Nest Energy Report: November

We've had the Nest thermostat for almost six months now and my opinion of it hasn't changed since my last post.  Mine is tucked in the hallway with the guest rooms and we never walk by it so it thinks we are never home and tries to adjust to reflect the "absence".  We turned off the learning/sensing features and manage it manually now.  I find this to be frustrating for how "smart" it is but oh well!

So for November (let's just skip over the other months) we mostly used the heater.  We keep our temperature settings lower because despite the fact that our system is 20 years old, it surprisingly works well.  Nest has three options for cooling/heating.  It has A/C, heat and a mix of A/C and heat.  November was cold so we did 100% heat.  December has been much milder and we have been using the mix setting the past two weeks.

How did we do?  We keep our heat temp around 69-70*.  If it's really cold, we will bump it up to 72* but then go to sleep with it around 69/70.  For November we used 56 hours of energy and according to the weekly report we get from Reliant, we average about $3.50/day in electric usage.  Nest's suggestion this month was to turn our temperature down another 2 degrees but that's our max cold tolerance so maybe not.

Anyway, a month or so ago I did turn off the "auto away" feature on Nest because of the hall issue and it thinking we are gone all the time.  Turning that off killed my leafs so usually we earn a leaf a day and instead ended up with 5 for the month.  The leafs used to be a game for me - see how energy efficient I could be...but now I am more interested in how long the system runs.  On heat, it usually will run for maybe 45 minutes the entire day.  My favorite thing is still being able to control it from my iPhone!!

Here is a snapshot from our report...have you taken the plunge with the Nest yet?