A bug in Nest’s Learning Thermostats is causing excessive battery drain

It’s almost surreal to think that we’ve reached the point where appliances in our home will soon need firmware updates to fix buggy software, but apparently that’s exactly what happened with the Nest Learning Thermostat recently.

Apparently there was some sort of bug in the thermostat’s software that was creating excessive battery drain, causing the tiny units to go offline. Not really a safety concern as much as it is an inconvenience, a dead thermostat means you’re probably not going to reap any of the Nest’s touted energy savings and could come home to an overly cold/hot house.

This isn’t the first time buggy software/hardware has plagued Nest devices. A few years back, Nest’s smart smoke detectors were going haywire, causing the company to recall units while they got things sorted out. If CES 2016 and all the home automation technology we saw there wasn’t a big enough clue, expect much more things like this in the future.

Fridge on the fritz again? I hear a new software update will take care of that.

[The New York Times]