Welcome to Nest

I just got a Nest Learning Thermostat on the weekend. We've wanted one for a long time. It's a pretty high tech device. It is supposed to intelligently learn the habits of the household, and adjust the temperature accordingly. That seems like a great idea during the Canadian winter. In our house, no one is home for much of the day, so the temperature doesn't need to be at the same level than in the morning and evening. Same goes for when we're sleeping. Of course, there have been many thermostats over the years that you could program, but this one self programs, and perhaps can do it better than I could.

The Nest Thermostat that I have mounted in my living room.

Now to be fair, you can manually enter a schedule, and I already have, since I know that at night, I can turn the temperature down. But I'm waiting to see how Nest adjusts to our habits and begins to adjust the temperature accordingly during the daytime. If it truly works, I expect that it will automatically start setting itself in to "Away" mode for most of the daytime hours, since both me and my wife are at work. That's certainly an opportunity to save some money.

On the one hand, I am definitely not the first person to use Nest, so I believe it should probably work just fine, but I also know results can vary. So for now, it's just a wait and see situation. I've only had the thermostat for two days. No matter what, it's a pretty cool device. I'm a guy who likes gadgets, and I am really interested in affordable home automation going mainstream. Therefore, this product is right up my alley.

PS. As a side note, the same company has also announced "Nest Protect" as of today. It's an intelligent smoke detector, and apparently also works with your Nest thermostat. I will have to write about that another day.