Both Nest and Ecobee were affected by a series of server outages during the winter of early 2019. This frustrated many users and made it difficult to operate the thermotats remotely, which is one of the primary reasons people get a smart thermostat in the first place.
In this article, we’ll talk about why smart thermostats need a server in the first place, what features are lost during an outage, and what to expect in the future from the companies that make smart thermostats.
Why does a thermostat need a server, anyway?
Nearly all smart thermostats communicate regularly with a server – a computer somewhere (probably) far away from your home – over the Internet.
The server is how a request to raise the temp from your phone gets communicated to the thermostat itself. Even if your phone and the thermostat are on the same network, requests made via the app are sent through the company’s servers as a sort of “middle man”.
This is a common criticism of smart thermostats. The lack of a “local network” alternative to fall back on during outages makes the devices almost completely dependent on the company’s servers, even when your phone and the thermostat are on the same WiFi network.
Generally, your home is still safe
In event of server outage, your Nest, Ecobee, or other smart thermostat remembers the schedule that it was going to run and continues to run it. It doesn’t need to check in with the mothership to keep your HVAC running. (Note that this is in event of a server outage. In the event of a power outage at your home, your smart thermostat relies on whatever power it has stored in its battery to run your HVAC.)
During a server outage you won’t be able to alter the schedule or the current temp unless you’re standing at the thermostat – your phone/tablet/computer are now useless for controlling it.
In a perfect world most users won’t notice a server outage. Smart thermostats are designed to be scheduled and then forgotten about, more or less. Outages are most noticeable to people who are opening the app frequently to monitor their home from somewhere else.
Smart thermostat go “dumb” when the servers go down
The frustrating part of a server outage is the loss of remote and “smart” features. Any feature or action that would normally go through the server stops working when the servers go down.
- The app on your phone or tablet won’t connect, meaning you can’t check on your home remotely or change the temp from your phone (sometimes, this looks like a failure to log into the app entirely)
- Same deal for the web portal
- Features like geofencing won’t work at all
- Data collection stops or gets summarized in some way
- Weather reports and forecasts won’t display on the thermostat hardware
- Home assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home won’t be able to send your verbal commands to the thermostat (this includes the version of Alexa built into the ecobee 4 thermostat)
When the servers go down, smart thermostats become old school thermostats that can’t be operated from an app or website.
Winter 2019 – Nest and Ecobee server outages frustrate users
The winter of 2018-2019 up here in the Northern Hemisphere saw a series of outages affecting both Nest and Ecobee. Owners took to Twitter, Reddit, and the official Nest and Ecobee forums to complain and they weren’t kind:
These customers have a valid argument: being able to monitor and adjust the thermostat remotely is a major selling point for smart thermostats, so it’s aggravating when those features are disabled – especially if it also happens to be the coldest day of the year.
We hope the makers of smart thermostats come up with a way to mitigate the impact of server outages, and improve their server stability in 2020, because the way the devices get disabled when the company’s own servers suffer an outage is a major caveat we make anytime we recommend a smart thermostat.
How to tell if your smart thermostat’s servers are down
Somewhat surprisingly, since it’s a bit like hanging your dirty laundry out for your neighbors to see, Nest has a server status website and support Twitter that alerts users to outages:
Ecobee announces its planned outages on Twitter and r/ecobee.
Outages are also tracked by third party sites:
- Nest outage history at outage.report and downdetector
- Ecobee outage history at outage.report and downdetector
How big of a problem are server outages, really?
It depends how you want to use the thermostat.
For anyone who wants to “set it and forget it” outages shouldn’t be a problem because the thermostat can continue to communicate with your HVAC system without checking into any server. The only real loss of functionality is the ability to control the thermostat from your phone. If you’re happy with your schedule, though, you may not find yourself doing that very often.
If you want to use a Nest or an Ecobee to monitor a home’s temperature while you’re away, though, your annoyance level may run higher in event of outage. Outages will be noticeable to you and probably very annoying. The thermostat should keep running your schedule, but in event of exceptionally bad conditions you may want additional peace of mind. We once pointed an inexpensive Yi camera at a large thermometer in a house we weren’t living at but wanted to monitor through a winter – sounds silly but it worked.
In our own testing and trial runs with thermostats from Nest and Ecobee, we didn’t encounter any major outages. We’re very “set it and forget it” though, so once we had a schedule we liked we didn’t keep logging into the app. Many outages and scheduled downtimes went unnoticed by us.
(As an aside, we’ve used Nest cameras for over four years to monitor a property we don’t live in full time, and we’ve only encountered the occasional Nest service outage. As an additional layer of security we set the property up with cameras from both Nest and Yi, figuring it was less likely that both services were out at the same time.)
Who has the more reliable servers?
On April 11, 2019 we visited outage.report and took these snapshots depicting the last ~4 months of server outages for Nest and Ecobee.
Nest’s outage history
Nest’s outage history for 2019 shows many reports of outages during two days in January and two days in March. (Red box = more reports.)
Ecobee’s outage history
I thought this looked pretty bad, but then I took a look at Ecobee’s outage history for early 2019 – yikes.
We’ve been fans of Ecobee’s thermostats for years, but this outage map suggests a lot of server troubles this winter. Ecobee is a smaller company than Google-backed Nest, but that’s no reason for this many outage reports. We’re disappointed and hope Ecobee is making investments in its overall server stability.
If you’re trying to decide between a Nest and an Ecobee and accessibility through the app and overall uptime are a major concern then you may find yourself happier with Nest.
One reply on “Server outage? Here’s what happens to your smart thermostat”
I’m one of those who wants to set and monitor the temp of a property that I’m away from often. These server issues are troubling for sure. Additionally, customer reviews indicate many wifi thermostats will not recover from a power outage and reconnect to the wifi…. most say you have to physically be at the thermostat to reset it. So if I’m halfway across the country its kinda hard to do. This is even worse than the server issues and to me is an inexcusable design flaw. Some reviewers of the ecobee’s have indicated this same problem. Not sure about the nest. I don’t need a feature fancy thermostat… just one that works. I have a feeling that a lot of the problems are due to most or all of the products are designed and manufactured overseas. Few incentives to correcting problems if they’re making a profit. Sad but this is true in many cases. American companies need to step up. Bottom line though is……Are there any currently available thermostats that will always reconnect to wifi after a power outage?? If so I’d sure like to know. Thanks