I have an original Nest Hello Doorbell (wired) that is suddenly going offline and no longer chimes. I bought it in May 2018, and it has worked just fine until about 1 month ago.
I had an electrician at my home last week who replaced everything except the Nest Hello and the wiring in the house. The electrician did the following troubleshooting:
- replaced the mechanical chime box (Nutone BK115LWH)
- replaced the 16V transformer with a new one
- replaced the Nest Hello Chime Connector in the chime box
- replaced the regular doorbell (not a video bell) at the back door
- confirmed the chime setting is "ON" in the Nest App
- confirmed the electronic chime setting is "OFF" in the Nest App
- confirmed all wiring is receiving power correctly
- restarted the Nest Hello doorbell
- factory reset the Nest Hello Doorbell
The Nest Hello goes offline on a regular basis, in a consistent pattern. When it shows offline, the green light and the ring button are still lit, so we know it's receiving power.
I feel certain the doorbell itself is failing in a weird way! The problem is continual. Here's a screenshot so you can see what's happening, with markup showing how often it cycles offline. It's practically useless at this point.
This is extremely disappointing! I know nothing lasts forever, but for the price point of the Nest Hello, I surely expected a permanently wired doorbell to last longer. It hasn't even made it to 4 years! As you can see in the above screenshot, it's on a deep fully covered porch as well, so it's not exposed to the elements.
I don't know what my options are since it's out of warranty, except to buy a new Nest Hello. We have committed fully to the Google Nest ecosystem, with several cameras, a Home Hub, smoke detectors, etc. However, I am hesitant to continue if I'm looking at replacing my doorbell every 4 years. Also, I would like to know why the voltage information was removed from the "Technical Details" area of the settings. It was useful for cross-referencing any readings on the multimeter!
Browsing the forum, I see that others have similar complaints with the Nest Hello. If anyone has any other ideas, I'm all ears.
Google Nest is the absolute worst customer support ever, and that's saying a lot since I recently had to cancel Spectrum Cable TV, which is always a giant ordeal. I repeat; trying to get help from Nest Support is WORSE than dealing with Spectrum, which is awful. 😡
Nest Support kept me on the phone for almost 3 hours on Monday with absolutely NO resolution to this problem, repeating all the troubleshooting a qualified electrician just did while trying to fix my failing Nest Doorbell (including doing everything except replacing the Nest Doorbell itself).
I sent screenshots of my account, pictures of my doorbell, invoice from the electrician, speed test results, WiFi status, the whole 9 yards, showing it was NOT my network (what they were trying to blame) but definitely the Nest Doorbell. They are incapable of doing anything except following a script (poorly) and will not do anything else except follow that script over and over, probably hoping you will hang up in sheer exasperation.
They escalated it to a "senior" network support engineer, who also was not helpful and only repeated the script as well. They then asked for access to my Nest Aware account twice within 40 minutes, claimed they were escalating it to "engineering" and would reach out in 24 hours with an update.
Oh, LOOK! It's now over 48 hours later, and I have no update and no way to even check the status of this case despite having a case ID number!
This is absurd. Google is doing everything they can not to admit their Nest Doorbell's fail because they are probably trying to delay any action until they release their next generation of the Wired Doorbell: planned obsolescence.
Meanwhile, those of us with Nest Aware subscriptions and a useless, failing doorbell or left paying for absolutely nothing.
Also, as crappy as Spectrum is, at least they let you download a full transcript of your pointless customer support chat, unlike Google, so there is no record of exactly how useless your interaction with them is.
