Nest Thermostat - Bringing Intelligence To Home Heating & Cooling

Many of us have struggled with trying to keep our living environment at the right temperature so that we have the correct comfort level. Years ago, there was the manual thermostat which required you to changing it constantly to maintain the temperature you wanted. Changes when you go to bed, get up in the morning or leave for the day. Then came the programmable thermostats which greatly simplified what we needed to adjust, freeing us from paying attention to adjusts to a certain degree. But, we still made adjustments to the settings.

When the Nest Thermostat was released by Next Labs it brought in a thermostat which had the ability to learn and adjust to our living environment and our changing patterns. This was a form of home automation to control the temperature but so much more. Artificial Intelligence is probably a better description of the Nest Thermostat. They call this a "Learning" thermostat and that is probably the best description of what it actually does.

The Nest Learning Thermotat learns your behaviors as you make adjustments to it and it keeps track of that information. It also can detect that you are moving about in the home to know you are there. If it cannot detect you, it will set itself to Away Mode to conserve energy. During the first few weeks after you install the Nest Thermostat, it keeps track of the various setting changes you make and starts to do them for you. It is that learning which lays the foundation for it taking over the process.

With WiFi connectivity to your Nest Thermostat, you can make changes remotely to temperature settings. And while the only app available when this was released was for iOS, they now have an Android app as well which covers the majority of smart phones in the market today. The WiFi connection communicates with your Nest.com account which is where you would make changes to the temperature remotely. This WiFi connectivity also gathers information about the weather where you live so that minor adjustments can be made to compensate for it.

They claim that 75% of people can install it themselves which is probably the same number who can install a programmable thermostat. There is an installation video and it makes the whole process look pretty simple. Nest Labs currently have the 1st and 2nd generations available for purchase and one of the big differences is the 2nd gen is thinner. If you have a narrow hallway, the reduction in how far it sticks out is a big deal.

The Nest Thermostat is not cheap, but if having technology in your home and being able to control it remotely while away is desirable, this is the one you want to look at.