Nest claims to be a thermostat that will learn your habits and adjust the AC accordingly to help you save money and energy. Some energy companies will give you a discount when you have a Nest and participate in whatever energy saving program they offer. After about a week and a half of using it, it "learns" your schedule and adjusts accordingly. You can also create a schedule for it. It will email you a monthly usage report too.
We picked up a Nest at Lowe's for $259. Let me preface this by saying that I do not believe in "smart homes". I don't believe in being able to access things like your security system from the internet because I feel that it's vulnerable to hackers, etc. Maybe these feelings are unfounded but I was resistant to Nest because a) it is kind of expensive and b) the "smart home" factor. Luckily we only had to buy one since we are a one story home that's about 2300 sq ft.
Set up of Nest is really simple. We were installing ours on a Friday night after hours but you follow instructions on the website and it walks you through how to connect the wires. It did say that we had to call customer service because our wires were not straight forward, but we got it installed without incident. M did email this photo of our wires and they responded the next day with a set up explanation.
So once we got it installed, Nest searches for your wifi connection and gets hooked up to the house. You can give Nest a new name, tell it where it is located in the house (our's is in a hallway), set your location, time, etc. You turn the silver dial to select your option and push into the Nest to select the options. Nest will use your location to sync up with the weather forecast. One of my favorite features with Nest is that you can control it from your phone. I know I said I don't believe in "smart homes" but I have been disappointed with Nest and that is the best feature in my opinion.
We have had Nest for a month. It is on a schedule where it's at 76* during the day and at 9pm it drops to 70* for sleeping. I like it to be a frozen tundra when I sleep. I have half Fridays so around noon it will go down to 74*. It has learned we are not home during the day so it will go into "Auto Away" mode which means that the highest temp it will get to is 76* and the lowest is 61* before either the heater or AC kicks on. Every day it will run a report on the app to tell you how many hours Nest ran. It will tell you if you got a leaf for low energy usage, if it was an unusually hot day so energy consumption was above average, the weather was cool so it didn't need to run as much, or that Auto Away helped you.
This month we got our monthly usage report and I was really excited because I thought it would go into detail about Nest's capabilities. What a disappointment! All it told me is that we cooled our house for 215 hours in July and recommended that we turn our temperature down 30 minutes before we go to sleep to give Nest a head start. It does kick on to start cooling down for sleep at 9 but we do not usually go to bed until 10 or 11. Anytime you turn Nest down it will tell you how long it takes to get to that temperature. Our HVAC is almost 20 years old so it takes way more effort to cool our house than a newer system. I honestly hope it breaks so we can get a new one while we are under our home warranty.
Overall my review of Nest is positive even though I have been so disappointed with the information it provides. I truly expected a smart thermostat to tell me all kinds of information about how I could lower my energy usage and save money. Granted, we do not necessarily follow Nest's recommendations (especially at night) but it has been really interesting to see how much our AC unit runs on a daily basis and just generally what kind of hot/cold temps our house feels good at. Nest does "auto away" us on Saturday/Sundays which is fine but if we are doing projects or moving around a lot I have to adjust it so it feels cooler. Sometimes it will go back to "auto away" after I turn the temp down so that is kind of frustrating.
I also have tried to enroll in the Nest discount program that Reliant Energy provides but I still have not received any emails so I need to call them again. You can save up to 80 cents a kilowatt hour when you participate in the program!
The one thing I am REALLY interested in trying is the smoke/CO2 detectors that Nest makes. They are $99 each so that is a little pricey but they come either battery operated or hard-wired so you could take them with you if you moved. Our house is small so over time that would be a beneficial upgrade.
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