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mattmag

join:2000-04-09
NW Illinois

mattmag to mudtoe

to mudtoe

Re: New Nest Thermostat- 2 stage

said by mudtoe:

If you have a Nest in a vacation home you had better login to the web page and check out the temperature. After the software update yesterday the Nest in my Florida vacation home has malfunctioned. For some reason it's no longer turning on the blower inside the house, but is just turning on the A/C compressor.

How can it accomplish that? The stat should just initiate a call for cooling, in which case the blower control is performed by the A/C system, not the thermostat. I don't think you have separate circuits just from the outside condenser, do you? Or I may be missing something since it's a warm-climate situation and I'm used to a combined furnace/AC.

PSWired
join:2006-03-26
Annapolis, MD

PSWired

Member

Almost all residential thermostats have control over the refrigeration and air circulation functions separately. That's how the "fan on/auto" function works.
mudtoe
join:2005-10-09
Cincinnati, OH

mudtoe to mattmag

Member

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I'm not sure either, but they told me last night that the symptom was the blower not coming on, and my neighbor confirmed that today. All I can tell you is that the system is a 2 stage A/C (I think the A/C unit controls the stage 1 vs stage 2 and not the Nest) and electric resistance forced air heat (which I've never used). There are only 3 wires hooked to the Nest: Rh, W1, and Y1. It worked perfectly since I installed it in June, until yesterday after the software update.

jack b
Gone Fishing
MVM
join:2000-09-08
Cape Cod

jack b to PSWired

MVM

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said by PSWired:

Almost all residential thermostats have control over the refrigeration and air circulation functions separately. That's how the "fan on/auto" function works.

Yes they do, most have a system FAN ON manual override switch and all that does is supplies 24volts to terminal G continuously.

Typically terminals Y (compressor) and G (fan) are energized simultaneously on a cooling call, and the bug that must be happening with the firmware update is that terminal G is NOT being energized, therefore the blower will not run.
mudtoe
join:2005-10-09
Cincinnati, OH

mudtoe

Member

Nest sent someone out to the place to check it out. I didn't hear back directly from the person I talked to, but when I called in later a level one person told me that notes in the case showed that the green wire had fallen off. I give them kudos for sending someone out on their nickle, but I'm not so sure I buy the idea that the green wire just happened to fall off at the exact time a firmware update went out.

From examining the web page that shows energy usage I found that I could pinpoint the exact moment the thermostat rebooted after the firmware update (because the thermostat after a reboot shows the temperature being set to the value it had prior to the reboot, as if I had changed it on the web page, but I hadn't changed it at that time), and from then on until the service tech got there the thermostat was trying to run the A/C all the time.

I'm still in the dark as to exactly what happened. What this does show though is that there is a great need for Nest to give customers the ability to opt out of automatic firmware updates, especially for thermostats in vacation homes and other places where there is no human being present to verify that things are working correctly after the update. There should be a way through the web page to turn off updates and then turn them back on once you are there to watch what happens afterward. As I posted earlier, if I didn't have other temperature sensors in the place that started emailing me, I would have never known that this was happening.