![\"Nest](\"\/images\/news\/nest_temp_set.jpg\" "\\"Nest")
<\/p>\nAutomated Home reader Peter White reviews the new Nest thermostat that’s got everyone drooling.\u00a0 So how does this Learning marvel compare to a ‘real’ home automation setup.\u00a0 His conclusion may suprise you…<\/p>\n
“A short background; I was controlling my heat & A\/C (I\u2019m in Texas) via Homeseer, and some Z-Wave (Wayne Dalton) thermostats. Many hours were spent setting up all sorts of conditional events in Homeseer, based on the time of day, the outside temperature and occupancy of the house.<\/p>\n
This normally worked fairly well, generally ensuring that I wasn\u2019t burning too much energy cooling or heating the house when it was empty, or full of sleeping people that would never know the difference ;-).\u00a0\u00a0 The problem, for me at least, was that Z-Wave has never been a perfect technology, and nor is Windows XP, the O\/S that my aging Homeseer server happens to run.\u00a0 On top of that, HS has recently started to crash, perhaps once a week, which not only means the house is a bit dark when people get home, but it means it\u2019s cold, which is beyond SWMBO tolerance, who then makes me pay for it by turning everything up to the max.<\/p>\n
So, enter Nest, which I noticed a few months ago, and registered for a couple of just before Christmas. They install very easily, the only issue being that my original stats were in a very low traffic area, so I repositioned them to somewhere more relevant, as they need to \u2018see\u2019 people every now and then to determine whether anyone\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
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They’re handsome devices; you\u2019ll read everywhere that the two guys that head up Nest are ex-Apple, from the iPod design team, and that\u2019s easy to tell.\u00a0 Using the stat is simple and intuitive. Compared to all my other fairly typical Texan-style ‘wall furniture’ they stick out a bit, both literally, and figuratively, as they’re obviously fairly modern.\u00a0 Any of the family can get to them from a PC, tablet or phone, and it seems to have learned our schedules fairly well. Checking now on my iPhone, both floors are set to auto-away, which means I’m not heating an empty house (it’s forced-air heating, so not terribly efficient, but it is very quick when compared to radiators or UFH, so in my case it is not more efficient to maintain a constant temp).<\/p>\n
Overall, I’m a fan. I\u2019d love for them to bring out a house alarm, as programming that required a brain the size of a melon, and ideally one that\u2019s stuck in the 70\u2019s, since the interface is so clunky.\u00a0 I’m all but done with Z-Wave, it needs almost as much TLC as X-10, and that was never meant to be the case.\u00a0 I’m not particularly an Apple fan, but, I am a fan of stuff that ‘just works’. In that category I include iPods\/iPads\/phones, Sonos and now Nest.\u00a0 I have plenty of other technology at home and work that occupies my time, so I\u2019m all for a few gadgets that require no maintenance.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not perfect though.\u00a0 A couple of weeks ago, Nest pushed out an update that mysteriously caused the stat’s to try to connect to a server that was unreachable, eventually draining the battery (even though it receives 24v power from the HVAC). You can read all about it on their Facebook page, depending on your point of view this is either scary and Big-Brotherish (not my pov), or a daft mistake made by a young but rapidly growing company (my pov). Either way, they fessed up eventually.\u00a0 There are occasional connectivity issues as well, as can be seen from one of the screenshot below.<\/p>\n
![\"Nest](\"\/images\/news\/nest_failed.jpg\" "\\"Nest")
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There\u2019s also a lot more intelligence they could build into the algorithms, which I assume will feature in a future update.\u00a0 An obvious one, considering that the stat knows both the outside temperature, and how long it takes to reach a specific temperature, would be to define the temperature you want at a certain time, i.e. at 7pm, the temperature should be at 72f, as opposed to how it currently works, where it starts trying to get to 72f at 7pm.<\/p>\n
![\"Nest](\"\/images\/news\/nest_schedule.jpg\" "\\"Nest")
For many American houses, Nest will save a fortune.\u00a0 Most of them either have a stat where you can set one temperature, or, perhaps a 5 or 7 day programmable, but the odds of anyone actually having set it correctly are low.\u00a0 My average electricity bill (pre-Nest) in the summer tops $500 per month (based on around $0.08 per Kw\/h), and that\u2019s close to half of many of the people I work with.\u00a0\u00a0 For me, it’s now doing almost exactly what my Homeseer \/ Z-Wave stats were doing, except it took about 10 mins to set up (rather than 10 hours), it looks cool, anyone can use it, and it\u2019s reliable.<\/p>\n
Available from Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n No products found.<\/p><\/p>\n www.nest.com<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 :\u00a0\u00a0 More HVAC Articles<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Automated Home reader Peter White reviews the new Nest thermostat that’s got everyone drooling.\u00a0 So how does this Learning marvel compare to a ‘real’ home…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-04-15T20:33:41Z","apple_news_api_id":"9acd2844-3afc-4cb9-8f75-c8005f5db559","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-04-15T20:33:42Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/Ams0oRDr8TLmPdcgAX121WQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,42,24,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hardware","category-hvac","category-new-products","category-reviews"],"apple_news_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/automatedhome.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/nest_connected.jpg?fit=504%2C515&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2972"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50393,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972\/revisions\/50393"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}