I'm posting in this community to see if I have any other options. I chose to install a Nest thermostat in my vacation home so that I could monitor and control the temperature in the house while I was away. This worked great for a while, but after two years, the wifi on my thermostat stopped working. This caused the battery to run down as it tried to search for wifi signal, eventually running the unit into power-saving mode. This caused the unit to cycle my furnace off and on repeatedly as it tried to charge itself, which cost me over $250 in excess gas usage.
I finally was able to get back up to the house to address the problem, and after spending over an hour on the phone with customer support, I was told that the wifi chip was irreparably broken, and that because the thermostat was three months out of warranty, my only option was to "buy a new one." I asked to speak to a supervisor, and I was told that I would have to wait until the next day for a call back. When I eventually got the call back, I was curtly told that my product was out of warranty, and there was no option for a replacement, and the supervisor HUNG UP ON ME MID-SENTENCE. This seems absolutely ridiculous for a product that costs literally 10 times more than a standard thermostat.
I'd alway had positive impressions of Google and Google products in the past, but I can't imagine any other company acting this way in response to what is clearly their own hardware failure. In particular being told to just "buy a new one" like a bizarre and insulting response, because if this is how they deal with faulty hardware, why should I? Why should anyone?
If anyone has any resources or advice for escalating past the standard supervisor level to get a replacement unit, I'd really appreciate it. Otherwise, I'm just never going to purchase another google product ever again.
