Nest learning thermostat gets refreshed with a slimmer design | Hacker News Reader

Nest learning thermostat gets refreshed with a slimmer design

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42 pointsiqster42 comments

Matt, the founder of Nest, is doing an AMA right now: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/10tpxx/i_am_matt_roger...

Any updates to the software? I'd really like to see some kind of API available over the network.

Radio Thermostat (http://www.radiothermostat.com/) makes a line that's not as pretty, but they provide a web/JSON interface that looks pretty interesting.

API doc: http://www.radiothermostat.com/documents/RTCOA%20WiFI%20API%...

although not necessarily a public api, you can control the nest via rest.

here is a reference implementation https://gist.github.com/3808559

Will Nest work with a dual zone system? (Also does anyone have one of these? I have questions)

I have it in 8 zones. They cooperate well.

Are you saying you have 8 zones, or 8 zones and a nest for each one??

A Nest for each zone.

You need a nest for each zone.

I have two air conditioners in my house, and I put a Nest on each one. The Nests appear to cooperate together just fine.

Hmm, I only have 1 AC but it has two thermostats and something mechanical to control which floor gets the cooling. I wonder if nest could handle that?

Your current thermostats probably talk to the AC controller, which then controls the ducts. So a nest thermostat shouldn't need to make any accommodations for the duct stuff.

Nice, but I'm not spending $250 on a thermostat; I have 10 thermostats in my house.

So... you're wealthy enough to own a house that requires 10 thermostats, but don't want a premium system to control it? :-)

A 4 bedroom 2-story house with radiators in each room. I'm not poor, but we're not talking top 1% here.

I'm not a homeowner - is it normal to have this many radiators in a house this size? My 2BR apartment has one thermostat and my parent's 4BR house has one as well.

IIRC, if you do not have central heat, then you have a radiator in every room you want heated. Each radiator is then going to have its own thermostat to control its heat level for that room.

Some houses have central heating where one thermostat controls the entire house. My rental which was built 3 years ago has that. That is a case where I think something like nest is affordable and useful.

I'm hoping the Zigbee radio they quietly built in will be used for remote sensors. $2500 is unrealistic, but if they offered a $49 remote sensor it would only be $700 in your (highly unusual) case.

My home has separate heating and cooling systems. (The heating is done with radiators and the cooling is a conventional AC.) Does anybody happen to know if Nest works in this type of system?

I believe it should. If the systems have separate thermostats you'll need two nests though I think (they apparently can communicate with one another).

>If the systems have separate thermostats you'll need two nests though I think

You shouldn't, unless you can't run the wires to the same location for some reason.

It's a >70 year old house, so it's a miracle when I can get wires anywhere.

What we have in our favor, though, is that the boiler is in the unfinished basement, the air handler is in the unfinished attic, and our electrician ran some pull string through a chaseway that connects the two. It may actually be possible to get both sets of wires to the same spot.

I looked at the wiring for the previous generation and at the very least it wired up to such systems. I'm fairly sure it works with them - and, in spite of all the pretty pictures, the site ( http://www.nest.com/ ) is quite informative.

Can anyone comment on whether buying one of these is worth it and if they've seen any savings?

I bought one of these at the beginning of the summer and I definitely noticed a fairly significant savings. In my case I updated from a really old, couldn't-be-programmed, thermostat right to one of these which almost certainly skews the results since any kind of programmable thermostat would have shown a savings.

I live in NJ and work in NYC so during the week I'm only home for a few hours, besides sleeping, and it learned my schedule on its own. When I get home it's just kicked in and started bringing the temperature down and it goes off shortly after I leave.

The only issue I had was during the first setup it mixed up the heater and air conditioning because of my settings. But I just restored and went back through and changed what I selected and all was well.

I haven't directly noticed any savings (although I haven't payed much attention,) but the design, remote access, and general pleasantness of it are well worth it.

They have clearly paid a lot of attention to even the smallest details and if you like that kind of thing, a Nest Thermostat will make you very, very happy.

I like the monthly report too. Being able to adjust both the Nests from the comfort of my couch via the phone app is also a nice feature.

I bought one 3 months ago (damn!) and am very happy with it. I can't say for sure I saved X dollars but between airwave, auto-away and it's easy scheduling (compared to my old, confusing, impossible to understand thermostat) I can't imagine it hasn't saved me at least some money.

But on top of that it looks good in my high traffic hallway. Being in the hallway to my bathroom it acts as a nice night-light (it turns on when I step out of my bedroom to goto the bathroom and visa-versa) and overall has been a joy to work with.

I bought two of these, and a guy I work with bought one. My co-worker has measured pretty significant savings in his electric bill. I have not, but it's because I just bought this house and installed the Nests pretty soon afterward so I have nothing to compare.

I got one and my bill went down by about a third. Paid for itself in four months.

I even got a negative bill as my first month was billed on estimated usage. :-)

I'm wondering if they provide any meaningful savings vs a cheap programmable thermostat. Putting your HVAC on timers so it runs less will obviously save energy, but can Nest actually do much better than a unit from Home Depot?

Well... the really cheap ones are just timers/thermometers. The amount of control you have over it is related to how much you can program it. I used to have one that was very simple: I could set 2 times/temps for the week and 2 for the weekend. It was easy to program but didn't have much smarts. SO on days that I worked form home, it still let it get hotter/colder for my pre-programmed "away" time frame. So I was constantly tweaking it when I was not really away. My new house had some fancier ones that gave me more times/temps to program and I think I could adjust them per day (not just "week" and "weekend") but it was actually overly complicated to program. And some of the fancier ones still cost $150-175 at HD. So at $250, the Nest is not that much more expensive than some of the fancier ones at HD. But you get some much more "smarts" with it. And you get all the cool extra stuff like remote access, monthly usage reports, habit learning, etc.

Nest has an awesome feature called AirWave.

When you're running the AC, it actually learns how long it can continue to cool by just running the fan due the the lingering coolness of the coils after the compressor has been running. This causes the AC compressor to run less while you're still able to be kept cool, at significant cost savings.

Your standard thermostats currently don't do this.

> I'm wondering if they provide any meaningful savings vs a cheap programmable thermostat.

In my experience, yes. I left town for two weeks and forgot to turn on away mode. If I'd had a cheap one, I'd have paid for two weeks of A/C keeping my house at 72. Instead, I was able to remotely tell it to let the house get up to 85 before kicking in.

Auto-away does the same thing on a smaller scale on a near-daily basis for me, as well. We've got a pretty unsettled schedule, so it's a wonderful feature.

What happened with the patent issues we heard about a few months ago?

Nest went after the patents http://allthingsd.com/20120926/nest-takes-honeywell-patents-...

I'm curious to know if some of the software features of the new Nest will make it into an update for owners of the first-generation Nest.

Yes, 1st gen are getting the upgrade as well.

From: http://www.nest.com/blog/2012/10/02/the-next-generation-nest...

I just got an email from Nest. Subject? Oh, just "Experience 3.0 Software and a whole new Nest".

I am pleased.

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