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Nest Learning Thermostat
6.0
final rating

reviewed on
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Criteria Comments Rating
  • Design and form factor No comments great!
  • Ease of use No comments good
Detailed review
This is by far the most overrated piece of technology of the 21st century. It's got a great cool/geek factor, but it is just absolutely not impressive and I have a very hard time convincing myself that it was worth the additional $200 this thing costs to have it figure out my preferred thermostat schedule for me. The UI is certainly much, much better than any thermostat I've used in the past and I love going to the web UI to use sliders and temp settings for different times of day, day of week - but people revere this thing like it has solved our dependence on foreign oil and created lasting peace in the Middle East. It's good and if you have the disposable income to throw at it, go for it.

Comments (3) subscribe to this review's comments

dennyc69

dennyc69

Your review doesn't make any sense, you like it but you don't ? Can you be more detailed about the things you don't like about it.
slipperyp

slipperyp

Imagine integrating wifi and a bunch of LEDs on your pants zipper. You've just gone halfway toward creating the followup to the Nest.

It's cool, you might want it, but it probably not dramatically better than the thing you just had. It adds some interesting features (they might actually even be pretty compelling), but if you were pretty smart, you could probably do 95% of what you can now do a little more easily with the thing you had before that cost 25% as much.

Things the Nest can do that my last thermostat couldn't that are actually kind of useful:
- let me control the temperature in my house from a remote device (but if I competently programmed it, I probably don't actually ever need this)

Here's what my old thermostat could do that the Nest also does, but does better:
- tell me the temperature in a pretty display
- "learn" my schedule for heating preferences more conveniently (note: not better)

That's about it. I don't think it's worth $200 but it's a pretty, fun toy and I'm a sucker with too much money so I'd probably buy one again, but it feels very lavish - hence the angst you correctly recognize in my review. Does that help?
slipperyp

slipperyp

Also - read the other reviews and look for something that says:
- this thing actually, demonstrably saved me money
- this thing actually does anything I couldn't do with my last thermostat

I'm not impressed that it can go to auto-away mode. I could set my old thermostat to "Away". Also when I've set it to "Away" and I come back, it doesn't seem to recognize my activity in the room to come back from "Away". I have not noticed a reduction in heating costs but maybe I'm the rare genius who managed to actually set his home thermostat before. This is cool and it is a lot - A LOT - easier to interact with than a traditional thermostat, but traditional thermostats just aren't that hard to use and they do (AFAICT) just about everything the nest does.

This isn't the most well articulated review I've written and I have 0 + votes and I don't expect that to change - especially given how strongly people seem to feel about the nest (maybe this is an instance of the 6/21/2012 David Pogue column on device loyalty).
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