David Pogue reviews the Nest Learning Thermostat, which brings the iPhone aesthetic to HVAC:
Don’t snicker. This isn’t trivial. According to Nest, there are a quarter of a billion thermostats in this country alone; 10 million more are bought each year.
Half of your home’s energy is controlled by this ugly, beige tool. Most people never even bother to program their programmable thermostats. As a result, their houses actually use more energy than homes without them. Two years ago, the federal government eliminated the entire programmable thermostat category from its Energy Star program.
As the kind of rara avis who installed and programmed his own programmable thermostat — let’s not bring up the fuse I blew on the heater’s circuit board — I wasn’t sure that the $250 learning thermostat would have much to offer me, but, Pogue says, it introduces four radical changes:
RADICAL CHANGE 1 The look. The Nest is gorgeous. It’s round. Its screen is slightly domed glass; its barrel has a mirror finish that reflects your wall. Its color screen glows orange when it’s heating, blue when it’s cooling; it turns on when you approach it, and discreetly goes dark when nobody’s nearby.
Sweating over attractiveness makes sense; after all, this is an object you mount on your wall at eye level. A thermostat should be one of the most beautiful items on your wall, not the ugliest.
RADICAL CHANGE 2 The Nest has Wi-Fi, so it’s online. It can download software updates. You can program it on a Web site.
You can also use a free iPhone or Android app, from anywhere you happen to be, to see the current temperature and change it — to warm up the house before you arrive, for example. (At this moment, vacation-home owners all over the world are wiping drool off their keyboards.)
RADICAL CHANGE 3 Learning. The Nest is supposed to program itself — and save you energy in the process. When you first install the Nest, you turn its ring to change the temperature as you would a normal thermostat — at bedtime, when you leave for work, and so on. A big, beautiful readout shows you the new setting and lets you know how long it will take your house to reach that temperature. That information, Nest says, is intended to discourage people from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees, for example, thinking that the temperature will rise to 70 faster. (It doesn’t.)
Over the course of a week or so, the thermostat learns from your manual adjustments. It notes when that happened, and what the temperature and humidity were, and so on. And it begins to set its own schedule based on your living patterns.
RADICAL CHANGE 4 Energy savings. Let’s face it, $250 is a lot to pay for a thermostat. But Nest says that you’ll recoup that through energy savings in less than two years.
The mere act of having a correctly programmed thermostat is the big one, of course. Why should you waste money heating or cooling the downstairs when you’re in bed upstairs? Or when you’re away at work all day?
But the Nest’s smartphone-based components offer other goodies, like Auto Away. The Nest contains two proximity sensors (near and far), which detect whether anybody is actually in a room. If the sensors decide that nobody’s home, they let the temperature drop or rise to an outer limit you’ve defined — say, 65 in winter, 80 in summer — even if that absence isn’t part of your normal schedule.
This feature is useless, of course, if your thermostat can’t see the room — say, if it’s in a closet or behind an open door. But often I’ll return from a day trip, having forgotten to turn down the heat, and see Auto Away on the screen. Good ol’ Nest!
Nest says that turning down your thermostat by even a single degree can save you 5 percent in energy. To that end, it offers a little motivational logo: a green leaf. It glows brighter as you turn the ring beyond your standard comfort zone. As a positive-reinforcement technique, it’s a lot more effective than an exhortation from Jimmy Carter to put on a sweater.
The wi-fi sounds great, but what I really need is a better way to send heat right where I need it — and without drying out the air to lip-cracking, nose-bleeding extremes.
“intended to discourage people from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees, for example, thinking that the temperature will rise to 70 faster. (It doesn’t.)”
It is amazing how many people think this. The behavior of a simple feedback-control system is apparently pretty unintuitive.
It depends on the kind of heating system you have. We have very nice fully programmable thermostats in the house that came with the replacement heat pumps. The problem with our heat pumps is that if you raise the temperature more than two degrees in the winter, the auxiliary (electric) heat kicks in, making the electric meter spin like crazy.
I actually don’t know if this is a problem of the thermostat or the heat pump, but leaving the heat at the same temperature day and night, all through the week, keeps the electric bill lower.
Two years to wait for this gizmo to pay off? In two years there will be new models, a quarter of the price and better in all respects.
Also, what offered as advantage in Radical Points might be the opposite.
The 1st point – the way it looks. It seems the designers have only one style in mind – the style of IChotchkes. But what works in small appliances like phones (that you put away in pocket or handbag) for a wide variety of people will not work for something a person puts on his wall. In reality people’s tastes differ tremendously when it comes to their personal residence’s interior. What if the homeowner prefers traditional furnishings (of which there is also infinite variety of styles)? That round space saucer will look alien on a wall with damask wallpaper and drapes with tassels – and not everyone appreciate eclectic mixing as I do.
Interior designers for a long time developed strategy of dealing with situation: make a discordant element as inconspicuous as possible. Neutral casing, neutral screen, no orange flashes. Mirror frame that reflects the wall color is actually a good idea, it makes camouflage better – except it makes the object shine, and so – compete for attention.
The Pitch Point #4 mentions that AutoAway (which it sells as a radical advantage) work only on one room and doesn’t work where it can’t sense the presence of people (I assume it has a motion or temperature sensor). So how much it saves the homeowner in a house with 10 rooms? To make an economical sense for this feature there should be 10 Nests in the house!
And another thing…I don’t know how to say that – I will be labeled a pitekantrop…Not all people have Androids or IPhones. There is a big group who are so stubborn they want to use their phones only as phones, for calling and living messages – and not to pay exorbitant sums of money every month for a privilege of playing Angry Birds or checking if there a Starbucks in the vicinity. For these hopeless retrogrades an ability to send a signal to a home thermostat to warm up the house sounds like another headache and a line on a checklist, not as an advantage. Besides, does a human became such a delicate flower that he can’t stand 15 minutes of slightly cooler temp when he waits for a normal thermostat to go up 2 degrees?
Don’t want chapped lips? Use radiators. They’re great if you can afford the initial cost.
It is a little surreal reading about wifi home heating controllers when the house is heated by wood.
I just don’t understand why everyone has a jones to put your thermostats, refrigerator, lights, etc on the ‘Net. Go watch the Sorceror’s Apprentice scene, and then imagine everything in your house under the control of malware.
I guess that if you got something substantial for it, that might be something. But for $10 a month (actually it’s probably less than this due to the time value of money and opportunity cost)?
But hey, it’s pretty and looks like an iPhone!