10 ms·

Really? $200 for a predictive thermostat, with a lame excuse to stream energy usage data and proximity data (Nest detects humans) out of your home? Id rather p

• taylorwc 13y ago
  Does that mean you place no value on aesthetics or industrial design of a beautiful device? Don't get me wrong, I agree that it's overpriced, but I do at least place some value on a well-made device.
  • Fasebook 13y ago
    I don't like the aesthetics, no. From a engineering perspective, it is not much of an achievement of R&D, imo. They probably paid more for their Photoshoppers.
  • bentcorner 13y ago
    I'd pay a few dollars more, maybe. At the end of the day as long as it isn't garishly awful I don't particularly care. For example, this one does everything I need and costs 10% of a nest: http://amzn.com/B002RL9BIM http://amzn.com/B002RL9BIM It actually has a backlight which is a step up from what I have today. It's just not important to me. Definitely not $250 important. I could definitely use a smarter thermostat, but my vision of the future is a wireless dumb thermostat paired to a home PC that is connected to other sensors. While those dumb devices could be made to interoperate with a cloud service (this is probably where Google is playing), I'd rather keep that control in-house (haha).
    • Ensorceled 13y ago
      Wow. That is ugly. Imagine you just, like me, bought your dream house. In the den you installed new hardware floors and custom builtin bookshelves, that you built yourself in a few hundred hours, using a gorgeous hardwood and a stain you picked after testing more than a dozen shades. Which thermostat goes on the wall, about 15 inches from the bookselves. That POS or a Nest?
      • reinhardt 13y ago
        Can't tell if serious...
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      • bentcorner 13y ago
        Honestly, I could be living in Bill Gates' house and I'd get the same thermostat. In fact, I'd be guaranteed to, since if I can afford that I can afford to squander some money on heating my home. I have one temperature that I'm comfortable at, and that's pretty much the end of the story. I think I've invested more time in this thread than I have interacting with my thermostat for the last year. I don't care how it looks above some minimum bar, as long as it works, and works reliably. (There's a caveat there - in a large home I assume you run into issues with uneven heating. But that's beyond the purview of a simple thermostat. Even a $250 one.)
        • deleted 13y ago
          [deleted]
      • marcosdumay 13y ago
        Well, ok, now I disagree :) (because up to now, I was agreeing with everybody.) It's not that ugly, but more important, it's white and not shiny. If I was looking for a thermostat for a completely decorated house, that's exactly the thing I'd look for (unless the walls were colored, in that case I'd get somebody to paint it). The one thing I wouldn't want people to look at in my house is the thermostat (and that's quite a thing for me to say, because my house has even decorative power outlets). Somebody with a great sense of aestetics may be able to place a shinny thermostat in a way that it looks nice. That's not for 99% of us, and few people do hire the other 1% for helping them. But, anyway, I'm here just for the fun, because I'm certainly not looking for a thermostat.
• wmf 13y ago
  Realistically Nest is a luxury product and the rest is just rationalization. But luxury gadgets is a legitimate market.
  • justincormack 13y ago
    Yes, but Apple's market not Google's...
    • jonlucc 13y ago
      I don't think this is strictly true. I believe rich and poor use Google search. Perhaps iOS and Android have different markets, but this acquisition will bring former iOS guys into the Google realm.
  • smackfu 13y ago
    An interesting question is whether Google will keep it a luxury product.
    • CoryG89 13y ago
      This is exactly what I was thinking. They will use their resources to make it cheaper, mass manufacture them, and start selling them to next to nothing just to get the data. More power to 'em.
• nate_meurer 13y ago
  The price makes me choke as well. But I think Nest's real value is as a market distruptor, the evidence being Honeywell's lawsuit and furious attempts to update their own products with comparable features.
  • matt-attack 13y ago
    You're certainly right that they kicked Honeywell in the rear. After years of making the same damned device, they finally released an actually nice thermostat. In fact, I was recently in the market for a new thermostat which I could control on my drive home, or from bed, or whatever. After researching thoroughly, and I opted for Honeywell's latest touchscreen device (over the Nest v2 which has apparently been having a lot of problems). I must say it's actually quite nice to use. I can put it in a mode where it does precisely what I want. Hold a temperature until told otherwise, and let me choose that temperature from my desktop or iPhone from anywhere. Such a mode so simple that the Nest refuses to allow it.
    • dangrossman 13y ago
      You're misinformed. Nest can hold a set temperature like any other thermostat. It'll do so better than any other thermostat, in fact, by learning the efficiency of your heater and A/C so that it doesn't overshoot your targets, and takes into account whether the thermostat is in direct sunlight part of the day, and airflow in your house. It can also be told to hold a temperature forever, to hold a threshold forever (cool if it gets above 75, heat if it gets below 60), you can set a detailed schedule manually, you can tell it to hold a temperature until a certain time, or you can tell it to just kick on the fan for the next X minutes without changing the temperature then turn back off. Turning on/off auto-schedule is one click if you want that feature, like all its other learning features. I've never run into any kind of bug with mine. You can change the temperature it's holding at from your iPhone or desktop from anywhere, along with all its other settings. http://i.imgur.com/3gRj67L.png http://i.imgur.com/3gRj67L.png http://i.imgur.com/VNwz1ZF.png http://i.imgur.com/VNwz1ZF.png
      • dsl 13y ago
• nikhizzle 13y ago
  I made the money back heating my house in the bay area in 5 months. The Nest is just much better at using energy efficiently.
  • VLM 13y ago
    That's a savings of $60 on heating per month, for five months. The laws of thermodynamics continue to be enforced regardless of bubble or not, so I think it quite impossible to save more than 10%. So you're averaging $600 or more to heat. Averaging... I live in Wisconsin where I would be hard pressed to spend $300/month during the worst imaginable weather (and this is five months... the worst imaginable weather is .. January. Three months earlier or later isn't too bad, back to $100/mo or less). With the recent polar vortex event settled right over my house, maybe this will be a $400 month for me... maybe not. I assume by "bay area" and spending $600/mo on heating you mean Prudhoe Bay on the north slope of Alaska?
    • dundun 13y ago
      They have a widget on the Nest store (https://widgets.nest.com/en/calculator/widget https://widgets.nest.com/en/calculator/widget) that estimates energy savings. According to that, a $250/year savings is possible in SF with electric heating and a house over 2000 square feet. Though, the range they provide probably means: a) It is a historically cold year for a prolonged period of time b) You set your heat to 80F all the time With gas heating, it looks almost impossible to save $250... unless you're heating an NBA arena.
    • seregine 13y ago
      In the Bay Area, electricity is priced in tiers, so depending on your usage you can spend 50% of your bill on 10% of the electricity. http://www.pge.com/myhome/myaccount/charges/ http://www.pge.com/myhome/myaccount/charges/
    • foobarian 13y ago
      You can get a Nest thermostat for $150 if you get a rebate.
• ssmoot 13y ago
  I could get the same benefit from a device for $30 of electronics, and however many hours of my free-time I decide to put into such a project. Which would be a lot more than $250 lost, and not a trade I'd be willing to make considering I value my free time with the family a lot more than that. For me this whole thing misses the point though. Saving money is a sort of minimum expectation. The thing that Nest delivers that the competitors don't is ease of use. The previous 3M and Honeywell thermostats I owned before were not cheap, but their displays were terrible and their UX was the stuff of nightmares. It took me probably 10 minutes to setup the Nest by comparison and maintenance has been mostly hands-off. It'll tweak the schedule here and there as necessary. THAT is the value proposition. To throw out the Indiglo monstrosities before it that were inevitably running on some awful schedule because they were too much trouble and came with 50 page instruction manuals in 5 different languages. I don't have time for that. So to me, that's why Nest is successful. It might also explain why their smoke detectors are meh to me. Having a nice UX for something I don't actually need to interface with beyond tapping the occasional "ignore" button just isn't very much of a motivation to spend $100.
  • Fasebook 13y ago
    Uh, good for you? That is not the value proposition, that is trivial information about your personal life. I don't know why you felt it necessary to try to duplicate a manufactured device by hand, but that is most certainly not the value proposition. The value proposition is that $200 and letting Google extract value from your life by way of energy prices will somehow pay for the fractional energy saved when the device realizes that you work on weekdays.
    • ssmoot 13y ago
      I didn't duplicate anything. That was my rationale behind not doing what you suggested. Honestly, I'm having a lot of trouble following what you're trying to say. Now you're talking about unauthorized data use and Google manipulating energy prices? I guess?
      • chronic25 13y ago
• acdha 13y ago
  > You could get the same benefit from a device for $30 of electronics. … in theory but there's no evidence that most people actually see those benefits: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revisions/downloads/thermostats/Summary.pdf http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revis... I was going to say that you should start a company to produce that competitive $30 thermostat but then you confirmed that you have no idea what you're talking about: > The price doesn't justify the energy savings or by product manufacturing cost This might be true if you live in San Diego but in much of the country people pay many hundreds of dollars every month during the winter or summer. If a smarter thermostat saves 10% of that, it pays for itself in less than a year.
  • VLM 13y ago
    "but in much of the country people pay many hundreds of dollars every month during the winter or summer. If a smarter thermostat saves 10% of that" Not mathematically / thermodynamically possible, sorry. I live in a cooler area but not the real cold areas up north. During the recent polar vortex, which momentarily was centered over my house (and I'm not kidding) we got down to -15. (70 - -15) = delta t of 85 degrees. Lets say the magic machine dropped the temp by 5 degrees during the entire event 24x7 to save me energy. Why I'd pay $300 to simply permanently turn a thermostat down and leave it down is a mystery, but stick with me. That would mean a theoretical delta T of a "mere" 80 degrees. That means a maximum theoretical energy savings of (1-80/85)100 = 5%. Not 10%. No, I'm not setting my thermostat back 24x7. No, I don't live in a cold area like the folks up north where it was -30, in fact right now its somewhat above freezing outside. I just don't see it mathematically. True, the weather is not always that bad. Right now its about 35. So 70-35 = 35 degree delta T, and dropping 5 degrees temporarily when unoccupied could save as much as (1-30/35)100 = 14 % if the weather was like this all the time and my house was perma-unoccupied. However, out of 168 hours in a week, my house is unoccupied for 18 hours. The rest of the time is filled by work at home, strange overlapping shifts, etc. So my house can only set back 10% of the time, so I only get 10% of the theoretical maximum savings, or a whopping .... 1%. Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties, but we like it, keeps the riff raff away. So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039. Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops. I would come out ahead both in comfort and financially by purchasing a kerosene heater and $300 of kerosene. Or better yet, even more insulation, or newer windows or whatever. The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.
• Houshalter 13y ago
  You are paranoid. That data isn't worth anything, certainly not billions of dollars.