My warm little nest (and Nest)

You never know what matters until you nearly lose it. That's what happened when I lost contact with my Nest thermostat. And our little nest in Maine.

On the road, away from home, I get an email from Lisa, the lady who is looking after our plants while we are away: Power went off in the house. Generator didn't go on. Called the generator service. They took care of it. All is fine.

Whew!

But then I check my newly installed Nest and find it's not online.

Maybe a problem. Maybe not. The Nest is two routers away from my ISP, so maybe there's a problem with one of my routers. Fortunately I've another Internet-capable device connected to the first router. So I check that. Also down.

I call the house phone. We've got an answering machine in the house and a backup at our phone service provider. The voice prompts are slightly different, so I'm able to confirm that the home answering machine has power. So good. Everything's OK. Or is it.

I have the guy who plows for us take a look. He tells me power is off in my office where the primary router is located. Huh?

I write her an email, and fortunately, Lisa drops by the house and checks it out. It turns out that when the generator went off it didn't transfer the critical areas back to our power supplier. Non-critical areas (like the answering machine) had power. Critical ones, like my office did not. And also like the Nest. And, oh yeah, like the furnace. Not. The temperature is in the teens outside, and the house is on its way there.

Lisa calls the generator guy who flips the switch which turns on the heat and the first router. I can see the device that's attached to it. But not the Nest.

Then I read about a problem in a software update Nest has put out that causes Nests to drop off line, lose their battery charge and fail.

No!!!

Happy ending. Lisa stops by next morning. I walk her through the reboot procedure. The Nest does not come on line right away, but a few hours later, when I check, there it is!

Now I check a dozen times a day. It's nice to see my little Nest plugging away.

And even nicer to know that our little nest is warm.

So every time I check, I smile.