Nest thermostat compatible with Airport Extreme

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Nest thermostat compatible with Airport Extreme

I am having problems with my Nest thermostat periodically disconnecting from my Airport Extreme. The Nest thermostat will appear on-line only periodically for a short period of time, sometimes on its own, or after it has been "woken-up" by any interaction with the Nest device itself.

I have an AirPort Extreme base station (software version 7.6.4, 5th generation model A1408) and a second generation Nest thermostat (software version 3.5.3). I am using dual band on the AirPort extreme, and I have tried configurations with both the SSID broadcasting and hidden. The signal strength for the Nest is excellent (-65 dBm). I have a DHCP reservation set for the Nest thermostat. There have been many other discussions on threads related to not working with dual band airport expresses, some conversations about downgrading to 7.6.1, known problems with recent versions of Nest software - but none of these seem to fit exactly my issue. The Nest does not show a low battery error, and I would prefer not to downgrade by airport extreme unless I was certain this was the issue.

Please help.

iMac6.1, Mac OS X (10.6.3), iMac Late 2006 (white) 27" 2.16 Intel Core Duo2 3 GB RAM

Posted on Jan 4, 2014 5:32 AM

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Answer 1

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gortpara

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Jan 4, 2014 8:10 PM in response to anthonyng

Have you tried to seek help from the Nest Community? https://community.nest.com/welcome

Nest Community is Nest's peer to peer help site. Unfortunately, Nest Community help pages do not show up in Google results, so it goes unnoticed by most people.

There are many discussions there, about connectivity issues with the Nest. The Nest Community Member Jasiu could probably assist you with your problem.

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Answer 2

anthonyng Author

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Jan 5, 2014 4:46 AM in response to gortpara

Thanks. I have started a thread on that community, as well. I am still working through the issue and have a few things to try. Presently, none of the suggestions have yielded an easy answer.

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Answer 3

anthonyng Author

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Jan 5, 2014 9:58 AM in response to anthonyng

The latest update is that so far things are working better, and the issue did appear to be related to the WiFi connection. The SSID broadcast was enabled and the Nest Thermostat had to be RESET - it seems like just updating the broadcast without the reset was not sufficient. Also, a DHCP reservation was added for the Nest Thermostat, although it is not clear that this was the root of the prior problem. I had disabled the guest network on the Airport Extreme.

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