Nest Thermostat

[pcooley]

Has anyone tried one of these (http://nest.com/thermostat/life-with-nest-thermostat/)? I'm trying to figure out if it would be worth the money ($250!). We have had a standard programmable Thermostat for several years. It seems to work OK. There are some reviews that say the nest saves people money over their programmable thermostat. But there are other reviews of the Nest Thermostat that are extremely negative -- especially on Amazon. Our total gas bill for 2012 was $339.33, and the electric bill for the same period was $308.17. (We don't have any air conditioning or swamp cooler, but some of that electricity goes into running the forced air fan in the furnace in the winter). It looks like our gas runs around $20 a month in the summer, dipping down to as low as $15 if I'm leaning heavily on the solar oven, and it goes up into the mid to high $40s in the winter.

It seems like a Nest would have to do something really remarkable to recoup its cost in any reasonable amount of time.

What's the opinion out there in Simple Living land? I trust you much more than I trust the reviewers on Amazon.

[SteveinMN]

Much as I would enjoy automating all the systems in our house, a Nest is a non-starter for me. Considering you can get a pretty decent programmable for $50, spending another $200 for the Nest rather than spending 20 minutes reading the manual and pushing buttons -- well, saving $200 for 20 minutes of my time sounds like a good deal to me. Besides, Nest has smartphone apps, but it doesn't seem to use a smartphone operating system, nor does it appear to be compatible with/talk to other widely-used standards for home automation.

At $100, I might be interested. At $250, nope.

[EDIT]I have had a programmable thermostat in every house I've lived in since 1987. They're not that hard to use and they've all paid for themselves in about a year -- less if you can put a price on waking up to a comfortable house.

[razz]

Off topic - I am so impressed with your energy consumption being as low as it is.

On-topic - Are you possibly trying too be too efficient and overthinking the issue and spending as a result or is that your question?

[Gardenarian]

It sounds like you are running such an efficient household that Nest would be wasted on you - I doubt you could recoup the cost before it broke/something better came along.

[pcooley]

We'll stick with our current programmable thermostat. I always get nervous at the beginning of winter when the heater starts running. Anything that is actively burning up a resource makes me feel like I'm wasting money. I was thinking that the "auto-away" feature would detect when we weren't at home, and our heat would not run as often, but when I look at what we actually spend, gas isn't very high on our expenses. Looking at the "Spending by Payee" on our financial software, the gas company is down at #34. Not taking Amtrak to visit relatives on the east coast and cutting out organic food would make a bigger dent in our budget.