Perhaps you have heard about
NEST. It was designed by a person who left Apple, I believe. Anyway, he is one
of the most creative and innovative persons in the tech arena, so this is not a
hot-shot product that doesn’t quite work.
Apparently it works very well, and is priced accordingly $250.
But it could save thousands a year in heating and cooling costs (so say
neutral experts). Why?
Apparently in most homes, the
HVAC system is 50 % of all energy consumed. So, cutting back a little on this cost means
magnified savings.
Apparently most
programmable thermostats are too hard to program, and so people don’t do
it. ALL OF THEM lost their energy star
rating in 2009 – I guess because, in practice, they were not used properly.
NEST thermostat, now at Lowes
and other stores, has Wi Fi connections, so you can adjust your house temp
from your I phone anywhere in the world.
Letting it know you are coming home … and to cool the house down, or
heat it up.
NEST will memorize and
understand your habits and then run itself, seemingly it will use advanced
logic to figure out when you go to bed, what temperature you like for sleeping,
when you normally wake up, and so on. It also seems to know if you go off for
the weekends.
WATCH THE VIDEOS on the website above. There are several of them on this web page
--- the are about
1. seeing if your system can use a NEST thermostat – not all
can
2. learning how to do a
self-install --- it even has a level
built in to help you get it level and big “uh-oh plates” to fix bad tears in
wall paper or painted areas that you want to hide.
3. it picks up your wi fi
signal and a website works with it, so it is quite amazing what it does, and
how it does it. Linking with your iphone
(and I presume other smart phones ?) with an APP.
I don’t have one of these,
and don’t know when I will get one, but it is certainly a worthy product and
everyone should consider, because, “sooner or later” you will have one – will it
be “sooner” ? or “later” ?
PS -- modern thermostats are not cheap, no mater which one you get. A fully functional programmable thermostat I just got with a new system was $250. But it allows the service person to plug in and read the history of the system and what might be wrong with it. But, the new heat pump it controls is the top of the line, and highly complex, variable speed fans inside and outside. Not sure how a NEST would control this kind of system.
