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Comment by lordbusiness | Hacker News Reader

My nest paid for itself in the first 8 months of use. The difference in my utilities was that dramatic. And I was a person who had actually bothered to set his thermostat and thought I had a decent setup going.

I'm not so interested in the Protect product. I just need a smoke alarm to wake me up. The rest is just bloat to me. :-)

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I have a very efficient setup that's also very new construction. Steel framed, mostly polished concrete floors, lots of large windows and thermal heat pumps. Plus the thermostat I originally had I felt I had set conservatively.

Bought a Nest, and it still managed to save enough to pay for itself in about 15 months. Staggering to have an electric bill in the $40-50/mo range.

We had a thermostat that was just plain confusing to program, plus it was damned ugly.

I am not sure if the Nest has saved me any money but it looks a lot nicer on the wall than our old thermostat, and really is nice and easy to use!

I still find myself showing it off when friends come to visit...need to stop doing that probably. :-)

That (looks nice and fun) is the only reason I kick around the idea of getting a Nest. Living in San Diego, there's not much reason for a thermostat. It does get chilly in the winter, but we use firewood to heat the house. We use the A/C maybe two weeks a year. But that UI sure looks nice.

Would you mind explaining where your savings came from?

(to be clear: I'm curious, but I don't mean to pry and understand you may simply not want to)

Not at all; the biggest difference was electric for cooling, though there were savings in natural gas heating too.

I believe the biggest nest concepts to help were the clever fan operation (allowing cool air from the basement to circulate after the AC unit itself had shut off), and auto-away.

Apologies if I sound like a shill; I really am just a very satisfied customer.

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