Personally I’d just replace the one in the kitchen, and use the old ones for the rest of the house.
If they’re interconnected, which is required in many places, you can’t do that. These will not interconnect with other brands. It’s all or none.
Keep in mind this is called the “Nest Protect” and it includes motion and presence sensors. They don’t have an application for it yet, but you have the makings of a security system as well. Just need to add door/window sensors and maybe cameras.
I wish they’d get around to making the thermostat compatible with 120V systems. I want one very much.
OK, at first I was going to scoff at Rob for being intimidated by a mere thermostat (have you tried putting male connectors on a couple dozen cat6 wires yet?) but I see your point.
When I wire a thermostat I always start by turning everything off, then I open up both ends (furnace and thermostat) of the connection. So that instead of saying “my connectors are marked R, Rd, W, and Bl and I have orange, pink, yellow and green wires, wtf?” I instead get to say something like “the green wire’s hooked to the connector on the furnace motherboard marked Rd, how delightfully whimsical, I guess I better connect it to the Rd post on the thermostat then.”
Also, when I disconnect the old thermostat, if there’s plenty of wire I clip off enough so that there’s a colored tag end left on the old thermostat for additional reference. And whenever possible I pull the furnace manual before I start (good luck finding a manual for a natgas-converted 1926 coal burner, though).
I love the styling of the Nest thermostat, and it’s power supply tech is impressive… but every time I really look hard at it, I conclude that it’s too much cost for too little advantage.
Certainly, compared to almost any wiring that has actual signal-integrity requirements (and
that’s the reason why very-high-frequency radio is a…specialist…hobby) thermostat wiring is cake, you could probably run it over baling wire as long as the strands didn’t actually touch, it’s just the fact that virtually all of it is unstandardized or incorrectly-standardized legacy crap that makes it so annoying. If I were wiring a new house, It’d be very low indeed on the list of challenging wires, because it’s neither particularly sensitive nor particularly dangerous (unlike data and mains wiring); but that has never been the state in which I’ve found myself.
A normal low voltage electrical household thermostat has two terminals. There are two wires in the wall and you connect one to each screw - they are not polarized, you can connect them either way. You are just sending an on-or-off, need-heat/don’t-need-heat signal.
??What kind of thermostats are these that involve bundles and complexity??
I don’t know (which didn’t help); but the last thermostat install I had the…pleasure… of dealing with (and this was in a house without AC, so I wasn’t expecting anything more than furnace control) consisted of at least five unlabeled wires, of assorted faded colors, some of which were connected to the old thermostat and some which were just dangling, and a new thermostat (cheapie digital capable of basic scheduling and not much more, with more pins than the old unit, fewer pins than there were dangling wires, and all pins identified by cryptic three letter strings ill explained in the creatively ‘English’ language manual.
Some are reporting that the units communicate over low power RF in the case of a network fail so I’d guess that’d be Zigbee.
Nest’s insufferable (and deeply cribbed from Apple’s equally insufferable page for their Tube mac) puff page explicitly says that the units communicate with one another even if they lose contact with the wifi network(though, presumably, the exciting phone-home-to-mothership and control app and whatnot stop working).
Odds are that they are using one of the 802.15.4-derived standards(quite possibly Zigbee), that seems the most logical; don’t know which one, though, 802.15 is the IEEE’s way of reminding us how lucky we are to have 802.11, and ‘standards’ that you can actually buy, from multiple vendors no less, and expect to work seamlessly together.
Is it possible that there was an old-old set of wires that had failed next to a less old set of wires that was in service when you got there?
sfrazer:
I wish they’d get around to making the thermostat compatible with 120V systems. I want one very much.
All normal thermostats are compatible with line voltage systems. They work by tripping a relay which sends the power. There is no need to send 120 or 240 volts AC up however many levels in the building to a switch and then all the way back downstairs again.
These guys are former Apple engineers. Since when has Apple made anything replaceable?
Oh, entirely possible. The house, in some form, dated back at least 50 years, with assorted renovations of varying severity, so I’m sure anything not absolutely required by fire codes was in whatever state it felt like being.
All Apple products are replaceable. Just not nearly as many of them in more than one piece.
Hey, c’mon man; I don’t want my, like, fun smoke detected. Ri’?
FWIW, I never found thermostats all that much of a pain to install. Look at how the one you’re removing was connected, connect corresponding terminals of the new one the same way.
Admittedly, I actually understand electric circuits (more than that if you believe my degree), and have been taking them apart and putting them back together since I was a kid, so I grant that I have an unfair advantage. But still…
If you need the thermostat to control something which isn’t controlled by a low-voltage circuit, you could add your own relay and a battery or transformer to provide the control voltage.
Their website says that the detectors do, in fact, set up a network amongst themselves as well. They use 802.11 for their WiFi connection, and 802.15.2 for their “interconnect.” One of the benefits they claim is that the mesh of detectors will continue to work together if the wifi goes down. (For instance, if a detector in the bedroom goes off, all the units will announce the alarm’s location.)
I feel like this would be great at, like, one third the price.
At least the Nest thermostat (which I have!) can theoretically pay for itself with smarter thermostat control and energy savings. No such luck with these smoke detectors – and you need 4+ of them in most homes.
