Yes, I did read that, and agree it’s a shame. But, how hard is it to pick up a wifi signal from a thermostat on a home network indicating whether the Nest thermostat heating/cooling is ON or OFF?
Pretty hard, at least in Nest-land. The data is buried in the Nest Weave protocol which is rather complex and built to resist packet sniffing. The data sent and received by the Nest/Google mothership travels via an authenticated VPN tunnel. Nest/Google really only allow people to see what’s going on via their partner API. Ecobee has done a much better job opening up their data, but they are much more focused on just being a smart thermostat that integrates into smart home environments, not being the whole smart home.
Thanks for the info - I hope you wind up being able to work this out with Nest. As you know, the more such connections you can get, the better your device will work and the happier your customers will be. Like me, I’m sure that many purchasers fully didn’t realize that it would be along drawn-out process requiring months to see the jazzy bubbles and electric use details depicted in your promotions and advertisements. My sense system is falling into the category of interesting, but not all that useful so far.
I’m just another Sense user who had Nests a few years ago until they started removing data access features.
Ah, well thanks for being a volunteer and taking time to answer questions from newbs like me.
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Hey @fagerlie, welcome to the community! @kevin1 is spot-on here with his overview of the Nest Weave protocol. We’re always on the lookout for integrations and if something changes here with Nest, the community will be among the first to know.
This seems like an obvious/necessary integration point.
My house is 3 zones. Sense found/identified the Furnaces/AirHandlers semi poorly but hasn’t gotten the AC units. Nest has that info readily available real time and nest links it into Google Home so that would be another avenue to retreive.
There was once a Sense beta with a Nest integration, concurrent with Ecobee, but in the middle of that Google rescrambled their API. Based on my experiences with Nest / Google, they make data access much harder than it needs to be, especially compare to Ecobee. I was a former Nest enthusiast, but Google’s changes and restrictions forced me to move to Ecobee for all 4 Nests I once had in place.
Not a small investment for those of us that already have Nest. I’ve got 3 main nest units and then a whole array of room sensors to augment. Nest is one of my favorite products, so i’m unlikely to switch. However, not integrating with Sense then becomes a negative / detraction from the value of Sense.
Can definitely understand - there are a lot of Nest users out there.
From our point-of-view, investing a lot of development resources to build an integration just to have the API changed by Google (as @kevin1 mentioned above) was a high risk at the time. That doesn’t mean we won’t pursue something in the future, just providing some context for why we didn’t go back to the drawing board after the initial Nest Beta several years ago.
I was in similar straits - loved Nest and had a not-so-insignificant investment from a $ and engagement perspective. But I wanted my data for analysis, so I eventually replaced all 4, and have stopped looking back. I can do charts like this that combine Ecobee and Sense data - pretty sure that you wouldn’t be able to do the same with Nest.
Top is power utilization from Sense, bottom is data coming out of Ecobee. Circle area is where my floor heating loops (on NuVent thermostats) are on at the same time as my AC.
But again, appreciate why you like Nest. Just realize that Google has locked away some of the real-time thermostat data that is available from an Ecobee.
Any progress with the Nest thermostat integration? Sounds like work was continuing on the problem but that was years ago.
I just installed my Sense Home Energy monitor and am loving it! I now know how to make educated eco decisions to save on my power bill. One of the first features I found myself wanting however was an integration with Nest. So I stumbled on this thread, which I am eagerly watching for updates on this feature.