Comment by bananas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bananas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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!

#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.

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