Fast forward to a few days ago, when the nest reported that it couldn't detect the fan wire. It also read the current temperature in the house a few degrees higher than actual (confirmed with two other thermometers). We had just installed a whole house humidifier, through which the fan wire runs, so I thought fan wire issue might be related to that. Nope. Then the nest dropped off my wireless network and gave a low battery warning. This is odd because my nest has been working without issue for weeks. I tried the obvious (charging via usb, resetting to factory settings, etc.) but nothing seemed to help. My house was now around 64 degrees fahrenheit (the nest claimed 84!) late on Sunday. Hardware stores, where one might buy a temporary thermostat, are closed.

So I called support. I was on hold for longer than I liked (perhaps 20 minutes?), then a guy named David picked up. David was exactly the kind of guy you want on the other side of a telephone call in a situation like this. I described the symptoms and he immediately knew what was up -- a bad update (v1.1.2) had been downloaded by my nest and couldn't be installed. The nest was repeatedly trying to install this update, which ran the battery down and caused my problem. David was able to look at detailed logging to see that my nest had indeed downloaded said bad build, and essentially issued a command for my nest to download a new fixed version of the same build.

At this point, I charged the nest via usb once more and put it back on the base an hour later. I set it to heat my home, made sure it was connected to my network, and left it alone. A few minutes later all was well. The temperature nest was reading was closer to normal and entirely normal by morning). So not only did they have someone there to take my call late on a Sunday night, but they also had enough data to know exactly what my problem was *and* push an update to fix it the same night. Should this have happened at all? No. Did they resolve my issue promptly? Very much so. Nest has excellent support.