A thermostat that learns? Three months with the Nest

It has been close to a year since the Nest “learning” thermostat was introduced to the public, bringing us one step closer to that elusive home of the future. Founded by the former senior VP of Apple’s iPod division, Tony Fadell, along with his partner Matt Rogers, Nest Labs set out to create what is essentially the iPod of the thermostat world. The round, user-friendly device was initially met with excellent reviews, but were these based in reality or were they the result of some Apple-like hype?

I like to think of myself as somewhat of a thermostat nerd. (Listen, it doesn’t sound very exciting because it’s not, but I like them). I am fascinated by thermostats and their usability, but I also don’t like to spend too much money on them—unless the extra cost is worth it. Friends and Twitter followers have long asked me to evaluate higher-end thermostats, and I’m always examining the thermostats at other people’s houses. So when I finally had the opportunity to install a Nest, I jumped at it.

Now that I’ve been using the Nest for several months, I have a pretty good feel for its strengths and weaknesses—at least compared to what is typically available on the market. Is the Nest really worth the $250 it costs to obtain one, just so you can have a fancier way of turning the temperature up and down? I think so—especially if you’re the “convenience oriented” type (that’s PC for “lazy”).

What’s so great about the Nest anyway?

General usability

The usability of the device as “just” a thermostat is extremely straightforward, and it’s the first thing you deal with after installation. Overall, it’s pretty good—as you’ve likely already seen, the thermostat itself is a round wheel, similar to the original iPod’s moving click wheel, but in thermostat form. The device has a backlit screen that comes on when you mess with it, or whenever you pass by it (if you have that setting turned on). I like to have it light up when I walk by, because it allows me to see the current setting at an easy glance as I’m on my way to the fridge or the living room.

The background color of the Nest turns blue when the air conditioning is running, and an orangey reddish color when the heat is running. When nothing is running at all, the background is black and the text is white. Just walking up to it and turning the dial will wake it up and allow you to turn the temperature up or down. If that’s all you ever wanted to do with your thermostat, then that’s really all you need to know.

More importantly, the device can connect to your WiFi network, which lets it perform a number of valuable functions. For one, it can update its own software over WiFi, allowing the company to issue bug fixes and even add features (if they should feel so inclined). Since the Nest’s original release in October of 2011, there have been 10 software updates seeded wirelessly to users’ Nests, most of which were released in May of 2012.

That in itself is a handy feature, but the WiFi functionality serves another purposes to us lazy geeks: the ability to see stats and make changes to our settings remotely. Nest comes with a Web app, as well as an app for iPhone, iPad, and Android—the functionality of which I’ll get to in another section of this review.

But the Nest’s interface can do a lot more. In addition to turning the thermostat, you can also “click” it by pressing down on it; this brings up a plethora of other features that you can scroll and click through. If you want to set yourself to “away” (more detail on this later), you can do so by clicking once and turning to the away setting. You can also enter your address when you first set up the device so it can bring in the local weather. This is useful for its energy statistics, because it can tell you whether the day’s weather affected your thermostat use. You can also set up your account there and view/change the Nest’s learned schedule.

Learning features

In fact, the Nest’s headline feature is its capability to learn. The device learns what you like, when you like it—there is no schedule to program, only a schedule to live. If you want the thermostat set to a certain temperature when you get home from work, set it that way for several days and the Nest will eventually figure it out. Do you like the temperature to be at 75°F at 6pm on Monday through Thursday, but 73°F at 3pm on Fridays and 80°F at 4pm on Saturdays? The Nest will figure that out too, as long as you give it a few data points to work from.

I found that it generally takes about a week or so to train a Nest to conform to your schedule. That’s not too bad, especially if you consider the trade-off in the time it typically takes you to figure out how to program—and reprogram, in the case of a schedule change—your older thermostat. There is no reprogramming involved with the Nest. If your schedule or preferences change, you can just start training it to your new schedule and it’ll be there in a few days. But if you need a one-off temperature change—say you’re home “sick” for the day but you’re really playing the new Call of Duty—it won’t throw off your schedule. Individual temperature changes won’t force the whole schedule to change unless you make that change consistently for several days in some kind of pattern. And even then, it will eventually switch back if you somehow end up switching back to your old schedule.

Other cool features

The Nest learns things besides your schedule, too. One of my favorite features is its time estimates for when it will reach the temperature that you’ve requested. Nest’s materials state over and over that you can’t get to a cooler (or warmer, depending on the season) temperature by setting it to extremes, so don’t do it—instead, it tries to tell you that it will reach 73°F in, say, 25 minutes. It takes several weeks for the Nest to learn how fast it takes to heat or cool your place to the desired temperature, but I have found that after a few weeks, the time estimates are extremely accurate. I have set the temperature and taken note of the time estimate many times over the past several months, while also setting a timer on my phone, and found the times to be almost exactly on point, adding a certain comforting layer of information to your temperature choices. (Just don’t try to explain that to the people you live with, who may think that setting the thermostat to 55°F will result in a cooler home faster. They just don’t listen.)

In fact, setting your Nest to extreme temperatures isn’t just useless—it’s actually a bad idea. Since the Nest learns from the temperatures that you set, it could learn that you actually want it to be 55°F all the time (when you actually want it to be 70°). Luckily, the Nest seems to discourage this behavior—perhaps even indirectly—because of the time estimates; when someone sets the temperature to significantly lower than it is currently, they may not feel very satisfied once the Nest tells them it’ll take 5+ hours to get there, forcing them to reconsider their temperature choices.

There’s also the away and auto-away modes. While the Nest allows you the ability to manually set yourself to away—say if you’re going on vacation or even just going away for the weekend—it can also detect when there hasn’t been any activity nearby and will automatically determine that you’re not home. The Nest has a motion detector that allows it to do this, and you can set the maximum and minimum temperatures you’d like to maintain through either the Nest’s website or on the Nest itself.

For example, I have my maximum temperature set to 80°F (I have cats, so I don’t want them to boil to death) and the minimum set to 60°F; this temperature range applies to both regular “away” mode and auto-away. If the Nest hasn’t seen me in a few hours, it will just set itself to auto-away and won’t turn on again until 1) it sees me again, 2) it hits one of my preset thresholds, or 3) I manually change it remotely. Upon viewing your energy history (again, more on this later), you can definitely see where the benefits of auto-away kick in. The Nest tells you which days were affected by which factors, and being set to auto-away (so the thermostat saves its energy) appears often in my timeline.

My only beef with auto-away mode is when you are home, but you just don’t pass by the Nest very often in the course of navigating your place. I’m often not on the same floor as my one and only thermostat, so it sets me to auto-away more often than actually needed. This can be solved by adding another Nest (as they can talk to one another and adjust themselves accordingly), but naturally, that costs another $250.

And if you live in a home with people you don’t trust—kids, or your shady brother-in-law—you can lock the Nest with a PIN as well so that no one can change the temperature. You can only set the PIN on your physical device (not the website), and if you’re the owner of the Nest, you don’t have to worry much about losing the PIN either, as long as the account is associated with your e-mail address. You can reset it if necessary, and the process isn’t any more painful than resetting your password on a website.

Finally, the Nest learns any and all adjustments you make. Whether you’re making adjustments from the website a thousand miles away, from your iPhone in bed, or while standing right in front of it, you can train it to whatever patterns you have in your normal life.

iPhone app

Like several other “modern” thermostats on the market today, the Nest has corresponding Web, iOS, and Android apps that allow you to make temperature adjustments, see your stats, and more. The online features aren’t the main reason you would want to buy a Nest, but they’re certainly some of the most useful perks to having it.

Nest makes an effort to make its Web app, iPhone app, and iPad app functionally (and visually) similar. To that end, the main interface is visually pleasing and very simple. The thermostat is displayed next to an icon of a house, and the ambiance of the imagery changes depending on whether it’s daytime or nighttime. Clicking the thermostat allows you to turn it up or down, and all of the corresponding apps allow you manually set your Nest to away. (I actually use this a lot after I’ve already left the house, because I don’t like to wait until auto-away kicks in. That’s just my preference, but it’s not necessary.)

The basic functionality works well enough, but for as “beautifully” simple as it is, I do think the iPhone app interface could use a little work. For example, while viewing the app in portrait mode, you can only change the temperature—the ability to set yourself to away only appears if you use it in landscape mode. (Edit: Changed the wording of the previous sentence to be clearer.) This is an inconvenience for someone like me who only uses her iPhone in portrait mode and never in landscape mode. The complaint isn’t so much about landscape mode—good for you if that’s your thing—but it would cost extremely minimal screen space to add the away switch to the UI in portrait mode. It’s perplexing why the Nest team forces users to jump through unnecessary hoops for this feature.

Also accessible through landscape mode are some basic settings for your Nest, such as its name (which you can change via the app), the zip code where the Nest lives, and the ability to add a new thermostat. To be honest, I don’t find myself ever wanting to access these features from my iPhone, but I do sometimes try to access them from my iPad or the Web. You can also manage your account, change your e-mail address, or change your password through the app(s) in either landscape or portrait mode.

Web and iPad apps

Nest’s iPad app is almost a mirror image of the Web app in both looks and functionality.

Nest’s offerings on the Web and iPad are the most complete, however—in fact, the iPad app is basically a mirror version of what’s available on the Web. Here is where you can access information like the Nest’s learned schedule, a plethora of information that is otherwise only available via the Nest itself (current humidity levels, which features you currently have on/off, your away temperature thresholds), and most interestingly, your energy history.

First, a brief walkthrough of the schedule feature. Remember how I told you the Nest doesn’t really let you set a schedule because it just tries to learn what you usually like? That is true, but you can still tweak what the Nest has learned if you really decide that you know better.

What the schedule adjustment UI looks like on the Web.

Here, you can see your general patterns that the Nest has learned for you, and when you click on each number, the site will tell you at the bottom whether it was learned or whether you set it yourself via the Web app. You can change the scheduled temperature from here using the arrows, as well as the time it kicks in by dragging the number left or right. This is pretty useful, though I can’t help but feel like the Web app doesn’t fully display every setting it has learned from me.

For example, I know that it always sets itself to 75°F at night for most days of the week, but this only seems to be reflected on the Web app for Saturdays and Sundays. Perhaps the Nest hasn’t actually decided that it has learned that habit from me yet, but I feel that it could offer me more data points than it already does—especially considering that I’ve been using it for several months now. On the upside, you can manually add new data points to your Nest’s schedule through the website (the option is located at the bottom right). But a large part of the appeal of the Nest is its learning capabilities exist so you don’t have to manually set a schedule.

Your energy history, however, is by far the most interesting part of the Nest website. The site is capable of showing you the last 10 days of history (unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to obtain a file of longer-term historical data) along with details about why your usage was higher/lower than usual on any given day.

A closeup of the energy history viewer.

The cloud icons on the right indicate that the outside weather affected your energy usage, while the house icon indicates that your usage was affected by the away mode kicking in—whether automatically or manually. Clicking on the icon will show you exactly when your air conditioner (or heat) was running, and hovering over the cloud icon will tell you more: “This day’s weather caused energy usage above the weekly average,” for example.

For anyone who likes to see their real-world usage data, this feature is a blessing. And on days when the thermostat was affected by your away status, it will show you in the timeline:

Want to know exactly when your heat/air conditioner was running? Now you can.

This is by far one of my favorite parts of having a Nest, and I wish this information was more easily accessible via the iPhone app in particular. The iPad app is much more complete—undoubtedly thanks to the much larger screen compared to the iPhone—and this is much appreciated, but I don’t always have my iPad on me when I want to make changes. I hope the Nest team decides to add a few more features to the iPhone version.

Update: The Nest team has clarified to me that you can, in fact, access your energy history through the iPhone version of the app. You must first turn to landscape mode and then tap on the temperature circle, which will bring up the energy options. I’ve verified that this is indeed the case, which is great! But again, this is why usability is so important, because the discoverability of some of these features leaves a bit to be desired.

Nest competitors

As much as I (and others) like the Nest, it’s certainly worth noting that there are competitors when it comes to high-end, high-tech thermostats. The most prominent of these is the ecobee, which largely enjoyed the position of being the most popular techie thermostat until the Nest came along.

Full disclosure: I have not used the ecobee in my daily life. Any comparisons I’m about to make are purely based on my research and talking with people who do own it. That said, I had my eye on an ecobee for years before the Nest came out, so I feel familiar enough with the features to at least know the basics of where the ecobee and the Nest diverge.

First up is price. While the Nest sits pretty solidly at $250, the ecobee can be found online for about $280 to $310 (add a bit to both prices if you’re not going to install them yourself). The difference in price isn’t huge, but it’s big enough to make you consider which features are more important to you if you’re going to be spending that much money.

The best comparison I can make is this: a Nest is to an iPod like the ecobee is to an Android device. (Yes, I realize an iPod is a music player and an Android device is most likely a smartphone, but hang with me). The ecobee prides itself in being very feature-rich with many options available to you in as many places as possible—including on the thermostat itself. It has a color touchscreen (with additional hardware buttons to the right) and even has an on-screen keyboard for typing… things. You can set explicit schedules on the ecobee itself and via its website. There’s just a lot more information displayed at any given time. For some, it’s not quite as “brain-dead” simple as the Nest, but then again, I would argue that many regular thermostats that are quite successful on the market aren’t either.

By comparison, the Nest really is like an iPod, and not just because of its round click wheel. Children, the elderly, and sheltered people are perfectly capable of walking up to it and turning a knob to get to the right temperature. There is no temperature programming involved, and it can detect when you’re home or not automatically—you only have to manually set yourself to “away” if you feel like it. And why would anyone need an on-screen keyboard for a thermostat? (The Nest does let you enter text when you’re doing things like giving it a name, but you have to do it in a very Apple-y way—by using the click wheel to scroll through letters. Yes, this is a slight pain, but then again, I haven’t had to enter text on my Nest in months. It’s not really something you run into often.)

Like the Nest, the ecobee also offers an iOS and Android app so you can control your thermostat remotely. The features are very similar to what you get with the Nest: you can see your schedule and adjust it accordingly, and there’s a vacation mode (similar to the Nest’s “away” mode). The ecobee won’t learn from your habits, but some people don’t care about that. You can still see your energy usage as a detailed graph—more detailed than what the Nest gives you—and you can change your account preferences remotely. In this sense, the two devices are pretty similar.

There are a few other high-tech thermostats that are generally similar to the Nest and ecobee, but I’m less familiar with them and I don’t feel that they’re directly comparable. For example, home security company Vivint sells a thermostat that talks to its security systems, all of which you can control remotely via an iOS app. I know one person who uses this system in his home as well as his office, and he loves the ability to see which doors have been opened or closed while he’s away, in addition to the temperature settings. But the thermostat itself isn’t particularly advanced, and there are certainly no learning features. Many of the other so-called “high tech” thermostats I’ve seen on the market seem to be very similar.

This will come with me

There’s no question the Nest borrows some of its design and usability inspiration from Apple—one of the company’s founders was a major influence at Apple for many years, after all. It’s clear the company is aiming to find a balance between technology and simplicity; it’s not enough to just throw a ton of features at a thermostat if it’s not also painfully easy to use. The Nest wants to do exactly that—it wants to be high-tech enough to make it worth the money, but still behave in a way that’s so simple, a non-techie can use it with ease.

After having used a Nest for several months, I feel very comfortable saying it’s high on the “worth it” scale, at least if you’re looking for something nicer than what you already have. I say this as someone who has bought much lesser thermostats in the recent past that came close to the price of the Nest—at $150 or even $200, most thermostats on the market just don’t measure up with the same ease-of-use and feature list. To be frank, the extra $50-100 is worth it to me if only for the iOS apps, but the Nest offers much more than that, and I have come to really like the learning features.

That’s not to say it’s a perfect thermostat for every home. Instapaper’s Marco Arment wrote about some of the frustrations he had with the Nest’s wiring limitations last year, so you should certainly make sure you’re familiar with what’s involved with your home’s wiring before committing to a purchase. And if you’re not comfortable doing installation yourself, there’s no shame in hiring an electrician.

My personal metric for whether a home modification was a good purchase is whether I want to take it with me when I move. In this case, I do—desperately. It would be hard to go back to a “normal” thermostat after having become attached to the Nest’s capabilities (first world problems, I know). Then again, maybe having a Nest in your home would help bump the resale value. Homeowners can dream, right?

The Good:

• Learning features mean you don’t have to set a schedule; it will figure out your schedule for you.
• Web and mobile apps are always a plus. Change the temperature from bed!
• Auto-away mode (thanks to motion detection) is quite handy.
• Dead simple to use, even on the most basic level.