So Derek had convinced me to get a Nest, but honestly it doesn’t take much these days to convince me to get a new toy. Ooooh shiny! This isn’t a cheap thermostat as it sells for $250 and for someone like me, it’s probably not going to save me much money in the short run given that my previous thermostat was already fined tune. I could probably save more money if I changed those darn filters more regularly. ;p
So I’ve had the Nest for a month and it’s been pretty cool so far (no pun intended). The auto-learn feature is pretty neat as it was able to guess my schedule pretty closely after the 1st week. I did end up tinkering with the schedule a bit, but it’s still learning.
One cool feature is that you can change the temperature from your phone or computer. You might think that I should just probably get off my lazy ass and just go turn up the thermostat, but the real benefit is when you’re not home. I set my thermostat to turn on rather late at night, but on the evenings when I’m going to be home unexpectedly early, I can turn on the heater before leaving work or while I’m in my car, so I return to a nice and warm house.
Have you ever left your house on vacation and wondered if you remember to set your thermostat to vacation mode? Well, now you never have to worry because you can always check and even turn it off from any computer.
They recently updated their software to display energy usage and it’s pretty cool:
One thing I’d like to see is location based learning. My thermostat already connects to the internet and pulls in local weather or data. What if it also knew where its cohabitants were currently located? If they detect that people are on their way home, turn on the heater. If they detect that everyone just left, set auto-away on.