Nest thermostat

[ColaCock]

I'm sure you've all seen these in Home Depot. Does anyone here own one?

I didn't realize they were so simple to install and relatively affordable ($250 or less).

I was chatting with a coworker today who uses one and he had all kind of great things to say about it. Told me it has saved him around $500 since he got one last August in power bills...more than paid for itself.

He explained how it "learns" when you are home, when you aren't, when many people are there, etc to adjust the temperature itself. Without monitors around the house, I don't see how that could be very accurate from a single thermostat point. We have a very long home and about 2800 sq ft of space that our A/C unit covers; we spend most of our time in the areas (kitchen/living room) away from the thermostat.

Does anyone have one that would like to share their experience? I'm on the fence.

[cocky0]

Well the machine itself doesn't "know" when you are home. It's the fellow at the NSA who's doing the monitoring that knows when you're home.

[acejrock]

Yeah you are essentially paying for the drone honing device not a thermostat.

[ColaCock]

Originally Posted by cocky0

Well the machine itself doesn't "know" when you are home. It's the fellow at the NSA who's doing the monitoring that knows when you're home.

Well he better prepare for quite a show!

[johnnyb]

Originally Posted by ColaCock

He explained how it "learns" when you are home, when you aren't, when many people are there, etc to adjust the temperature itself. Without monitors around the house, I don't see how that could be very accurate from a single thermostat point. We have a very long home and about 2800 sq ft of space that our A/C unit covers; we spend most of our time in the areas (kitchen/living room) away from the thermostat.

I dont get this for our region, its so hot (and humid) for 6 months out of the year even a well insulated home will take a long time to get tempatures back down into comfortable range if the HVAC is off for any sig amount of time. I could see it working if you had a seperate whole home humidifier/dehumidifier that wasnt controlled by the nest, because thats a big part of the load on a central HVAC unit.

Most HVAC experts will tell you it is much more energy efficent to pick a tempature and leave it alone than it is to turn it up/off when you leave and back down/off when you come home.

[Spur's Addiction]

I have been hearing a good bit about them. I think it's a very good concept. For $100 I would probably get one. But $250? I'll adjust my old one myself.

[Acockolypse Now]

I'd encourage you to read this before spending the money: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/emotional-design-fail/

My favorite quote:

Try as I might, it won’t listen. So I pull on another sweater (a la Jimmy Carter) and mittens and a hat. Indoors. In my home. I am serious. And I wait until my thermostat decides that I am worthy of radiant warmth.

[TKE226]

I have a programmable thermostat that took some getting used to, but it does fine. If I need to adjust it from the settings I have I can just put the program on hold and set to a desired temp.

To me the nest is a novelty item. I am sure it works but I don't have anything invested in thermostats for me to care about paying and changing to the Nest.

[GamecockInHell]

I did refrigeration work for several years, and just give the old slide mercury thermostat anytime.

[uscfan1]

Controlling the thermostat from your phone with att digital life or ADT pulse is pretty convenient.

[uscfan1]

Originally Posted by GamecockInHell

I did refrigeration work for several years, and just give the old slide mercury thermostat anytime.

There is actually good money in home appliance maintenance

[gamecock88]

Nest and Dropcam are both owned by Google if I remember correctly.

[PCaughman]

I own one for 5 years now. I have not had any problem with it. I live in a old house in Columbia. It reduce my electric bill by 20%. The joke about my house if the heat not on it is cold and if the A/C not on it hot. It very easy to setup and simple to operate.

[IMACOCK]

I have one and love it. It sets itself to Auto-away when we all leave in the mornings. I have noticed that my bill has dropped every month since it's been installed. I have had times that I have forgotten to lower/raise the temp before bed and I just have to grab my phone/ipad from the nightstand and adjust it. You can also manually schedule it to start warming/cooling before you get home. I actually have two systems in my house but only one Nest. We like it so much that we will probably be buying a second one soon.

Also, I have a co-worker that had two systems but only had one Nest. He liked it so much he bought a second one.

[rjmims6017]

I highly recommend the Ecobee3 over the nest. It comes with remote sensors that you can place in any room making it a lot more accurate than the nest. And in my opinion it looks better too.
http://www.cnet.com/products/ecobee3...rt-thermostat/

[MisterClowney]

Originally Posted by gamecock88

Nest and Dropcam are both owned by Google if I remember correctly.

Dropcams a pretty flipping sweet.

[kingofnerf]

Originally Posted by johnnyb

I dont get this for our region, its so hot (and humid) for 6 months out of the year even a well insulated home will take a long time to get tempatures back down into comfortable range if the HVAC is off for any sig amount of time.

Most HVAC experts will tell you it is much more energy efficent to pick a tempature and leave it alone than it is to turn it up/off when you leave and back down/off when you come home.

^^THIS. My house has a programmable t-stat since I have lived in it, but I have found that in extreme temps it's best to just leave it at a steady baseline temp. Sixty-eight degrees works best in the fall/winter months.

My furnace was out of commission for a few months and my mom loaned me a nice Lasco space heater with a thermostat on it.

I determined that the problem was a faulty door switch on the furnace, so I decided to run the space heater and see what the impact on my utility bill was.

I only use two or three rooms in the house anyway and I found that the space heater (closing the doors in the rooms I used) saved me @$100/month except for those periods when the daily highs were in the mid-40s and below. Then it would constantly run and only save me about $30/month.

I believe most furnaces have thermal safety shutoff devices that will kick in if the furnace runs too long and gets too hot. So the fan runs, but blows cool air. Ordinarily my house will warm up 1 degree/hour if the heat hasn't been turned on over the weekend. I fixed the furnace and found that house warmed up much faster if the t-stat temp was manually increased in 2-degree increments. This seemed let the furnace cool down instead of running until the shutoff kicked in.

So the two-degree increments allowed the furnace to shutdown normally and cool off using the thermal shutoff that forces the blower to cool the unit off for 90 seconds before also shutting off.

Once it hit 62* I just set the t-stat to 68 and let it run the rest of the way.