I am a big fan of technology. In fact, I want to build my career around technology because I truly believe it has tremendous potential to improve the lives of humans everywhere. However, sometimes technology fails spectacularly and becomes a huge annoyance instead. For example, I have a Nest thermostat in my house. It is what is called a “smart” thermostat. For the first week, my family was happy with the Nest thermostat. I particularly enjoyed the ability to control the heater remotely using a mobile app. If the weather was particularly chilly on a certain day and I was 15 minutes away from arriving home, I could turn on the heater via the app, and the house would already be toasty warm when I arrived. Later in the evening, I could use the mobile app again to turn off the thermostat from the comfort of my warm bed.
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| Screenshot of Nest's online store (Nest, 2016) |
However, I realized quickly that the “smart” features of the Nest thermostat were nowhere near as useful as I had hoped. Nest’s Auto-Away feature was supposed to automatically shut off the thermostat during the times that people would not be at home. However, it is useless in households where the family's schedules are constantly changing. Rayoung Yang and Mark Newman (2013) did a study on this which was presented at an international conference. They wrote, “Participants expected Auto-Away would save energy when they were not at home. Several participants reported that they did not obtain much benefit from it since Auto-Away often either turned on when they were at home or did not turn on when they were not at home."
Furthermore, the ability to access the Nest via the mobile app is completely dependent on the stability of one’s home WiFi system. There are multiple reasons why a home WiFi connection would be unstable: spotty service from the internet provider, a faulty router, etc. When the Nest thermostat loses its connection to your home WiFi, it doesn’t tell you. It currently has no system for doing so. You only find out that it is offline when you are 25 miles away from home, trying to turn off the thermostat. Needless to say, this is highly annoying. This is apparently a known issue with the Nest thermostat, as I later found out when I read an article by Dave Greenbaum (2015). He wrote, “The app and the thermostat let you know your thermostat is offline if you check manually, but Nest doesn’t proactively warn you with an email or mobile notification if it detects the thermostat hasn’t checked in with the server in a while." Greenbaum suggested a web service, Junction, as a possible solution to the notification problem. I might just try it. Though I can’t help but think that I shouldn’t have to use a third-party service. That feature should have been built into my Nest thermostat in the first place.
For sure, this is one prime example of technology failing us.
Works Cited
[Screenshot of Nest’s online store]. Retrieved March 11, 2016 from https://store.nest.com/product/thermostat/
Greenbaum, D. (2015). How to Fix what Google Won’t Fix With The Nest Thermostat. GroovyPost. http://www.groovypost.com/howto/fix-annoying-nest-thermostat-issues-that-google-wont/
Yang, R., & Newman, M. W. (2013). Learning from a Learning Thermostat: Lessons for Intelligent Systems for the Home. Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international joint conference on Pervasive and ubiquitous computing, 93-102.
