Smart Thermostats

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OVERKILL

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Just ordered the Nest Learning Thermostat for the 2nd floor of the office to test it out. Anybody have any experience with these? This one had fantastic reviews, which is why I selected it.
 
Don't own one myself, but I think they are very cool. Very high-tech and high-touch. Like Apple designing a thermostat. Do they have any remote sensor capability?
 
No remote yet, and have a API but no documentation...

It should be great, but it depends on a few things:
-a no-frills HVAC system - meaning no zones or multi-speed fans
-a properly balanced and insulated house - it's not a miracle worker, but a few built-in band-aids are nice (like auto-fan)

That being said if you have an irregular schedule and no pets it should make quite the difference. Since it has some brains it works really well with boilers and hot-water/steam since it learns your system response and can more accurately keep the desired temperature.

Be sure to report back!
 
Been eagerly awaiting from someone knowledgeable (like BITOGers, or my other home reno board members) to give it a short to medium term test report.

I have a 3-zone hydronic system in my house, and would definitely benefit from using something like this (Nest), except the rather prohibitive upfront cost I need to fork out to have a 3 of them upgraded...

Q.
 
Originally Posted By: michaelluscher
You got the 2nd generation right?

Enjoy, I will one day also have HAL 2001 on my walls


Yessir! And will be getting a 2nd one if this one works out. I will certainly report back on its performance, I should have it by Friday (thank you Amazon Prime!).
 
I've had a 2nd gen Next for about a year and a half. I really doubt there is much energy savings over a properly set up traditional programmable thermostat. If you're one of those people who had a programmable but never programmed it, then there are some savings.

With that out of the way... it's really cool. The app has all kinds of useful info it in. I like the energy history function. It shows when and how long your heating or cooling system has run each day for the past week or so.

To be really shallow, one of my biggest purchase drivers was how it looked. I despise beige square thermostats and our new house's thermostat is located smack in the living room for all to see.
 
According to the Nest website they can be used with multi-speed fans and zones. Of course you would have to have a Nest in each zone.
 
Given the price, and being doubtful that one would ever see a payback over a conventional programmable thermostat, I don't think I'd call it a "smart" thermostat. But if having one hanging on your wall makes you feel cool and impresses your friends, then by all means it may be an outstanding investment for your ego.
 
Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit
Given the price, and being doubtful that one would ever see a payback over a conventional programmable thermostat, I don't think I'd call it a "smart" thermostat. But if having one hanging on your wall makes you feel cool and impresses your friends, then by all means it may be an outstanding investment for your ego.


It is for the office. I said that in my first post. We have two industrial A/C units and two large furnaces, one for each floor.

The current "dumb" thermostats don't have the ability to switch between heat and A/C and the building is cold in the morning and hot in the afternoon this time of year (and in the spring) there is no way around that. So you'll have somebody put it on heat in the AM and then it gets above the set temperature and then continues to rise until somebody puts on the A/C in the afternoon. Then it never gets switched back and you walk into the place like it is a fridge in the morning.

This "smart" thermostat will learn the office occupancy behaviour and should have the appropriate temp already reached by the time we walk in in the morning and turn on the A/C when needed to keep things comfortable in the afternoon. It'll then ramp the temp down at night (or let it climb in the summer) when nobody is there.

The convenience factor of this behaviour and not having staff mess with it is well worth the $250.00 the thing costs.
 
My next house will have a smart thermostat. Curious to hear feedback.


Don't you just love the holier than thou attitude some people on this forum have?
 
Originally Posted By: kmcavin
According to the Nest website they can be used with multi-speed fans and zones. Of course you would have to have a Nest in each zone.

There's a huge simplification in the "we support multi speed fans".

They support it in that if the thermostat can only tell the unit on/off and the unit is responsible for the van speed control, they support it. Which isn't really supporting it since most of the thermostat speed control is mfr-specific.

And yes the huge downside of the zoning is that you need a Nest in each Zone which is mucho dinero.
 
At first I read it as a "Smart Thermos" and then I started wondering "How does a smart thermos knows to keep hot coffee hot but keep a cold drink cool without having a built-in microchip inside it?"
 
Originally Posted By: racer12306

Don't you just love the holier than thou attitude some people on this forum have?


Meh, it's Pop. It wouldn't be a day on BITOG if he didn't show up in a thread just to opine on how you're doing something wrong.

Quote:
They support it in that if the thermostat can only tell the unit on/off and the unit is responsible for the van speed control, they support it. Which isn't really supporting it since most of the thermostat speed control is mfr-specific.


I've never had multi-speed blower, so this is just a curiosity question, but are there any generic programmable thermostats that support this type of fan control or are you basically locked into the HVAC unit manufacturer for a thermostat?
 
I have a Nest on a two stage hvac system. It's a slick thermostat but if you have a regular schedule then it doesn't really do anything big other than simplify programming. The auto-away feature works pretty good so you don't have to remember to turn off the hvac before leaving.
 
Originally Posted By: MrHorspwer
Originally Posted By: racer12306

Don't you just love the holier than thou attitude some people on this forum have?


Meh, it's Pop. It wouldn't be a day on BITOG if he didn't show up in a thread just to opine on how you're doing something wrong.

Quote:
They support it in that if the thermostat can only tell the unit on/off and the unit is responsible for the van speed control, they support it. Which isn't really supporting it since most of the thermostat speed control is mfr-specific.


I've never had multi-speed blower, so this is just a curiosity question, but are there any generic programmable thermostats that support this type of fan control or are you basically locked into the HVAC unit manufacturer for a thermostat?


My home furnace has a variable speed fan and multi-stage heat. Basically, it looks at incoming air temp and how quickly it is changing and manipulates that in order to satisfy the thermostat.

My current home thermostat is just a cheap programmable Honeywell unit that has no fan speed control as part of it. The furnace itself looks after the heat level and fan. I've only ever had it step up once that I'm aware of, and that was on one of the coldest days of the year last year.
 
Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit
Given the price, and being doubtful that one would ever see a payback over a conventional programmable thermostat, I don't think I'd call it a "smart" thermostat. But if having one hanging on your wall makes you feel cool and impresses your friends, then by all means it may be an outstanding investment for your ego.


your just jealous. I got two of them. one for a xmas present last year. I got one using my citibank thank you points in 2012. both are second generations. so I got them eh for free.
happy2.gif


I love being able to turn the nest off when I'm going out of town, then turning it back on before a 3.5 hour drive and the house is nice and cool. I can turn down the heat from the nest app on my moto.

I have schedules set up for upstairs and downstairs on both nests. My wife is known to turn the heat all the way up in the winter and turn the a/c down low in the summer. so I know day to day how many hours the a/c or furnace is on per day. I thought of password protecting my nest thermostats but it would be war with the wifey.

I'm pretty sure I saved some cash with these. If your married to someone who doesn't pay attention to stuff like this, it's a money saver. my wife leaves every light on in every room too and doesn't turn them off when she leaves the room either. I'm thinking of using timers but it would be a battle.
 
Installed it this aft and setup the heat/cool thresholds. I'll do some additional programming Monday when I'm back in.

First thing it wanted to do was connect to the WiFi and update, LOL!

Nice and easy to setup too, had it operational in a couple of minutes. The longest part of the entire install was it updating itself, LOL!
smile.gif
 
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
The convenience factor of this behaviour and not having staff mess with it is well worth the $250.00 the thing costs.

One of my business offices has a smart thermostat, though not quite to the point of yours. Mine won't switch between AC and heat, but that's not really an issue because there are other heating setups in the building. It does learn how long it takes to heat up or cool down the office to the correct temperature, and has it at the appropriate temperature at the appropriate time, within the limits of it being set on AC or heat.
 
'Airwave' (turning the AC compressor off a few minutes before turning the fan off) saves a bit of cash in the summer.
True radiant is a proper learning PID-style control of your heating boiler so it doesn't overshoot the setpoint and turns on earlier as it learns how long the reaction time is between boiler-on vs temperature of the room. It's essentially really good at flappy birds and that saves you money as well.

And the fact that it's software and cloud controlled it'll only get smarter, the only thing it could be better at is interacting with smarter boilers, fans, and heatpumps but that's probably something the manufacturers need to open up to: accept the fact that nest has better programmers and designers.

Imagine a system that knows incoming and outgoing temperatures as well as room temperature in multiple rooms that can be damper controlled with multiple fan speeds, heat pump stages, and/or boiler heat. It would know the cost of each fuel and would take into account run-time vs occupancy vs vs occupant comfort all minimize cost. That's where it's all headed!

I'll be extra excited when solar hot water heat is able to be integrated, it's come along way as well and is pretty impressive in what it can do in arctic climates with just the long-term cost of a pump to consider.
 
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