NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

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it introduces four of them. RADICAL CHANGE 1 The look. The Nest is gorgeous. I t’s round. Its screen is slightly domed glass; its barrel has a mirror finish that reflects your wal l. Its color screen glows orange when it’s heating , blue when it’s cooling; it turns on when you app roach it, and discreetly goes dark when nobody’s n earby. Sweating over attractiveness makes sense; after al l, this is an object you mount on your wall at eye level. A thermostat should be one of the most bea utiful items on your wall, not the ugliest. RADICAL CHANGE 2 The Nest has Wi-Fi, so it’s onlin e. It can download software updates. You can progr am it on a Web site. You can also use a free iPhone or Android app, fro m anywhere you happen to be, to see the current te mperature and change it — to warm up the house bef ore you arrive, for example. (At this moment, vaca tion-home owners all over the world are wiping dro ol off their keyboards.) RADICAL CHANGE 3 Learning. The Nest is supposed to program itself — and save you energy in the proce ss. When you first install the Nest, you turn its ring to change the temperature as you would a norm al thermostat — at bedtime, when you leave for wor k, and so on. A big, beautiful readout shows you t he new setting and lets you know how long it will take your house to reach that temperature. That in formation, Nest says, is intended to discourage pe ople from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees, for example, thinking that the temperature will r ise to 70 faster. (It doesn’t.) Over the course of a week or so, the thermostat le arns from your manual adjustments. It notes when t hat happened, and what the temperature and humidit
y were, and so on. And it begins to set its own sc hedule based on your living patterns. RADICAL CHANGE 4 Energy savings. Let’s face it, $2 50 is a lot to pay for a thermostat. But Nest says that you’ll recoup that through energy savings in less than two years. The mere act of having a correctly programmed ther mostat is the big one, of course. Why should you w aste money heating or cooling the downstairs when you’re in bed upstairs? Or when you’re away at wor k all day? But the Nest’s smartphone-based components offer o ther goodies, like Auto Away. The Nest contains tw o proximity sensors (near and far), which detect w hether anybody is actually in a room. If the senso rs decide that nobody’s home, they let the tempera ture drop or rise to an outer limit you’ve defined — say, 65 in winter, 80 in summer — even if that absence isn’t part of your normal schedule. This feature is useless, of course, if your thermo stat can’t see the room — say, if it’s in a closet or behind an open door. But often I’ll return fro m a day trip, having forgotten to turn down the he at, and see Auto Away on the screen. Good ol’ Nest! Nest says that turning down your thermostat by eve n a single degree can save you 5 percent in energy . To that end, it offers a little motivational log o: a green leaf. It glows brighter as you turn the ring beyond your standard comfort zone. As a posi tive-reinforcement technique, it’s a lot more effe ctive than an exhortation from Jimmy Carter to put on a sweater. This all sounds spectacular, of course, and mostly , it is. But feathering my Nest wasn’t all smooth sailing.
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