I probably should have just stopped when this was said:
I don't want to continue my negativity, but
Fair enough. Sorry to get you riled up again
I guess we both should have been clearer about where we were coming from and what we were debating. I realize now that I was adding too many secondary thoughts about my opinion of the Nest product, and that was getting me away from my primary thesis.
I still think Nest had no intention of expanding much farther than they had, and even if they did I didn't see them interoperating with other systems, but as I said it's starting to not matter. As long as these companies publish open APIs, other people will take on that "startup dooming waste of time" for them, as people have already done with Revolv and Vera. We're both getting what we want. I also (to get back to the original question) don't see why Nest couldn't continue down the road you envisioned for them.
You implied that one of the reasons you finally installed the Nest was because you were moving around a lot. I was asking why that had anything to do with it, since it's as easy to install as any other thermostat.
Any other normal thermostat, perhaps. But no on any other thermostat with WiFi at the time. They all required the extra C wire with 24V for power.
I swear I'm not being antagonistic here, I'm just curious because I don't understand. The Nest doesn't need a C wire? It doesn't run on batteries so I assume a C wire is necessary... Sorry, I'm just still curious how the wiring is different from other thermostats.
I didn't have a C wire behind my original thermostat either when I moved in, so I didn't know what I was going to do for power. I'd read a few things about running an AC adapter up to the thermostat, but clearly that would be really ugly. Finally I read a tip that I might actually have the wire, just not visibly. Sure enough, I pulled the cable further out of the wall and found that they'd cut and pulled back extra wires and left them wound around the outer sleeve. I picked a color, added it to the C Wire terminal on my new thermostat, and connected the other end to the power terminal at the furnace. Worked like a charm!
I haven't done a deep dive into the space and simply have a casual surface view dating back to the X10 stuff.
Oh good god, I'm very sorry. X10 is the worst. I used X10 for the first 8-10 years that I was playing with automation, and I pretty much always hated it. It was completely unreliable, and "scenes" were handled in the worst possible manner. I remember having a scene in my condo that turned on 12 lights to specific dim levels. It would send the on command to the first light, then slowly dim it to the desired level, then repeat with the second light, and so on. It took about 2 minutes to turn them all on. That's if all the signals got through and there was no noise on the power lines. Yikes.
I may think home automation hasn't gotten very far, but it's still way better than X10. Thank goodness
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