Nest Learning Thermostat, 3rd Gen Copper

I purchased this thermostat and installed it in the summer of 2018. Reason for the purchase was my mom, who was turning 88, and needed something easy to read and understand (she does not understand technology and had trouble seeing the old mercury thermostat we had since the 70s that worked perfectly all those decades). This thing was great! She could turn it with the dial like she was used to. It was easy to read. It had color so she knew what system was on. And best of all, she could tell Alexa to turn it up or down from her chair. Only thing I noticed was it kept kicking the AC unit on and off in shorter cycles, which I didn't like. Then winter came. I live with her and work days. She would start noticing the thermostat would adjust itself to 60, without touching it, at least twice a day. She would get cold and realize it's on 60 and turn it up. The other thing I noticed was it would adjust itself to 70 at around 4 AM when I didn't want that, wasting heat and money. I tried adjusting the schedule so it wouldn't do that and had the away feature off since she's home. That didn't work. Turned the schedule feature off and figured that was that. Seemed to work. Then we started getting the infamous "2+ hours" message people are reporting when you turn the heat up. Thermostat is still lit orange, which means boiler is still sending heat ... and registers are warm, but the temperature in the room wasn't going up. In fact sometimes it was falling. Thought maybe internal battery was getting low (I don't have a C wire, but support says it's not necessary). Battery was reading about 3.8. Charging it via USB didn't make a difference. Adjusted display brightness and farsight to "on when pressed." Didn't help. It would take hours to go from 67 to 70. So by the time I get home, my mom's finally comfortable in the room. Thankfully we have a big house, so during the day she's in the back bedrooms, which is controlled by a regular manual thermostat, to stay warmer. So in the last few days I've had to use a space heater in the room with the Nest to warm it up before I leave for work. It seemed to to maintain the warmer temp (70) for the first two days. Over the last two days, however, after heating the room to 70 it gradually fell (usually not below 67, however this morning I woke up to 64 degrees in the room. I went into settings and updated software .. which said was up to date. I decided it worked better when auto schedule was on so I turned it back on, and instead of saying "2+hours," (which is the thermostat saying to you it doesn't care if you turned it 70 it's refusing to heat the room to that temp for over 2 hours, even though I'm cold), it said "heating." I thought yessss, heat! That's what a thermostat should do, give you heat when you're cold. So since it's my day off, I have to get my car worked on and do shopping. Checked the thermostat before I left. And you guessed it .. it won't seemingly heat past 68 (giving me that 2+hours crap message again). Checked the app while I'm sitting at the car mechanic waiting ... sure enough it's reading 67 in the room, even though the color is orange and set to 70. So temp is falling again. So far I've used support online ... not chat yet ... and YouTube videos to try to solve this. My life is too busy at the moment to deal with nightmare stories I read online about being on hold over an hour and how bad Nest customer service is. Guess I have 2 options at this point. Suck it up and waste probably hours with customer service when I get home. Or simply trash it and put back the old reliable thermostat my mom has trouble seeing. Soooooo, my conclusions. I thought this thing was literally the greatest thing since cheesecake (much better than sliced bread). It worked great for one summer, fall, and much of one winter. I've had it installed for nine months to date (it's currently early March 2018). I live in NYS, so no major temp swings during the year. I'm technologically savvy with just about everything. But have no idea what's going on with this thing. I'm a technology junkie of sorts. I wanted to love the Nest, but decided never to buy a Nest product again. I'm starting to hear a lot of bad things about them (my mechanic had trouble with one too he just told me). I can't afford it failing with my elderly mother at home and I can't even get the heat to go up. BTW the app worked perfectly for me ... really loved the easy interface and that I can control it remotely. Installation and setup was super easy too. It's all such a shame. The design is beautiful. They would have to lower the price and have maybe a 10th generation before I may consider one again. They have to fix a lot of issues. By then, however, there will be many smart thermostat options, so doubt I'll give Nest any more of my money. If it wasn't for my mom's vision problems I would probably still have that old reliable thermostat on the wall that worked perfectly. It "listened" to me when I was cold. Turn it up and presto ... heat came up almost on cue. A thermostat is supposed to keep you comfortable and obey your wishes. I think this one actually wasted money by blasting heat early in the morning when I didn't need it. Although now it's not giving me enough heat. If customer service miraculously solves this I will update this review. I'm not holding my breath though. To safeguard my mother I'm going to put the old thermostat back. We still have cold days ahead. Guess I'll use my $200 Nest as a hockey puck for the kids.