The Nest Thermostat

[Alex]

Wondered if anyone in the ninjette family has installed one of these gadgets yet.

http://www.nest.com/



Short description is that one of the key designers of the iPod left Apple and founded a new company with a bunch of Apple engineers. They designed a thermostat. It's self-learning, is supposed to have a great UI, looks great, and is accessible over a wi-fi network (and therefore over the internet, a phone, tablet, etc.). I had heard of them awhile back, but saw one for the first time at a friend's house over the weekend.

I've always been a bit of a thermostat geek, with the installation of a fully programmable thermostat one of the first things I install, every place we've ever lived. We're pretty good about programming them for each day already, and remembering to turn them off when we leave for a few days, so I'm not sure whether the smarts of this device will save us much energy. But it does have some neat features, like knowing that the a/c compressor can be turned off and the fan can stay on for several minutes afterwards, still blowing cold air while using significantly less energy. I couldn't help myself, and ordered one a few minutes ago, and may have it installed as soon as tomorrow night if Amazon delivers as expected.

Nest reviews

Wired, Time, and cnet.

[CynicalC]

Looks pretty cool. Not too unreasonably priced I guess. Hopefully it controls all the zones in your house. I don't think it does anything particularly "new" but the industrial design sure is something.

[Alex]

I believe it does control multiple zones, but it also talks about some installations requiring 2 or 3 of them. They then talk to eachother, so if one of them senses somebody (or actually, nobody), they can all trigger the auto-away features as a team rather than individually.

Our current house has a dirt-simple system, with 1 zone, forced-air heat + A/C, and a single thermostat.

[alex.s]

a coworker of mine was talking about this... he said he didn't notice any difference yet but its only been a few weeks... i'll try to remember to ask him if it effects his utilities bill

[Apex]

Well the thermostat won't save him any money if he is keeping the house at 60* during the summer or 90* during the winter.

So the saving money part only works if you are actively trying to do that. Too many variables involved there.

My company makes some stuff for that gadget. I'm interested in it, but I will hold off a while longer since we just got some thermostats not too long after we moved into our new home (a year ago).

[Alex]

OK, it's installed. Had to use the backing plate as I didn't want to spackle and repaint the area that already was chewed up and had some holes in the wall. Might be a project for another day. But it seems to be working fine.

[Apex]

As long as it isn't supported by the wiring itself, I call it a job well done!

[Alex]

[himynameisjoe]

I want this!!!! For no real reason other than I'm a huge gaget geek... if only I wasn't poor haha

[Alex]

I like the metrics that it shows you. Our furnace was running for 1.25 hours yesterday. And here's exactly when it turned on and off each time. (click for full size)

nest energy usage.jpg

The round dots are the set points in the program, or when my kid was messing with the dial to give it different commands. The solid blocks of orange, are when the furnace was actually on.

[himynameisjoe]

That's super cool... So you can essentially look over an entire winter's worth of heating and figure out exactly when you're using the heater the most? And then you can decide what to do (if you can do anything) next year.

[Alex]

I'm not sure how long they keep the detailed records. Supposedly you get a detailed email each month about your usage, but I haven't seen what one looks like yet. I think the online minute by minute logs (like the pic I posted), might only be up for 10 days or so, but again, it's a little early in my ownership of the gadget.

[himynameisjoe]

O okay. But even still, if one were so inclined, they could save all of those detailed records.

I think too much... and it's late and I'm tired. I'm surprised I make any sense at all honestly!

[Redgeneral]

That's really neat! And here I was looking at picking up a regular old programmable thermostat in the near future. The side of my brain that loves Gadgets (roughly 99.9% of it ) is very intrigued.

Time to do some research!