Nest...

Yesterday we received our new thermostat, called a “Nest”, 2nd generation.  Ours is just like the photo at right.  We bought it to replace a roughly 10 year old thermostat we'd purchased from a now-defunct home automation company.  Our old thermostat had a very conventional display and controls, which means it was very difficult to use, along the same lines as modern electronic watches.  It did have the ability to “talk” on the network, but the software for it was just awful, and only worked on Windows.

I'd heard about the Nest thermostat some months ago from a colleague.  I figured I'd wait until the bugs had been worked out (and there are inevitably bugs!), and until some reviews came in.  Last week I heard about the second generation version, which I could reasonably hope worked out some bugs from the first generation.  Also I found some reviews, which ranged from merely positive to all-out fanboy ravings.  So I took the plunge and ordered it.

A slight aside: a frequent comment I see about the Nest is that it's expensive – and at $250, compared to a $40 or $50 conventional electronic thermostat, it is.  But really that's about like comparing a bicycle with a Toyota – you're not talking about the same kind of device at all.  I don't know about you, but I expect to pay more for the Toyota than for the bicycle (though there are some darned expensive bicycles these days!).  Clearly there is more cost in the Toyota, and for most of my travel needs, much more benefit.  So I'm willing to pay extra for it.  Ditto with a thermostat.  It's something that I use at least twice each and every day, and it controls something expensive to run, so I'm willing to pay a little more for it.  And just for comparison purposes, at $250, the Nest was less than half the price I paid for our previous thermostat!

Yesterday afternoon I set off to install the Nest.  When I opened the box, the first thought I had was “Apple!”.  That is, the packaging looked like something you'd buy from Apple, right down to the choices in packing materials.  The presentation was a little work of art, just like opening a box from Apple.  Someone paid close attention even to this detail.

What was in the box surprised me (I hadn't read anything at all about installing the Next prior to buying it).  First surprise: it comes with a quite nice little screwdriver, with an ergonomic handle and a magnetically secured dual flat blade/Phillips head screwdriver – the only tool I needed to install it.  Nice!  Second surprise: the installation booklet came with a set of wire labels, so that I could label all the old wires before removing them.  This is a very nice detail, and I'm sure it saves them a lot of time on support calls.  Third surprise: it comes with an assortment of mounting adapters that will let you mount the Nest in any circumstance I can imagine.  In our case, our old thermostat was (much) larger than the Nest, so we had a big, rectangular hole in the wall.  No problem; the Nest's box includes a white plastic plate designed to handle this precise issue.  Nice, Nest.

It took me perhaps five minutes to remove my old thermostat and label the old wires.  Then perhaps another five minutes to install the Nest's base plate and connect the (labeled!) wires to it.  Then I snapped in the actual Nest.  The installation instructions basically end at this point, with a sentence that tells you to follow the on-screen directions to finish setting up the Nest.  There's a web URL in case you get in trouble, but otherwise, that's it.

So when my Nest powered up, I really didn't know what to expect.  I was actually a bit surprised at this point, as I expected to have to first attach the Nest to my computer to set it up (I could see the micro-USB port on its bottom).  But the installation booklet made it clear that the setup was performed through the Nest itself.  The reason this surprised me is that the Nest's “user interface” is pretty darned basic: you can twist it clockwise or counter-clockwise, and you can push it to “click” it – but that's it.  No more user interface!  So I wondered how on earth I would, say, enter my WiFi password?

The answer delighted me, in fact I laughed out loud (which quite amused Debbie).  When you get to the point where you need to enter information, the Nest's display shows a circle of possibilities (such as the letters of the alphabet).  Then you just twist the Nest to select the one you want, and push it to “click” and select it.  That's it!  It took me no more than five more minutes to get it connected to our WiFi and to handle the other bits of its setup.

There was one little scary bit, though.  During the setup, there is a stage where the Nest tells you what sort of equipment it detected.  In our home we have both a heater and an air conditioner, but the Nest reported only finding an air conditioner.  In our case we have five wires connected to our thermostat, and I made the connections blindly following their directions – I had no idea which wire did what.  I remembered that when I installed our old thermostat, I basically had to reverse-engineer our heating and cooling system to figure out precisely what each wire did, then figure out which of the numerous terminals on the thermostat to connect them to.  I recall that it took me several tries to get it working.  Naturally, that got me imagining that I was about to go through the same thing again.

But first I thought I'd double-check that I'd actually installed the wires correctly.  So I pulled the Nest off it's mount and looked at my wiring job.  Oops!  The white wire wasn't actually in its little socket!  I pushed it into place and secured it, popped the Nest back on, and voila!  A little screen came up telling me that the Nest had detected an equipment change – and that now I had both a heater and an air conditioner.  Yay!

Next, I went to Nest's web site and registered my Nest.  That allows me to control my Nest from any web browser.  Sweet!  Then I went to the Apple app store, and downloaded the free Nest app – and now I can control my Nest from my iPhone.  Super sweet!  And all that took me another five minutes, tops.  The Nest people have made this a very painless process.

I don't have much experience with actually using the Nest yet.  I can report that it does the things you'd expect a thermostat to do (turn the heater on when it's too cold, turn the air conditioner on when its too hot), but I can't report on the Nest's vaunted learning features yet.  That will take a few weeks, as the Nest builds its knowledge of our habits.  What I can report on is what the geeks would call the “user interface” – what it's like for a human to actually use the thing.  Our Nest is mounted in our hallway, and we're finding the user interface to be as natural and simple as an old-fashioned mechanical thermostat.  The main thing one needs to do with a thermostat is to set the desired temperature, and on the Nest you do that by turning the dial.  It feels very natural, very simple.  There are separate set points for the heater and the air conditioner, and switching between them is just a click.  Again, simple and natural.  The fancier features are available from a menu, and while that's not quite as simple as setting the temperature, it's darned close.  Best of all: you don't need to remember anything all, as the screen provides all the reminders anyone would need.

I've left out one of our favorite features of the Nest's user interface: it detects your presence in front of it, and turns its screen on.  That's a very simple idea, but one that delights both of us.

Compared with our old thermostat, the Nest's user interface is spectacularly usable – but that's mostly a statement about how bad the old one was :)

The web site and iPhone apps are not quite as impressive.  They're fine, and easy enough to use – they just didn't delight me in the same way the Nest itself did.  In particular, the iPhone app doesn't let you use rotation the same way the Nest itself does.  I'd love to be able to move a set point by dragging it around the dial with my finger, but I can't – instead, I have to “click” on an up or down button.  Perfectly functional, but not the same experience as the Nest.  I can imagine that some might actually find it confusing, simply because it's different than the Nest itself.  But the fact that I can now check – and change – my thermostat from anywhere at all, any time at all, more than makes up for my picky complaints about the iPhone user interface!

Bottom line: two thumbs up for the Nest...