Nest – next generation thermostat

When I had a discussion with Freeman today about the Intelligent Home Monitoring system, he introduced me a new gadget called “Nest learning thermostat“. The term thermostat  makes some of my old memories fresh   . While I was in Manipal Dot Net, I got an opportunity to develop a wifi interface for the Radio Thermostat. My work was to make this thermostat ‘intelligent’ so that anyone who have this thermostat can control it remotely using a wifi.

But the real problem about these thermostats are they are not very user friendly. Most people never been bother program to these kind of programmable thermostat. As a result houses which uses these kind of device consume more energy than the homes without them.

Coming to The Nest Learning Thermostat, a cool and awesome thermostat designed by Nest, a company founded by Tony Fadell (a former Apple Employee and couple of other Apple employees). What’s makes this new thermostat to stand alone with the others? Is it because it is created by Tony Fadell?Or He helped design the iPod, hee ran the iPod and iPhone divisions of Apple for years? Certainly not. There are four factors which makes this beautiful piece into a cult product. Those are (source: nytimes)

1.  The look. The nest is gorgeous. It has a round shape and having a beautiful screen. It’s color screen glows orange when it’s heating, blue when it’s cooling. When you approach it, it turns on and goes off when no one nearby.

2. Nest has wifi in it. So that you can operate it online. You can program it online. It also can download software updates.

3. Learning. The Nest is supposed to program itself — and save you energy in the process. When you first install the Nest, you turn its ring to change the temperature as you would a normal thermostat — at bedtime, when you leave for work, and so on. A big, beautiful readout shows you the new setting and lets you know how long it will take your house to reach that temperature. That information, Nest says, is intended to discourage people from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees, for example, thinking that the temperature will rise to 70 faster. (It doesn’t.)

Over the course of a week or so, the thermostat learns from your manual adjustments. It notes when that happened, and what the temperature and humidity were, and so on. And it begins to set its own schedule based on your living patterns.

4. You can save lots of energy  by correctly programming the thermostat. Why should you waste money heating or cooling the downstairs when you’re in bed upstairs? Or when you are away at work all day?

Apart from these four points there are some more feature which makes Nest Learning Thermostat different from others. Such as it contains two proximity sensors (near and far), which detect whether anybody is actually in a room. If the sensors decide that nobody’s home, they let the temperature drop or rise to an outer limit you have defined — say, 65 in winter, 80 in summer — even if that absence isn’t part of your normal schedule.

Also, the installation part is too easier. If you are comfortable installing a light fixture, you can install nest by yourself.

By using Nest account and Nest Mobile app you can access the Nest on the go. You can change the temperature from miles away from home. Here is the some of what they can do:

• Control up to Ten thermostats in two homes from one account.
• Change the temperature.
• Check and adjust your schedule.
• See and change your settings.
• Put Nest in and out of Away mode.
• Show you a Nest leave if you are saving the energy.

Technology: The Nest Sense’s (technology used by Nest) job is to gather data to use in its calculations.

This data goes beyond just measuring the temperature in the room. In fact, Nest gathers data from the following sources:

• Three temperature sensors, designed to get a more precise measurement than a single sensor
• Motion and light sensors that detect activity in the room at a wide 150-degree angle
• A WiFi connection to get weather data about your area from the Internet

The Primary advantage over the Nest Learning Thermostat over other thermostat is its sleek design and its ability to use different data points to analyze users behavior, then form a energy-saving schedule to control the HVAC. But at the flip side, the main drawback of Nest is its cost! Its new to the market and costs $249 per thermostat. That’s more than twice and in some cases five times the cost of programmable thermostats from established brands.

On the whole The Nest is gorgeous, elegant and very, very smart. It will keep your house at the right temperature, save you money and do some good for the planet. Put another way, it can make you comfortable in more ways than one.
(source: HSW)