4 ms·

Because unless the house is occupied 24/7, there are substantial savings to be had. While I don't have a Nest, I put a similar timer on my water heater and sav

• Symbiote 11y ago
  When I was a child in, my parents had a mechanical thermostat with a timer. So did my grandma, and her system was even older. You could set two pairs of heating times, and control which (or both/none) were used. There was an override until the next set point. This was 1980s stuff, or maybe even earlier. The interface was far easier to use than any digital one I've seen.
  • __david__ 11y ago
    Yeah, even my mid 90s built house had that. It was easy to see how it worked, too—a big spinning wheel that represented the 24 hours in a day. There were little plastic arrows you'd snap onto the outside of the ring at the appropriate time. Red ones and blue ones. Each color had an indentation in a slightly different place so as the wheel spun past the "now" marker, it would flip one of two switches. The switches controlled energy saving mode. It actually wasn't super intuitive (in cooling mode it inverted the sense of energy saving mode, if I recall correctly), but it was easy and never failed me once I set it up.