Fancy new thermostat
 

My brother, a silicon valley tech guy who has moved from one cutting edge company to another, joined a new company about a year and a half ago. He wouldn't tell us what he was working on then, just that the company was headed by the inventor/designer of the ipod/iphone and that the new product was an every day item with a twist. This new company's version would save a tremendous amount of energy across the country and revolutionize the market.

So over the summer, I saw him and actually got to see this new product, but still wasn't allowed to tell anyone about it. Now the secret is out, because the head of the company, this ipod guy, went public.

It's a thermostat. And I've seen this thing first hand, and played with it, and can tell you that it's the coolest thermostat I've ever seen. It's visually very striking. Looks a lot like an iPod, except it's totally different looking. Basically just looks like a shiny hockey puck. You can twist it and push on it to control it. That's it. Very simple and elegant looking. No crazy system of switches and buttons like the programmable thermostat I own now. You can access it remotely from any computer or your smart phone to program it. I love this idea, because there have been many times that I've gone on vacation in the summer time, turned off the AC for the two weeks I was gone, and wished I could turn it back on several hours before I expected to come back so the house would be cool upon my return.

It's supposed to learn your behavior and respond based on how you interact with it. It appears to be turned off when you aren't using it, but when you walk up to it, it senses your proximity and lights up for you. If it's located in a hallway, that might get annoying, lighting up every time you walk by, so it somehow senses whether you are just walking by or are walking up to it on purpose.

Basically it's just a sexy looking new programmable web accessible thermostat. There are others out there, but they look like hell and are very complicated to use and program. This is extremely easy to use.

No idea what it will cost when it reaches market or if I'll buy one. I'm stingy. But maybe I will.

pretty cool.

Does it have that feature where when person A walks into the room it adjusts itself to A's preferences but when another person who outranks A comes in it defers to that person's prefs?

Gates had something like that in one of his mansions IIRC, it would change the music or the digital art display based on who was in the room and their preferences and social ranking.

the cellar has that. when I read a post by you it turns blue, but red when it's a lesser being. or maybe it's because it's cold enough to drink.....

I think it actually does. If it learns that when it gets cranked up to 85 in the winter, and about 15 minutes later it gets turned back down to 62 again, it's gonna start doing that automatically.

I should ask my brother, because they actually put a lot of thought into that.

So when you first install it, does that mean you have to take a week or two to train it, where you have to remember to turn it down every time you leave the house so it can figure out your schedule?

The whole thermostat is a big dial/push button. And you can use the dial like the dial on an older iPod to run through menus and then push the face to select what you want. So you can program it when you first install it. Or you can let it learn over time. Or you can do a little of both. Plus it has a motion detector, so if the house is unoccupied for a while it can adjust the temperature.

And I recently found out it will cost $250. Ouch. But for a wifi enabled programmable thermostat, that's not so outrageous. Plus, it's pretty and easy to use.

Do you need one in each room, or can you link other motion detectors to it?

Probably neither. But I'm sure you can set the motion detector interval and/or turn it off.

Glatt, I'm sorry to say I don't think it's going to take off at that price.

I generally only interact with my thermostat twice a year, when we switch on the heat in the fall, and when we turn on the AC in the summer. It's a pain in the ass to program, but I only do it twice a year.

If this was priced just a little higher than other programmable thermostats, it might make it, but not at this price.

It's interesting what some people won't pay more for. I won't pay more than $20 for a bottle of wine, or $100 for a cell phone. I can see this getting thrown in for a new construction, but I wouldn't go out and buy it to replace a thermostat that is functioning.

It is interesting. If this thermostat can save 5% off your heating/cooling bill, it will pay for itself in a few years. And it probably can do that. (YMMV and all that) It depends on what you have now, how you live now, and what you are paying for heating and cooling.

I wonder if this will come down in price the way all other portable consumer electronics come down in price. I don't see how it can be improved each year with a new model the way everything else can. It's not like you can go from 3G to 4G or fit more songs on it. It controls the temperature. Period. It's $250 now. Will it be $129 in three years?

Part of the package is that you get an account with this company so you can access it through the web. They aren't going to web host your home thermostat forever for free if this becomes a bargain basement item. That actually makes me wonder how they are going to handle the accounts. TIVO charges a small monthly fee after you buy their box. I wonder if these guys will too?

Yes, it will, because it will be bootlegged and made in China, unfortunatley.

That is definitely a cool aspect. He should try to bundle in with the new ADT packages that allow you all kinds of off-site features.

Oops, ADT Pulse let's you do that already.

I didn't spend a lot of time at that website, but on the front page they offer a coupon for $250 off, so it must cost significantly more than this thermostat.

I bought a smart thermostat for ~ $20 a while ago. It's got settings for wakeup/leave/return/sleep and those are different for weekdays and weekends. It's also got a lock mode for when someone's home on a weekday.

What's this got that will save 5% for me?

Our house has eight or nine thermostats - that could get expensive!

I wonder if they would all talk to each other.

What about? The weather?

If they're internet-enabled they could talk about all kinds of interesting things. Maybe they could even post on the Cellar.

They have parts from Skynet. They'll be talking about taking over.

I'm in IT. Tech is my life. But I just don't want my home's infrastructure accessible via the web. I don't want my fridge to be smart. I certainly don't want a smart meter for power usage either. Sometimes more is not better....

I agree with the thought.
We have the saying: "Just because you can doesn't mean you have to"

Meanwhile, while you did not notice, it was already implemented. Many electric companies no longer have meter readers. Smart meters have long since eliminated that need.

The thermostat is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem to solve. All innovations occur either because a solution is looking for a problem, or a problem is looking for a solution.

... and the meter readers are out of work.

Not yet...
 

This is an interesting article I read last month... tinfoil hats anyone?

When they make one that can hack into the NYSE and grab the money to pay my heating bills, call me.

glatt, that's not a hockey puck. that's a shuffleboard puck. yeah.. tha's been botherin me since your OP. other than that, kewl.

Here's a video of it.

This thermostat has made it into it's own article in the NY Times:

NY Times
By DAVID POGUE
Published: November 30, 2011
A Thermostat That’s Clever, Not Clunky
.

Oh, hey. I should have updated this thread.

I got a Nest thermostat as a present for my birthday back in April, and installed it just as the heating season was ending, and the open window season was beginning. But now it's AC season.

I don't know if you noticed, but it's been pretty damn hot lately. This week is a bit better, but last week was insane. Anyway, we were on vacation at a lake in Pennsylvania. We had set the Nest to "away" mode, which for us and the way we programmed the Nest meant that it wasn't going to cool the house at all.

It was Saturday up in Pennsylvania, and we saw on the news that it was 106 in Arlington. So my wife pulled out her Android phone, connected with the Nest, and turned on our AC from 3 states away. The AC worked all night on an empty house, slowly getting the temperature lowered, and when we walked in the front door in the early afternoon on Sunday, the house was cool.

Without the Nest, we either would have left the AC running the entire time we were away on vacation, which is stupid, or we would have come home to a sweltering house and would have been very uncomfortable for a full day or so as the AC slowly brought the temperature down over the course of a 24 hour period. (Our central AC was retrofitted into our old house and isn't really sized properly. It just takes forever to cool the place down.)

So for this feature alone, I LOVE the Nest.

Cool!

Reliant Energy now offering the Nest thermostat in Texas.

http://gigaom.com/cleantech/nest-sco...deal-in-texas/

Just saw the ad--it ran 9am Sunday morning during the Olympics.

Yeah, I've been hearing ads on the radio, and I thought, "Hey, that's glatt's friend!"

I was telling everybody in the house this morning-- "Hey! I know a guy who knows the guy who invented that!"

And they knew a guy who knew a guy who knew the dude who invented it. I hope they were suitably in awe.

(My brother didn't invent it. Just wrote some code.)

But I'm pleased that it's getting some attention in Texas. Hopefully, for my brother, the advertising will lead to sales and profits.

Another update to the Nest thread. We're just coming off a winter of heating, and I can report on how the Nest did. We used less fuel than we did last winter. And this winter was colder on average than last winter was. The Nest saved energy compared to the previous programmable thermostat we had.

I was confused by this, because I thought we had the previous thermostat set up just right. I didn't understand how the Nest was saving us fuel. It turns out that the Nest was able to learn how long it took for our radiators to heat the house and how long they continued to heat the house after the thermostat shut the heat off. Previously, we would call for a certain temperature, and the old thermostat would run the boiler until that temperature was satisfied. Then it would shut the boiler off. The hot water would continue to circulate through the radiators, and the house would get hotter than the temperature we asked for. If we had programmed the heat to turn off when we left the house in the morning, the house would still be toasty for a hour or so after we left.

With the Nest, it learns how long it takes to heat the place up, and how long the radiators will coast, still heating the house, and it runs the heat for a shorter amount of time to just give us what we ask for.

I don't notice any less comfort. In fact, I felt like it was warmer in the house. So the Nest is giving us the heat we want, when we want it. And isn't heating an empty house.

You probably want numbers, but I don't have the bills in front of me. But we easily used fewer therms this winter than we did last winter.

That sounds like a big advantage if you've got steam heat.

Nifty.

In the olde days when fuel was cheap, the thermostat would shut down the fire and circulator at the set temperature so there was little overshoot. That wasted a whole lot of heat that was in the boiler, and would just drift up the chimney. So common practice became to keep the circulator running to dump that heat into the living space instead.

With big olde boilers that could be several degrees of overshoot, I lived one place where it would overshoot five degrees. But newer smaller boilers, usually only overshoot a couple degrees.

Having a thermostat that can predict that, so it hits the right temperature at the right time, is the cat's ass.:yesnod:

That is clever. Nice work, twenty-first century.

Our boiler is really old and we don't have a circulation pump, so the water moves by convection. It's a masterpiece of plumbing, with the pipes sloped just so. But what this means is that the water doesn't start to circulate through the radiators until it gets fairly hot. The safety shutoff at the boiler is set at 180 degrees F, so it never actually boils the water. By the time the hot water reaches the radiators, they are hot, but not so hot you would get burned. I'll sit on the kitchen radiator as it is getting hot but when it's at full temperature I can't sit on it for more than about 10 seconds or so before it get uncomfortable. I'd guess they are 120 degrees or so. I've never measured them.

Anyway, I think the lack of a circulator pump means that we have pretty significant overshoot. Easily 5 degrees. Maybe even 6-7 degrees. The Nest keeps the overshoot under control.

Ah yes, that's exactly the type of system I had where I said it would overshoot 5 degrees. An old coal fired boiler converted to oil, with an octopus of asbestos covered piping. I can remember a roommate sitting on the kitchen radiator in his bathrobe eating breakfast, and suddenly jumping up when he realized how hot it was getting. :haha:

Austin Energy is now offering an $85 rebate to anyone who installs a Nest thermostat. Unfortunately, we're not on city utilities, but maybe our energy company will get on board soon.

My brother has been complaining about how busy he has been in advance of the Christmas season, but wouldn't say why. Nest has now revealed why.

They just came out with a fancy and expensive smoke detector.

$130

It's a smoke and carbon monoxide detector which sounds an alarm and also gives voice information about why it's going off. It will give you a mild warning at first if smoke or CO levels are rising but are not at an emergency level. If you are burning toast, and it goes off, you can disable the alarm with a wave of the hand. It connects wirelessly with your Nest thermostat to act as an additional temperature and motion sensor for the thermostat, and it will also connect with your smart phone to send alerts if something is going on in your house when you are not there. If you have multiple smoke detectors, they connect to each other wirelessly and will all go off at the same time if one goes off. You will get a message on your phone when the battery is getting low so you can change it before it starts chirping at you. I think you can monitor stuff on your phone like CO levels in the house over time. That would be interesting.

Seems to me that the batteries will wear out faster with all that wireless activity. But they claim the batteries are designed for "multi year" use. And there is a hardwired version.

The sensors it has: Photoelectric smoke sensor, Carbon monoxide sensor, Heat sensor, Three activity sensors, Ambient light sensor, Humidity sensor


Attachment 45622

The batteries are $20, or less, for a half dozen.
But if they are tied together and all go off together, I won't know where the problem is unless I buy a smart phone... or call the NSA.

But they'll tell you where the problem is. The message will be something like "fire in the hallway - evacuate" (It's a voice and an alarm.)

Will it nark on your kids for you? "Attention homeowner, it appears your teen son consistently burns toast in his bedroom late at night."

Obviously, these are marketed to some type of person who isn't me. The company is still going strong. And they seem to be selling well on Amazon.

Al Gore likes the Nest.

:lol2:

Google just bought the company for $3.2 billion. I wonder if my brother had any shares?

So your brother works for Google now?

Yeah. Well, when the deal goes through anyway.

I wonder what Google is going to do with my temperature data now.

Watch you. Or track your heating/cooling pattern so that HVAC adds will pop up in your searches. :tinfoil: ?

Yah beat me to it. I thought of you and your brother and this thread this morning, but you scooped me. Congrats to your brother.
:-)

An editorial in The New Yorker, is not happy about this acquisition.

An Environmental warrior fried of mine just "liked" Nest on Facebook. She doesn't do shit like that lightly, must be good....

Cool. In hindsight, I'd say it's worth the high purchase cost. At least with our HVAC system.