Nest thermostat turning on heating in away mode

[Ali2608]

I have home/away assist on and understand that if you are away the thermostat will use eco temps. Yesterday I was out but the nest reverted to schedule regardless. Is my understanding of home/away assist incorrect? I don't understand why my heating came on  despite being away. Do I have to set it manually to eco? These seems to defeat the purpose of home/away assist capability though? I am the only person whose device controls and sets the thermostat & no one else was home. Confused- help appreciated!

[Dyoungquist]

I have a similar issue. My nest is stuck on seasonal savings, and even though in eco mod, turns on at both the start of seasonal savings, and the end of seasonal savings. Despite what i have read on this forum and elsewhere there is no way to turn this off. This is a serious energy wasting flaw in this thermostat which needs to be addressed immediately. Nest would be better off to scrap jthis seasonal savings program.

nest experts please respond!!!

[Rixington43 · Accepted solution]

Do you have the motion sensor on the thermostat set to be part of your home away assist control and do you have any pets or anything that might move within the eyeline of the thermostat?
If you are the sole occupant of the property then I would suggest disabling the thermostat sensor and only using your phone for home away assist as this will be fare more responsive and accurate. This can be found under the home away assist settings for "What decides if you're home".
If you are running seasonal savings then you will see a yellow leaf inside a gear icon on the thermostat unit. I did manage to turn off seasonal savings on my partner's 3rd gen from within the app. The process is described here and did work for me;
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9244739?hl=en-GB#zippy=%2Chow-to-turn-off-seasonal-savi...

Hope that helps.

[Ali2608]

Thank you. I have turned off the thermostat sensors, I spent a lot of time trying to speak google last week and they never mentioned that. I will monitor it and see what happens. It had seemed like I received some post which made the thermostat revert to think someone was home but very strange given it’s no where near my front door. Fingers crossed this tip

works!

[Rixington43]

If you have the display set to 'Farsight' then the range is really quite large, I had this exact same issue when I first installed mine. It would pick up movement from outside even and then it would also turn my heating to eco if I was in my office for too long without going downstairs. Using just your phone will make the home away assist much quicker to respond as well so bigger savings 🙂

[Dyoungquist]

Rixington

thank you for these ideas. In my case i had home away turned off. In any case my home was empty at the time that thermostat came on unexpectedly. The first time it exited eco and turned on, just happened to be the day “seasonal savings” started. Seeing my energy bill, i checked and sure enough the heat was on. So i turned it back to eco remotely. A couple weeks later it came on again, the day that seasonal savings ended. I turned it back to eco again.

I never opted in to seasonal savings, it just started last june. I dont have any option to proactively turn it off. The stop button does not show up in my energy history. I would love to opt out as this feature just costs me money. On top of that now i will need to purchase another non nest thermostat to fix it. 

[Rixington43]

Now that seasonal savings has ended, the option to opt out will not be available. The nest 'should not' opt in automatically to any future sessions but I don't know how it behaves if you're away for the whole period of course.

Maybe just hold out for the next session before deciding to ditch the unit, hope it works out.