fix the issue myself. I turned off all of Nest’s fancy settings that never really seemed to apply to my setup anyway, and even checked my wiring. Our thermostat continues to short cycle our AC and I can’t risk it anymore.
I was a very early adopter of the Nest thermostat. It was one of the first smart home devices I owned and I loved that first generation Nest so much that it drove me to buy more smart devices and even start this website. Since then I’ve slowly soured to the Nest thermostat and a lot of Google’s home lineup.
My first issue was when I got my third generation Nest thermostat and after setting it up discovered that multiple thermostats installed in the same house can’t work with each other in any way. This still seems like a no-brainer to me, in that each additional thermostat can at least be aware of what the others are doing, if not support them as an additional sensor. Google seems to think otherwise.
Nest has also been absurdly iterative since that first thermostat, and the Nest thermostat remains largely unchanged with only minor tweaks over the past nine years. I would argue that they’ve actually managed to go backwards after shutting down the “Works with Nest” program in 2019.
Like many people, though, I’d already “locked” myself into the Nest ecosystem with two thermostats and three Protect’s, and foolishly continued to buy in. I’d already been openly saying “If I had to do it again I’d go with ecobee“, but that didn’t stop me from trying to make my Nest setup work like ecobee. In 2018 I bought a three pack of Nest sensors to distribute around my bedrooms which vary wildly in temperature depending on the position of the sun. I instantly hated them.
Nest sensors seem to be made simply to tick the box saying they have the option to have external sensors like ecobee, but they have almost none of the features of ecobee sensors. Sure, not everyone wants the added motion sensing capability that ecobee sensors bring to the table, but the big miss on Nest’s part is the configuration of the sensors themselves. While ecobee will take readings from all the sensors connected to a thermostat and attempt to regulate temperature across all of the rooms as accurately as possible, Nest simply lets you select a single sensor to control the whole floor for a period of time. You need to manually choose which sensor at which time and set a schedule that you’ll likely have to change with the seasons. This fly’s in the face of the whole Nest Learning Thermostat angle.
Future users of Nest products wont have to deal with the whole Nest vs Google Home app controversy, but that’s been going on for over a year and I’m still using the Nest app knowing that if I change to Google Home, I can never go back. That doesn’t stop both apps from pestering me though!
Although I’d learned to live with many of the issues Nest introduced, rather than solved, endangering the compressor on my two year old air conditioner along with piss poor customer service is the last straw. I’d rather sell my Nest thermostats and sensors now while I can still get money for them and switch to ecobee than continue to troubleshoot new issues every year or so. Nest/Google still seem to have quite a few issues to figure out in their ecosystem anyway, while ecobee is laser focused on making their small product set as good as possible and have conveniently aligned themselves with Alexa.