Nest thermostat released in the UK | Hacker News Reader

Nest thermostat released in the UK

nest.com

30 pointsrobmcm55 comments

Sorry but this product is horse shit. I have nothing but contempt for it.

1. It's expensive at £250. I doubt it makes a saving on that scale over 10 years. In fact I suspect it costs more over time (i.e. when it goes wrong and when it gets your routine wrong).

2. Most houses do have thermostats. In fact most of them have remotely programmable ones with week schedules at least and a precise user interface (mine is down to half a degree). Plus every radiator (apart from one) has a thermostat on it.

3. Is this really a problem or a manufactured one? If I'm hot I turn the thermostat down. If I'm cold, I turn it up. If I go out, I get back to a cold house and make some tea until the heating warms up. I'll set a minimum temperature at most.

4. I'm sure this will quite happily piss away your gas if you decide to go on holiday. I bet it didn't see that coming! Perhaps I've got the flu - does it know that?

5. Based on the fact that it connects to the WiFi, I suggest that it quite happily reports your data away somewhere which is surely useful. And I bet it knows who you are. How long before you start getting junk mail from NPower saying "have you tried our new tariff"?

6. There's even more shit to go wrong now which will require a CORGI engineer to come out and fix at great cost.

Sorry but it's an excessive product for a non-existent problem.

Actually, I do think domestic energy management is a real problem - we spend over £1000 between gas and electricity for the winter quarter and I'd love to have a simple way of getting a decent breakdown of those costs so I can do something about it.

That's because your house is broken or you're on the wrong tariff or you like it like the tropics. My entire year in a 4 bedroom detached house is around the £726 mark for gas and £540 for electricity. That's not bad, especially as there's 5 of us and I work from home. We have proper double-glazing (with decent glass), insulation, floor underlay etc.

Well, calling it "broken" is maybe a bit harsh - but we have a fairly large top floor "double upper" flat in Edinburgh's New Town that has had some 'interesting' modifications in its history.

Between having to get the agreement of neighbours, planning regulations (it's a listed building), conservation area rules etc. changing anything is a nightmare.

[e.g. Deciding what colour to get our external pipework painted took months...]

Ah yes I know the sort of things. I lived in a similar sort of place in Nottingham a few years back. Our front wall had to be replaced with the right kind of stone after a car drove through it. Total pain and very expensive (£19000 for a wall!)

In your case it's the bureaucracy that is broken because "conservation" appears to stump common sense and energy efficiency. I'd argue the latter is so tied to the former that it makes little sense to not modify listed buildings.

I wish you luck in the future with that one - we moved on after much pain to a easy to modify Victorian detached place.

Actually the bureaucracy isn't too bad - by far the worst is simply getting agreement with other owners over what to do!

Buying property in a place like the New Town of Edinburgh is going to come with difficulties and costs - and frankly given the option of staying where we are or moving to a new build I'd take the older buildings every time!

The average UK heating bill is about £650 a year (based on 2012 numbers with a ~10% increase). Assuming you have a reasonably stable routine I can imagine a better thermostat could save 15% on your energy bill - amounting to about £100 a year. It could be worthwhile financially.

Of course though, that would need to be tested. Fortunately there's a big queue of early adopters just waiting to do that for us.

could isn't enough to spend £250 on a 40% return in a year on such a low value.

If you have £250 floating around then £100 difference over a year on your heating bill isn't likely a major issue either.

It doesn't make sense, even as an early adopter.

It makes an interesting purchase for the shiny squad with a disposable income but that's about it.

As an early adopter, I would want it to have some kind of 'geofencing' logic.

Given that I currently use as my main mobile a Windows Phone and the announcements that they are doing something around this area come (should be detailed at Build), I'd like this.

I live alone, I have a gas and electric bill of £800 pa, often I'm not home, I'll work late, end up in another country that night etc. Having something that lets me switch off remotely the heating would be useful to a point. But I only have the heating on for maybe 5 months a year.

What would be useful, is some software that realised I was heading home, automatically turning it on. That realised there is no way I'd be home within 30 min, so delayed heating going on. Without me interacting with it.

As for control of the temp, well, as mentioned thermostatic valves do a great job of that.

I just want remote On / Off timer functionality. £250 is far beyond what I'd consider reasonable for that.

I'd sooner have an array of Zigbee sensors for the temp, a controller for the solenoid and something to bridge it to TCP/IP land.

This strikes me as not only ugly (you wouldn't notice the current thermostat) but pointlessly over engineered in one aspect, whilst ignoring the most important one. If you have to remember to interact with the app, it won't work. I could save the odd £2 or £3 if I remembered to flick a switch before leaving home on a morning.

At least from those I've seen in the US with a great interest in this product, it serves much the same function as a Prius; helping those with disposable income feel better about saving the world without having to really make that much of a sacrifice.

That is a broad generalization, I'm aware. So far it has been true.

It's £179 this week. I bought a new heating programmer and a wireless thermostat last year - together they cost £180. Nest is expensive, but it's not insanely pricey assuming that it leads to a similar energy efficiency as higher end thermostats and heating programmers.

Also: why so much anger about other people and their purchases? You don't have to buy once of these if you don't want to.

Spending £250 now to save £100 a year for a decade (the period you suggested you would want savings for) does make sense if you could save that much.

You also have to consider that as well as the cost savings you're getting a nicer 'thermostat experience' for the time you're living in the home, and potentially increasing the value of it should you move. There's a lot of things in favour of improving the building you live in besides minimising your bills.

It all hinges on the 'if' though. If the Nest doesn't save you anything, or if it costs you more in heating, or if it makes the home uncomfortably hot/cold then it's not worthwhile.

#4 it has an autoaway mode, which will determine a using motion sensor if you are around. And if not it won't heat or cool aside from your scheduled events.

So it knows you're in and tells everyone.

No thanks.

That data is pretty valuable to the wrong sort of people.

There is NOTHING good that can come from this product.

Who does the Nest tell? It doesn't have any sort of social networking bullshit. The only way someone can find out if you are in or not is if someone gains access to your Nest account.

When you are at home is pretty obvious to Google anyway.

"Most UK heating systems don’t even have thermostats"[1]

I died laughing.

[1] Citation Needed.

Oh, but thank goodness this California-based company is here to save us with their £250 thermostat because we just don't have them and we've been dying for some way to control house temperature all this time.

And every house I've ever lived in has had either a central thermostat or per radiator thermostat.

Please, Nest, I'm begging you. Come up with some way to keep the ever present rain from touching our heads. We don't even have umbrellas over here.

During the course of last 7 years I've rented 7 different flats / houses in the UK (all of them in London), 4 of them didn't have a thermostat, 3 had centrally controlled thermostats, only one of them from the 21st century. They were all fairly typical London dwellings. So there you go, anecdotal evidence supported by some data points.

Damn you and your data that doesn't support my outrage :-)

Data suggests that all properties outside London have thermostats, those within the M25 live cold and impoverished lives?

I guess the other question is, how many of the houses and flats with no thermostats had heating systems that were actually compatible with Nest?

There's definitely a lot of variety in the London rental market, which isn't surprising given the size and age. I've had central controls, single thermostats, thermostatic radiator valves and, in one particularly sketchy conversion, radiators that were connected to someone else's heating system.

However, I wouldn't have paid someone to install the Nest thermostat in any of these properties because I didn't own them and I wasn't planning to stay long enough to benefit. I can't imagine that it would have been of any benefit to my landlords to install one either.

I presume that Nest's target market is homeowners, but their statement that there aren't many thermostats certainly appears to be based on anecdotal evidence from the rental market.

I'd love to see these British houses with "No thermostat and you can't control anything".

Every house i've ever lived in has has not just a main thermostat but most have thermostatic vales on the radiators too!

I'm 31 now and have lived in lots of houses both brand new and old victorian. They do realise it's customary to modernise older houses after a while don't they? Maybe not!

Talk about inventing a a problem that no one actually has!!!

I've been renting in London for the last 7 years, and in 7 different flats. Roughly half of those places had thermostats, and they were usually poorly placed. In all but one of the houses, the valves on the radiators had been removed (the handles at least), so it was pretty much impossible to control the temperature room-by-room. Have one flatmate who likes a cold room and another who likes a hot room? Tough luck.

"Most UK heating systems don’t even have thermostats."

Is that true? It's a long time that I've owned a property that didn't have both a central thermostat and per-radiator thermostats.

Not from my experience, you normally have a thermostat, and then a boiler with a timer on it. The boilers often have temperature settings (for the boiler not the house), which allow you to set a seasonal output.

My rented flat has the worst heating system in history (electric cable in the ceiling) but that manages to have a heating thermostat on the wall. Every house I can think of (parents, sisters) has a thermostat for the hot water and central heating.

My heating system's got a proprietary wireless thermostat/control box (I guess what Nest refer to as a "programmer"), but it's a newer combi-boiler, less than 5 years old. The previous heating system had no thermostat, just a timing system. Similarly, my parent's old heating system didn't have a thermostat, and neither did most of the places I rented before buying... so it depends on the age of the system. I could easily believe the "most don't have" claim.

But every radiator I've known to be fitted in the last 20-30 years has had individual valve thermostats.

I think by "programmer" they mean the heating timer that most UK central heating systems have. (Unless they have features they're not advertising, the Nest isn't a full replacement for one - the timers also turn off hot water semi-independently or even totally independently in the case of many newer ones.)

3 of the houses I rented during my time as a student (2006-2010) had no thermostat. They weren't even that bad as houses go, this was in central Guildford and all of them were probably quite valuable but at the same time old. 1 even had a fairly modern combi-boiler but whoever put it in was obviously like "thermostat? who the hell wants one of them"

So you would have to manually regulate the heating - turn it on and the place just gets hotter and hotter and you manually turn it off?

Mind you, if its anything like our flat even if you left the heating on permanently with the thermostat turned full up it wouldn't get that warm. Although the impact on our gas bill would no doubt be spectacular.

Given how expensive rent is in Guildford it made more financial sense just to try keep it from freezing using the weird timer things that came with the boilers and wear lots of clothes. Yeah, they were all old fashioned single paned/sash window/broken-glass-with-holes type places so getting past 15 degrees in winter was impossible.

Not sure why you're down voted. I find this is at least somewhat accurate today in.

That said, never lived in a house in Scotland that didn't have central heating, gas being the fairly obvious choice. I doubt thermostats are uncommon at all.

"never lived in a house in Scotland that didn't have central heating"

My parents house in Moray didn't have central heating - the halls of residence I lived in when I first went to University had central heating and felt tropical to me. No sooner had I got used to that then I went home again for the Xmas break and felt like I'd moved to Siberia...

Sometimes people see the word "Guildford" and swell with rage. Its almost understandable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3_EYVznn1A.

And when you consider the type of owner (Who gives a toss they are only students landlord) are they ever going to upgrade to a normal system let alone nest.

When you think about it this product is so badly thought out on every level!

Personally I've only ever really seen them in commercial buildings and abroad!

In my experience, almost certainly not. I even find it kind of offensive that they would say that.

There is some old and poorly maintained housing stock here, so there are definitely some homes that don't, but I would bet the majority of these are rentals and a lot of them student rentals. My instinct would put the upper bound at 20%.

I can assure them that people in these properties (old, poorly maintained and usually rentals, correlating to low income) are not going to be buying a nest thermostat. I would be amazed if more than 1% of UK nest sales are going to homes without a thermostat.

I live in an area with no gas, so all our heating is electric. We have storage heaters, but Nest wouldn't work with them (there is no temperature setting once it's on).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater

Yeah, I reckon the only houses that wouldn't have one are ones owned by someone who was too cheap to splash out for one of the existing wireless thermostats.

It's hard to even imagine a radiator-based central heating system (whether gas- or home heating oil-fired) that doesn't have one of those cheap little bimetallic-strip thermostats, at least. Now lots of UK homes don't have per-radiator thermostats, or don't have central-heating timers: maybe that's what Nest meant to say.

Ill-informed and condescending. Radiator thermostats are very common (whether they work or not is another matter), boilers also have a maximum temperature setting.

I have lived in a number of complete dumps, and they all had thermostats.

I've have been renting 2 flats (new development) and they have electric radiator with build-in thermostats. Same situation with my friends' places.

I actually would be disappointed to have a central one.

I have been looking for a flat in London recently. A lot of the purpose built set of flats built since the 90's use electric heaters. Even brand new one are still the same ( lot of those are buy-to-let, and if you are going to rent your property, nothing beats electric )

Thermostat are not common with those ( actually I have never seen one ), and would probably be quite tricky with off-peak storage heaters.

I have hard time to belief that this is the majority of houses though.

edit: each individual electric regular heater has a thermostat. Off-peak storage one that are tricky to control because of said storage of heat. So it get controlled by an input and output control.

I saw this and was going to comment, it's outrageous. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a thermostat. I've lived in 5 houses myself and always had a thermostat.

I'd love to see the data on that claim.

It's absolute rubbish. Most heating systems installed in the last 20 years or so have required them due to assorted building/env regs, and they were quite common place before that. Some low quality housing stock with old systems won't have them, but if the owners were to want one they would likely splash out the twenty quid for a standard one, or take advantage of the substantial grants available to those on low incomes for new heating systems.

I really hope for their sake Nest haven't bet the (UK) house on this "fact".

"Available Today", no mention whatsoever of price, or even a place to buy, just a link to find certified professionals to do the install for you.

The lowest installation price I could find was £75, some were £100. Experience tells me that the $250 price in the US means a £250 price, a theory backed up by the conspicuous absence of any pricing. That brings total cost to £325-350, or at current exchanges, $540-580.

I think I'll wait for a cheaper alternative for what, although neat, is essentially little more than a pretty raspberry pi with a small display and temperature sensor. (Also it strikes me that the real savings will be made when this is done on a room-by-room basis rather than whole-home).

It’s a bit hidden, but there is a UK store for Nest:

https://store.nest.com/uk/product/thermostat/

£179 for Nest and (slower) installation if you order this week, £250 after.

I wonder how concerned Nest has been with the retrofit market, compared to the markets for large remodels and new construction. I think they have to service the retrofit market, the question would be how much of their business they think they can build there.

In those situations the big energy saving lever is insulation, but I think for people already spending a bunch of money, the convenience features would be more interesting than the price. And for much new construction, they just have to convince the builder to use Nest, not the buyers.

Well, that's hilarious. Many UK houses to get their hot water from a tank heated by the same boiler as the central heating system, with both turned on and off by a central timer plus individual thermostats. It sounds like the Nest can't handle that, meaning you still need a separate non-Nest timer for the hot water as well with its own user interface.[1]

[1] See the comments on http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nest-thermostat-officiall... - I thought it was odd the Nest PR stuff didn't mention hot water anywhere.

As others are pointing out, Nest don't seem to understand their target market if they think we don't have thermostats and timers already.

We also have other options that are already available. For example: https://www.hivehome.com/ or http://www.tado.com/gb/ or http://www.scottishpower.co.uk/connect/ or https://www.inspirehomeautomation.co.uk/

A solution the world has been waiting for...

I just hope i can pay for it with my Coin card!

Yea and the professional installer you need to call for this thing too.

The design looks so good! I wonder has anybody tested it?

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