Nest thermostat Hot Water Feature Improvements

[Tom6234]

I would love to see some improvements and additions to the Nest thermostat. It has been brilliant but the hot water system is lacking here in the UK. It would be great to see some much needed improvements. The hot water should be added to Google assistant. Its incredible that this is not able to be used and it only available manually in the app. What I would also love to see is a magnet temperature sensor which you could stick to your hot water tank and it could check how hot your water is. This could act as a safety net for legionaries or alert if it's being over heated and also help efficiency. There are so many possibilities for this simple addition. I wish I could work on it myself.

[Paul_R]

Hi there, thanks for all the suggestions! Rest assured that I'll forward them to the suitable department, and it will be taken into account. As for the temperature of the hot water, that is set from the boiler and the thermostat only activates it, so you should be able to check how hot the water in the tank is. And as for the Legionnaires Bacteria there is the Bacteria Prevention feature, specifically designed for it. Here you have a link with more details on this feature: https://goo.gle/2WTVgRK.

[OannaCG]

Hi there, just checking in, did you manage to see our message above?

[Tom6234]

Ahh yes thank you. Sorry it takes me a while to reply sometimes. So on our system here the boiler has a max temp but the hot water has a thermostat. It's very tricky to control all these things and they aren't smart for sure. I am setting up an Adruino Pico with DHT22 with a little magnet on the tank. My thoughts are a sensor at the top of the tank and a sensor at the bottom. I will also measure the temp of the water coming out of the tank to compare. It almost doesn't matter what temp the sensor reads from the outside as long as I do a calibration check. Will be an interesting system. I could use this to tell when the tank is too cold for a shower and on a schedule tell it to command the nest to turn on the hot water and then turn off when the tank gets to the right level required. This will make sure I am doing it as efficiently as possible. 

[OannaCG]

Thanks for the information. That's a very interesting idea, indeed. Do keep in mind that our thermostat can't interface with 3rd party sensors by default, while you'll control the heating schedule for the water, you may not be able to integrate the information from the sensors. If there's anything else I can assist you with, please let me know. 

[Tom6234]

Thanks for the info. Just to correct above I meant the Arduino Nano. I was thinking of the raspberry pi Pico. Will also need an ESP8266 to send the data by WiFi. Yes it's a frustration that the API for as removed but I can understand that you are going through a migration of services. I could use something like Tasker to interface between the data received from the Arduino and Nest. There is always a way. Probably not the quickest or most graceful but we will get there. I know the engineers would make it much nicer than mine for sure but it's incredible what's possible.

[Tom6234]

The bacteria prevention is a great idea but imagine if it could see the temperature. That would be ideal.

[OannaCG]

Thanks for the feedback. We're always looking for ways to improve our services and products. Indeed, the API was removed when the Works with Nest was discontinued. You can read more about what happened and what we're working on with Works with Hey Google here . 

[Tom6234]

Thank you. I think there might be an issue with the bacteria prevention setting but will post that separately. I only found out about this addition by chance and only after thinking something had gone wrong with my heating. There was a call to heat even when nest said everything was off. Just done a test and sure enough it was this setting heating even though the tank has been heated recently and I am not showing as away. I have had to disable for now.

[OannaCG]

Bacteria Prevention is an exclusive feature of 3rd gen Nest Learning Thermostats. Bacteria Prevention mode will activate if your domestic water hasn't been heated for at least 2 consecutive hours in the last 48 hours. You can learn more about this Bacteria Prevention here. For turning off this feature, please do the steps below:

1. Press your thermostat ring to bring up the Quick View menu.
2. Select Settings .
3. Select Equipment and Continue.
4. Choose Bacteria Prevention.
5. Turn Bacteria Prevention off.

Also, please check the Auto-Schedule feature. With Auto-Schedule, your Nest thermostat learns what temperatures you like at different times of the day. After a few days of learning, your thermostat will prepare a schedule for you. You can check if this feature is on or off by going to your thermostat, to Settings > Nest Sense > Auto-Schedule and if it's on, let's turn it to off for the moment and monitor it and see if the issue persists. 

[Vladut]

Hi there, just checking in with you. Did you manage to check our last message?

[OannaCG]

Hey there, since we haven't heard from you for a couple of days, we'll close this conversation for now. If you still need help, let us know so we can continue. Thanks!