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Comment by jotm | Hacker News Reader

I still don't see the point of the Nest thermostat. It takes seconds to adjust mine for the day, or just turn it low in the morning before work and up in the evening. It's such a minor improvement that I can do fine without it.

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Imagine you’re lazy and on the couch and it’s cold and you don’t want to go upstairs to where the thermostat is to turn it up. I can just do it from my phone.

Are you still unable to see the point?

Imagine you live in a big family and people come and go all day long and no one remembers to turn the thermostat down when they’re the last person to leave.

Are you still unable to see the point?

(Sometimes it seems like “I don’t see the point” is code for “I can’t imagine a lifestyle different than my own”)

No.

The rarity of when this would be useful is what gets me. I have a programmable timer on my thermostat that I set to turn on when I expect to be awake and in the house during the week.

If I leave the house for a few hours on the weekend, there isn't a big enough energy savings for turning it off. My range of comfortable temperatures is large enough that feeling cold while sitting on the couch and needing to turn the thermostat up a few degrees higher than normal doesn't sound plausible. Like wearing a wristwatch, this just seems like more trouble than it's worth.

After reading my post, I am surprised you fail to imagine a lifestyle different than your own where, for example, your time at home and away from home is unpredictable, and so a timer would not be helpful, but a geofencing system is.

I can imagine that lifestyle. I'm surprised you fail to understand how rare that lifestyle is. Most people who can afford a fancy thermostat work predictable hours.

Many of my tech industry peers are contractors with multiple in-person clients in different parts of the city. This often means they never know exactly what their schedule for the following day will look like. Some others travel 3-5 days per week, and the days they do it on vary too.

It is not uncommon.

You might not be the target market. The value proposition was largely the attractive design, which is still significantly better than most thermostats. And in addition the UX is nicer, and the app is convenient every once a while (coming home from a long trip), but I think those may be secondary.

Definitely am not, I guess. UI? It's a thermostat, it needs to just be able to turn the boiler on and off when temperatures hit the mark. Long trip? My house heats up in less than 15 minutes. App? I'd rather not bother.

Things it gives me:

- Turn it off from bed when I forget to do it before going to sleep. My system is too loud for us to have it one while we sleep.

- Peace of mind that I didn't leave it on while outside the house. It just detects when our phones have left. Whatever savings that makes, too.

- Similarly, it starts when it detects our phones are about to enter the house, so when we get in the heater is already on to welcome us.

- No need to walk all the way to it, all freezing, first thing in the morning. If I need to wake up before it turns on automatically, I just tell it to turn on from bed.

I somewhat agree; I'm too much of a control freak to rely on "auto away" (if I leave the house, i just turn the damn thing down!), though i will say having it NOT turn the heat on at 5pm when we're getting home late for the day is nice.

I think many of the cost savings from auto-away would only be realized for the lazy/inattentive and particularly for those with air conditioning, which is far more expensive to run than heat.

Also, it's really nice to turn on the heat before arriving home when it's been off all weekend, or at the cabin for a weekend skiing. The difference between walking into a 38 degree house and a 50 degree house is pretty large.

You have to be physically present to do so. The Nest can be set over the Internet using a mobile app. That's a categorical difference. That's not worth hundreds of dollars to me, but it's a feature some people care about.

I know a lot of people like it. It does sound nice, but in reality, it's meh. Enter/exit house, take half a minute to adjust your thermostat.

Not like default thermostats are free either, and a lot of them have mind-blowingly bad UX. "Just hold down these 4 buttons at once while hitting these two up arrows to adjust the time!"

There's also the option to tie your heating system into your local utility provider's network. My utility pays $25/yr to let them turn down your heat a few times a month, when load is high. Combine that with a $100 rebate on the Nest, and actual cost to me can be recouped in a few years.

The Thermostat is two things artfully combined:

1) "It pays for itself"

2) It looks fancy and expensive

Offer people a fancy expensive-looking thing for "free", and they'll take it. It's marketing genius, really.

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