Latest blog post by Nest marks the end of an era with Nest thermostats. Auto-Away is dead, and Nest killed it. Some of you might remember that the most problematic feature of Nest thermostat, as we mentioned in Nest Review, and offered alternatives to the problem. Thousands of people complained about the feature, because of a fatal error in the programming of the Auto-away, rendered the device useless for some of us. Nest tried to dodge the problem by ignoring it for a long time. They never admitted any fault but now removing the whole feature from the machine. This means that we were right and something was really wrong.The new feature called Eco Temperatures will try to solve the concerns we had about the issue.
The new feature called Eco Temperatures will be replacing Auto-Away, the name change is understandable because the feature has a manual override option now. You can set your thermostat to Eco mode any time you want, just like the eco mode on a Prius Toyota car. You can set a range of temperatures for the feature, heat to 40-70°F and cool to 76-90°F. This is great news because other Nest products will not come on or come off when you don’t want them too. For example, lights turning off when you are home when you in your house.
The setup of the new feature is very simple, just go to Setting on your Nest app and Select Eco Temperatures. Nest will ask a few questions about your range temperatures and give you saving advice using leafs.
When you turn on Eco mode, your thermostat will switch out of your Schedule , It will not pre-heat of pre-cool your house before you get home, it’s really for saving money and lowering your carbon footprint. You have to manually switch back to heat or cool mode for the schedule mode to resume.
Good update, we installed the Eco Temperatures on a few days ago and being able to set this feature manually is great. We will update this post after more testing done on our part.
Hi,..
I think you are mistaken in one fact on the new ECO feature – it does NOT switch out of the schedule. The schedule actually overrides the ECO temp. This is really a problem,.. you think you save energy by switching to ECO but the schedule sets it still to your know temp – so you waste energy and costs.
Eco mode will use eco temperatures until you tell it otherwise. You are mixing up Eco temperatures with Eco mode I believe. The Away mode will use the temperatures set in your Eco mode settings. Eco mode uses your Eco temperatures immediately and will continue to do so forever until you manually turn Eco mode off.
Here is a much longer explanation.
“Away mode is a Nest-wide thing. When active your cameras will change how they behave, your Protects will do stuff like test their alarms while you’re out, and your thermostat will, eventually (immediately if set manually, or few mins to few hours if automatically set), use your lower “Eco” temperatures for a bit.
Auto-away is just Away mode that has been set automatically by your Nest account. It uses the sensors on all your Nest devices and connected phones, combined with your historical schedule to figure out if anyone is at home, and importantly it also historical data to figure out how likely it is that someone is at home. This is why it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to start using your Eco temperatures. It tries to be intelligent about it.
You can also set Away mode manually via the app or website. You can no longer do this on the thermostat.
Away mode set manually (app or website) will start using your Eco temperature immediately, but it’ll switch back to Home if any phone arrives home or any Nest sensor detects you there, as you would expect.
In both cases (Auto or Manual Away mode), it’ll also stop using Eco temperatures if any scheduled temperature change occurs in your schedule, even though it’s still “Away”. For example, if nobody is nome for a few hours, and the Thermostat enters Away mode automatically, a temperature change in your schedule will kick in even if nobody is home still. It does this because statistically somebody will be home soon and they don’t want to find a cold house, otherwise your schedule wouldn’t be set like that.
If after 2 days of being in Away mode, it’ll start ignoring scheduled temperature changes, and use your Eco temperatures until it detects someone at home. This is useful if you go on holiday or something.
On the thermostat, it’ll show “Eco” on the display when Away is set by any means. This is confusing I guess, as it doesn’t mean it’s in Eco mode – it could be in Away or Eco mode.
So that’s Home/Away mode covered…
You also have Eco mode. This always has to be set manually, either via the Thermostat or the app/website. Eco mode uses your Eco temperatures immediately, and will continue to do so forever until you manually turn Eco mode off. It doesn’t matter if you come home, press the Thermostat, or other Nest devices detect you home, you MUST manually turn Eco mode back off.
Eco mode is only applicable to your Thermostat. It doesn’t affect cameras or smoke alarms for example (whereas Home/Away mode affects all Nest devices).
Google made these changes because they found most people don’t want to come home to a cold house just because they’ve gone out for a few hours (which Auto Away often made happen). The energy savings are relatively small, and a house can take an hour or three to return to normal temperature. However, if the Thermostat knows your typical schedule (e.g. leaving for and coming back from work at the same time every day), then Auto Away would switch more quickly to the Eco temperatures, and your schedule would ensure your house was warm when you arrived back home.
For those people that wanted more manual control, especially when going on holiday or whatever, they could then manually turn on Eco mode.
So… more people win.
A good chunk of the people that don’t like the changes, are technically minded, and can mitigate any downsides or work around them using things like Tasker or IFTTT to automate control of the Thermostat in exactly the way you want it.”
I hope this clears up things.
Since august 2017 this part is not true anymore:
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In both cases (Auto or Manual Away mode), it’ll also stop using Eco temperatures if any scheduled temperature change occurs in your schedule, even though it’s still “Away”. For example, if nobody is nome for a few hours, and the Thermostat enters Away mode automatically, a temperature change in your schedule will kick in even if nobody is home still. It does this because statistically somebody will be home soon and they don’t want to find a cold house, otherwise your schedule wouldn’t be set like that.
If after 2 days of being in Away mode, it’ll start ignoring scheduled temperature changes, and use your Eco temperatures until it detects someone at home. This is useful if you go on holiday or something.
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Now, ECO mode will not care about schedule temperature.
That’s a very sade news, because now, when you come back to home, it can’t be anything else than in eco temperature! Confort is near 0 with this update. Thanks to nest support solution is to give away home/away mode set eco temp to the nest thermostat!!! Sounds crazy!!
You are totally right. I have been working with the NEST Support team for almost 2 months of testing. We started new structures etc…
Finally the support guy tells me the same thing. ECO overrides all scheduled set points.
I live in an area of Canada where our winters are COLD!!! If I now forget to lauch my app at 5 PM after work, I always walk into a super cold house.
This update has caused nothing but pain for my family. It is not what I bought into with my 2nd Gen unit and now my 3rd gen unit.
After all my testing with Nest, they finally told me they will send me all my money back as this doesnt work the way I need it to.
Talk about crazy!!! Can they not create a switch, toggle or something where we can still use the cool Away/eco feature, but still have the scheduled times work for us.