Had the same issue. In our case, 42 minutes. A manual (via iPhone) adjustment worked fine, and Nest “honored” the set points perfectly. A glitch that seemed to happen to everyone?
All ok now.

I think there is something messed up with their wifi system.

I’m glad you’re having a good experience Chris. Do you have set points, or have you let it “learn” your routine?

Gah, now my Nest lost its account information as well!

I’m suspecting something is wrong with the most recent Nest firmware update. Looks like Nest updated it on January 20th:

“Version 1.1.1 – Released January 20th, 2012
[...]
Improvements and bug fixes for Schedule Learning, Auto Away, energy history, Wi-Fi connection, time zones, lock and more”

Note how it says they made improvements/bug fixes to the WiFi. I’d be suspicious someone accidentally broke something while making the “improvement”.

Oddly, my Nest says it is running 1.1.2, so maybe they pushed out another update that is still broken.

Same isssue here…mine has only been inaccessible with low battery for over an hour, just installed this past weekend

@Erin–yes, it was still keeping the schedule (mind you, if you’ve got it in learning mode, the ‘schedule’ may be adjusted without your knowledge).

Only W, G, Y1 and RC – nothing connected to C

Either as one of the comments on my blog or digtstat.com, someone talked about power options when there isn’t a “c” wire.

Check this tweet: https://twitter.com/nest/status/163774439987748865

ok thanks, good tip

I was one of the first to receive a Nest and had it installed from launch through last week. Like the author of this blog, I gave it a solid trial but found the Nest to be lacking in several areas.

In the end, before buying this product you really need to ask yourself: Do I really want a “computer” controlling my thermostat in the dead of Winter? With a computer comes “computer problems.” Old time technology does offer some benefits in this case.

Some areas that need immediate attention:

1. Temperature Sensitivity
As mentioned on this blog, the Nest has problems with accurate temperature readings. When compared to my (very accurate) external thermometer or previous thermostat, the Nest is consistently off by 3 or more degrees, in either direction. Usually warmer. (Meaning the Nest think it’s 71 when in fact it’s 68.)

2. Temperature Accuracy Comes at Cost: Furnace Runs More Frequently
With our 20-year old Robert Shaw thermostat, the temperature reading was ridiculously accurate. The unit would turn on, run it up about a degree past your set temperature, and then shut off for a good while. With the Nest, because it’s more accurate, your heater is constantly turning on and off. (The Nest was turning the furnace on every 15 or 20 minutes on some nights.) Yes, it keeps it exactly where you want it and not a degree colder or warmer so it’s really, really comfy in the house. While this may save you pennies on energy costs (because it does not run past your set temp), you’re absolutely beating the hell out of the furnace by constantly turning it on and off. That is not good for the starter solenoid if you’re running a natural gas unit like we have.

3. Learning Sucks
As mentioned in this blog, we encountered the same problems. The learning just does whatever the hell it wants and doesn’t seem to make much sense. We disabled it after two weeks; it was often letting us wake up to 58 degree temps (?) and bringing it up to 70 degrees without notice. One day it just went to 60 degrees at 7 p.m. for no reason. Very odd system it has.

4. Needs Quick Fan Control
In my home, we frequently use the Fan to circulate air, even in the Winter. Having this buried within the Advanced Settings menu is a real pain when you just want to go flip the fan on. It takes about 20 clicks to eventually get there. I get the whole “minimalized controls” concept that they’re trying to carry over from Apple’s design, but in this case, I think the button should be somewhere easier to find. Again, on our 20-year old Robert Shaw unit there is a tiny little switch where you can turn the fan on and off in about a second. (The author mentioned a clock on the faceplate as well and I agree; a clock should be there, or at least as an option, to put on the main screen.)

5. Internet Connectivity
I understand that the Nest offers remote control of your house, but throughout the first few months of using it, we encountered several days where the Nest was “updating” and unresponsive to our controls for 30 minutes or more. This really sucks if it happens to update right when you come home from work, or right when you decide you want to bump the heat up or down. It’s just inconvenient to constantly have my thermostat tell me that I cannot adjust my own home because it’s “busy.” This happened frequently enough to be a problem. (This confirmed my concept of never again buying a thermostat that connects to the Internet.)

6. The Big One: Needs an Emergency Override
Although I’ve encountered a number of bugs (more like irritating quirks) since installing it, I never felt unsafe with it until two weeks ago. Well that changed on one of the coldest nights of the year—it hit 8 degrees here—and the Nest encountered some type of random error at around 10 p.m. that night. When we noticed it felt really cold inside, we checked and the unit completely stopped working and we could not adjust the temperature or get the heat to turn on. After trying a support call, they had us disconnect everything and reconnect all the wires… no dice. After a few more calls with support, they had us try several factory resets only to come to the same error screen every time. By this time it was approaching 50 degrees in the house and falling fast. We asked if there was a way to just bypass all the programming bullshit and get the heater to turn on, as this was quickly turning into an emergency. It turns out there is no such method (the guy on the phone acted like this was no big deal), and you have to keep cycling through all the programming and setup screens to eventually get to the adjustments. To top it all off, after messing with the Nest for several hours and trying to get access to turn our furnace on, the faceplate needed to be recharged so it automatically went into “charging mode.” Now it was absolutely and totally bricked. We could not do anything with it and it was well below 50 degrees in the house. Luckily we kept our 20-year old Robert Shaw thermostat and ended up reinstalling it at this point. 20 minutes later our heat was on, working perfectly and we never went back.

In the end, I guess I prefer a “dumb” thermostat that just does what I tell it to do, has accurate temperature readings, has quick access to a Fan control, doesn’t connect to the Internet or download “updates,” and certainly works under emergency situations.

To Nest’s credit: after complaining about the whole experience (I think they finally got sick of us calling and writing), they offered a full refund. We sent it back and are awaiting a full credit. Hopefully everything goes well.

I had high hopes but I absolutely cannot recommend this product to anyone. The Nest is no where near ready for primetime.

I have three just-arrived unopened Nests that I will be returning. The fact is that a thermostat is a piece of process control equipment. It needs to have way more consistency and reliability than Nest currently has. I truly wish the guys at Nest the best of luck in improving the product, but I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to worry about whether my pipes are freezing because I can’t reboot three devices that are more than 100 miles away. I guess the final straw for me was reading about the server disconnects of last weekend, followed by what looks to me like a major hardware layout flaw: apparent inter-heating between a charging battery and the thermal sensor, causing the Nest’s accuracy to be seriously compromised.

@Vlad — thanks for the heads up and I (we all) look forward to hearing what Nest has to say. Feel free to post your pains on digtstat.com as well. I too see that at least one of my thermostats has display version 1.1.3. I haven’t noticed any problems other than the “Away” mode telling me it had saved us money even though we were home.

Many thanks to M. Jackson and Vlad for their informative posts. My only problems with software ver. 1.1.3 have been that it stalled in the middle of the “push” and I had to manually enter the data it needed (network name, account email address, etc.) to complete the update. Then of course I had to re-enter my schedule, which it had completely deleted. Since it re-installed with the default LEARN mode enabled, I decided to leave it there to see whether Nest had gotten any smarter. Alas, it hasn’t. It still randomly deletes scheduled set points. But now that I’m back in my preferred mode (LEARN paused, AUTO-AWAY disabled) it seems ok. It hasn’t dropped the network connection or lost my internet account the way it used to. Given the really serious problems others have reported (no heat, no battery, etc.) I guess I shouldn’t complain that my only problem is a learning thermostat that is too stupid to learn anything. With LEARN disabled, it’s a decent programmable thermostat.

On that previous post, meant to say “no problems so far”. My apologies. – John Q.

I had a similar problem to Dave In Nevada’s problem, only it was on the initial install. Apparently the Nest was not getting an install to 1.13 cleanly. It kept down loading rebooting over and over. Tech support seems to be aware of this specific problem and stopped the down loading loop within 15 minutes of my call. They then pushed out 1.13 overnight. We are on day 4 of operation and all is going well. The Nest built a preliminary schedule which seems to be close to ideal for us. It is still in learning mode at this time. Auto-away triggered for the first time yesterday while we were out of the house. Once we got home, its sensed us and cranked the heat back on. The app on my iTouch and iPad works well as well as the web browser interface. So far it is operating as advertised and from my standpoint I have no misgivings.