Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats no longer supported from 10/25/2025

Honeywell's z-wave thermostat basically does all of the shiny shit you'd want out of a connected thermostat while making basically impossible to lock the user out because Honeywell decided it didn't like the product anymore. Why people have to keep relearning this with IoT devices baffles me, and that Z-wave or maybe Zigbee isn't what's insisted upon.

I bought a $20 Zigbee thermostat from AliExpress and it has been fantastic. It turns on when it's cold, and off when it's hot. Anything else, I can do with software, because it's just Zigbee.

My Insteon thermostat is a great dumb thermostat that I can also send commands to over a serial connection to a powerline/RF modem. (Very similar to Z-Wave's RF, though proprietary.)

The key is do not buy smart devices with Wi-Fi. There are better products for serious people. Everyone here with a Zigbee or Z-Wave product probably learned that the hard way first. ;)

EcoBee is happy to work without WiFi.

They are so shady about this stuff

I have a Honeywell t6 that I got when they installed a new unit - Honeywell INSISTS that you create an account and download the app to connect it to your home network

Thankfully this is bullshit and you can connect it directly from the thermostat to HomeKit - you will not find a single piece of documentation on this though and will be told it’s not possible

The real kicker is that there is a notification to register your device that you can’t get rid of unless you register your device

You can only snooze it for a couple weeks at a time

How I’d love to have one on one conversations with the evil people who approve this type of crap

Or just open up a little JSON server on the thermostat.

I really appreciate mine. My big use case is that we go away for a week or two over winter sometimes and turn the house down to 55F. The radiators take quite a while to heat the house back up from that temperature, so I turn the temperature back up remotely the morning before we fly back.

That said, I'm quite annoyed that Google is nuking my perfectly functional thermostat, and I will be buying an Ecobee to replace it, and integrating it with home assistant.

I used to have a Honeywell wi-fi thermostat. It looked like any other thermostat you've ever seen, except you could connect it to a home hub. It was nice because you could exactly what you're describing, but you could also do it in the app.

What made it worth it was being able to turn off the air or heat when you weren't home automatically. Now all or the "AI training" garbage? Yeah, forget that. I used to work in an office with a nest and it was torture if you showed up too early if stayed a little too late.

Everyone always says this stuff, but man these things are such garbage to use: terrible user interface, LCD screen with random blinking elements to tell you that's being edited, response rate slower than a ping to Mars. Modern app-connected thermostats are so much better.

I have the same thing and to be honest, if I had to replace a $200 thermostat every 2 years I would gladly do it. In fact, this whole thing has made me go and research which thermostat will fit where I live.

The key usecases for me are:

Adjusting the thermostat (which is downstairs) from bed.

At the airport - oh shit did I turn off the AC for the two weeks we'll be away? Ok I just did.

I like being able to adjust HVAC based on temperature sensors that are not co-located with the input keypad.

Being able to use the temp reading in a specific room is choice.

you can buy these sensors off aliexpress cheap

I was hoping that at least my Home Assistant integration would keep working. That sucks terribly. Lesson of the day: Avoid any IoT device that you can't use without an external service.

You’ve got to use the one specific brand and type of battery they insist on. It’s some energizer lithium thing I’ll have to check for you and comment later. Anything else fails very fast, the correct ones last for years.

When I think of Google, killing products is one of the first things that come to mind.

Does operate locally retain any smart features or does it just essentially become a dumb thermostat?

Deprecate*

But yes, this is why I'm staying away from Gemini. Seems like an amazing product! But no way am I putting my AI eggs in the Google basket.

I wonder what year they’ll sunset Gmail. Nothing is forever, surely some PM in 2033 will decide that email is over and it’s time to push everyone to Gemini Messenger.

The day they finally deprecate Google Ads will be a good day.

Wave bye-bye!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

depreciate by deprecation

>Serious question: how long do you expect cloud hardware vendors to support the servers for their products? 10 years? 20? 30?

Serious answer: I do not expect any specific lifetime at all (though legal return period is an obvious floor), but at a bare minimum I do expect (and think should absolutely be mandated by law) that power be intimately tied to responsibility. Ie., it's fine if a hardware vendor decides to retire their cloud services (or OS updates or the like) in 1 year or 10 years or 20 or 30, but IF they cease to support it, THEN they must also remove any technical obstacles to hardware owners pointing it at another service of any kind. So any signing keys required, code, docs/APIs etc. Decide that a given product no longer makes commercial sense for you to produce or support? Sure, fine, it happens. The problem is then ensuring the hardware/software dies with that.

The basic issue is that these places generally want to have their cake and eat it too. They want all the financial power of a monopoly tie-in and feudal rent extraction, but no responsibilities to go with it and the ability to force customers onto new stuff (or nothing). That should be illegal. Honestly, I think any tie-in should be illegal, fully accessible local APIs should be required and any 1st party subscription should earn its place on its merits.

But at a minimum, no one should be able to have it both ways. If they want power over their customers, they should have responsibility proportional to that. And conversely if they go full open source community friendly hackable from day 1 (and are fully upfront about that), I'm fine saying they have very minimal long term responsibility. There can and should be room for many different approaches to the market, but not extractive lock-in.

liftime of the building it is installed in. if I choose to replace it that is fine but there are still buildings in use 1000 years later, you need to escrow enough to support servers that long just in case.

I don’t know how these were advertised when originally sold, but I think products like these ought to clearly display a minimum sever lifetime. Something like “Nest connected thermostat, with 10 years of guaranteed cloud connectivity” displayed relatively prominently on the packaging. Otherwise, if the vendor can arbitrarily remotely yank access to a key feature, then the consumer is being sold a false bill of goods.

When it's a device intended to be installed permanently in a house that could last 100 years, controlling a device that could last 20-30 years, and the company still exists (and is worth trillions to boot), I think 30 years of support would be a completely reasonable expectation.

Yes. Unless Google is going out of business?

Does Ecobee require an app and account to be activated, or is it something that HomeKit just detects on the LAN?

I've had both and am much happier with Ecobee.

I was really disappointed with the lack of analytics / historical data.

Thankfully the open source beetstat makes ecobee a lot more useful, with full history and graphs for heat/cool runtime, aux heat, indoor/outdoor humdity, etc

Which says something about how bad modern appliances are.

Worse than most thermostats that aren't made by Google though.