Hi all,
I have four Nest thermometers installed throughout my home. I had them set on a schedule. I last updated that schedule going into the fall for our "cooling" season, where the heat would be on at a minimal level- just to make sure the house didn't get too cold. Then, in mid-December before leaving on a trip, I updated my schedule to start heating more actively at night and in the basement area of my home.
I just got back from 2.5 weeks of travel and the heat has not been turning on in the basement. My plants I had moved inside for the winter are all dead. 6 fruit trees, nutured over the last 8 years, dead. Plus a variety of tropical exotic house plants. Withering and dying. Their automatic watering system was working fine, their lighting was working- but the basement was 51 degrees. 51 degrees was the safety temperature I had set back in September, instead of the new temp I set when I left.
So I checked my Nest app. 3 of my 4 thermostats were no longer connected to the app. Okay? When did that happen? Why didn't I get an alert? --Weird but I'll reconnect them. Go to reconnect them, they give me an error (TD004 (0.65) W-5), so I reset them. THEY ALL GIVE ME THE SAME ERROR AND WON'T RECONNECT. I reset them again, I moved my router, I changed my WiFi permissions, I gave the devices priority, tried connecting them through Google Home, tried using the QR code or the written code-- nothing worked.
I finally decide to check the Nest Support Pages and what do I find? I find that this is happening to a large number of these devices! People from all over the world are having mission critical devices in their home just stop working. No alert. No recall. No response.
So I call their support team and their only option is to 2-7 day ship me replacements, while putting a $300 hold on my account for each device-- and a suggestion that I should monitor these manually in the meantime-- I literally gave Google 1,200 of my dollars so that I wouldn't have to monitor them manually!
I arrived home 5 hours ago, after 4 hours of customer support and troubleshooting, I now am waiting for my new thermostats. As I am thinking about having to replace my fruit trees and much loved house plants (RIP Big Figgy, love you til the end- which is now, because of Google), I am reflecting on the other threads I am seeing with the SAME EXACT ISSUE. Google knew that they had either failing hardware or had pushed an update that bricked these devices. Google knew these devices were literally the heat source of people's homes. And Google decided to let people have to find this issue out via extensive research or hopefully going and purchasing a new device.
Before I put on my gloves to haul my 16 dead plants out of my basement, I checked my credit card. I hope I don't have anything else happen in the next couple weeks because I only have $53 left of available credit- thanks to the "temporary authorization".
Google, you killed:
-2 Fig trees
-1 Avocado tree
-1 Lemon tree
-1 Orange tree
-1 Pink princess philodendron
-2 Monstera borsigiana variegata albo
-2 Podophyllum
-2 Begonias
-4 Frydeks
