4 ms·

Sorry but this product is horse shit. I have nothing but contempt for it. 1. It's expensive at £250. I doubt it makes a saving on that scale over 10 years. In

by bananas 13y ago

Sorry but this product is horse shit. I have nothing but contempt for it. 1. It's expensive at £250. I doubt it makes a saving on that scale over 10 years. In fact I suspect it costs more over time (i.e. when it goes wrong and when it gets your routine wrong). 2. Most houses do have thermostats. In fact most of them have remotely programmable ones with week schedules at least and a precise user interface (mine is down to half a degree). Plus every radiator (apart from one) has a thermostat on it. 3. Is this really a problem or a manufactured one? If I'm hot I turn the thermostat down. If I'm cold, I turn it up. If I go out, I get back to a cold house and make some tea until the heating warms up. I'll set a minimum temperature at most. 4. I'm sure this will quite happily piss away your gas if you decide to go on holiday. I bet it didn't see that coming! Perhaps I've got the flu - does it know that? 5. Based on the fact that it connects to the WiFi, I suggest that it quite happily reports your data away somewhere which is surely useful. And I bet it knows who you are. How long before you start getting junk mail from NPower saying "have you tried our new tariff"? 6. There's even more shit to go wrong now which will require a CORGI engineer to come out and fix at great cost. Sorry but it's an excessive product for a non-existent problem.

arethuza 13y ago
Actually, I do think domestic energy management is a real problem - we spend over £1000 between gas and electricity for the winter quarter and I'd love to have a simple way of getting a decent breakdown of those costs so I can do something about it.
- bananas 13y ago
  That's because your house is broken or you're on the wrong tariff or you like it like the tropics. My entire year in a 4 bedroom detached house is around the £726 mark for gas and £540 for electricity. That's not bad, especially as there's 5 of us and I work from home. We have proper double-glazing (with decent glass), insulation, floor underlay etc.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    Well, calling it "broken" is maybe a bit harsh - but we have a fairly large top floor "double upper" flat in Edinburgh's New Town that has had some 'interesting' modifications in its history. Between having to get the agreement of neighbours, planning regulations (it's a listed building), conservation area rules etc. changing anything is a nightmare. [e.g. Deciding what colour to get our external pipework painted took months...]
    - bananas 13y ago
      Ah yes I know the sort of things. I lived in a similar sort of place in Nottingham a few years back. Our front wall had to be replaced with the right kind of stone after a car drove through it. Total pain and very expensive (£19000 for a wall!) In your case it's the bureaucracy that is broken because "conservation" appears to stump common sense and energy efficiency. I'd argue the latter is so tied to the former that it makes little sense to not modify listed buildings. I wish you luck in the future with that one - we moved on after much pain to a easy to modify Victorian detached place.
      - arethuza 13y ago
        Actually the bureaucracy isn't too bad - by far the worst is simply getting agreement with other owners over what to do! Buying property in a place like the New Town of Edinburgh is going to come with difficulties and costs - and frankly given the option of staying where we are or moving to a new build I'd take the older buildings every time!
onion2k 13y ago
The average UK heating bill is about £650 a year (based on 2012 numbers with a ~10% increase). Assuming you have a reasonably stable routine I can imagine a better thermostat could save 15% on your energy bill - amounting to about £100 a year. It could be worthwhile financially. Of course though, that would need to be tested. Fortunately there's a big queue of early adopters just waiting to do that for us.
- bananas 13y ago
  could isn't enough to spend £250 on a 40% return in a year on such a low value. If you have £250 floating around then £100 difference over a year on your heating bill isn't likely a major issue either. It doesn't make sense, even as an early adopter. It makes an interesting purchase for the shiny squad with a disposable income but that's about it.
  - TheAnimus 13y ago
    As an early adopter, I would want it to have some kind of 'geofencing' logic. Given that I currently use as my main mobile a Windows Phone and the announcements that they are doing something around this area come (should be detailed at Build), I'd like this. I live alone, I have a gas and electric bill of £800 pa, often I'm not home, I'll work late, end up in another country that night etc. Having something that lets me switch off remotely the heating would be useful to a point. But I only have the heating on for maybe 5 months a year. What would be useful, is some software that realised I was heading home, automatically turning it on. That realised there is no way I'd be home within 30 min, so delayed heating going on. Without me interacting with it. As for control of the temp, well, as mentioned thermostatic valves do a great job of that. I just want remote On / Off timer functionality. £250 is far beyond what I'd consider reasonable for that. I'd sooner have an array of Zigbee sensors for the temp, a controller for the solenoid and something to bridge it to TCP/IP land. This strikes me as not only ugly (you wouldn't notice the current thermostat) but pointlessly over engineered in one aspect, whilst ignoring the most important one. If you have to remember to interact with the app, it won't work. I could save the odd £2 or £3 if I remembered to flick a switch before leaving home on a morning.
  - 13y ago
gerbal 13y ago
#4 it has an autoaway mode, which will determine a using motion sensor if you are around. And if not it won't heat or cool aside from your scheduled events.
- bananas 13y ago
  So it knows you're in and tells everyone. No thanks. That data is pretty valuable to the wrong sort of people. There is NOTHING good that can come from this product.
  - gerbal 13y ago
    Who does the Nest tell? It doesn't have any sort of social networking bullshit. The only way someone can find out if you are in or not is if someone gains access to your Nest account. When you are at home is pretty obvious to Google anyway.

by bananas 13y ago

arethuza 13y ago

Actually, I do think domestic energy management is a real problem - we spend over £1000 between gas and electricity for the winter quarter and I'd love to have a simple way of getting a decent breakdown of those costs so I can do something about it.

bananas 13y ago
That's because your house is broken or you're on the wrong tariff or you like it like the tropics. My entire year in a 4 bedroom detached house is around the £726 mark for gas and £540 for electricity. That's not bad, especially as there's 5 of us and I work from home. We have proper double-glazing (with decent glass), insulation, floor underlay etc.
- arethuza 13y ago
  Well, calling it "broken" is maybe a bit harsh - but we have a fairly large top floor "double upper" flat in Edinburgh's New Town that has had some 'interesting' modifications in its history. Between having to get the agreement of neighbours, planning regulations (it's a listed building), conservation area rules etc. changing anything is a nightmare. [e.g. Deciding what colour to get our external pipework painted took months...]
  - bananas 13y ago
    Ah yes I know the sort of things. I lived in a similar sort of place in Nottingham a few years back. Our front wall had to be replaced with the right kind of stone after a car drove through it. Total pain and very expensive (£19000 for a wall!) In your case it's the bureaucracy that is broken because "conservation" appears to stump common sense and energy efficiency. I'd argue the latter is so tied to the former that it makes little sense to not modify listed buildings. I wish you luck in the future with that one - we moved on after much pain to a easy to modify Victorian detached place.
    - arethuza 13y ago
      Actually the bureaucracy isn't too bad - by far the worst is simply getting agreement with other owners over what to do! Buying property in a place like the New Town of Edinburgh is going to come with difficulties and costs - and frankly given the option of staying where we are or moving to a new build I'd take the older buildings every time!

onion2k 13y ago

The average UK heating bill is about £650 a year (based on 2012 numbers with a ~10% increase). Assuming you have a reasonably stable routine I can imagine a better thermostat could save 15% on your energy bill - amounting to about £100 a year. It could be worthwhile financially. Of course though, that would need to be tested. Fortunately there's a big queue of early adopters just waiting to do that for us.

bananas 13y ago
could isn't enough to spend £250 on a 40% return in a year on such a low value. If you have £250 floating around then £100 difference over a year on your heating bill isn't likely a major issue either. It doesn't make sense, even as an early adopter. It makes an interesting purchase for the shiny squad with a disposable income but that's about it.
- TheAnimus 13y ago
  As an early adopter, I would want it to have some kind of 'geofencing' logic. Given that I currently use as my main mobile a Windows Phone and the announcements that they are doing something around this area come (should be detailed at Build), I'd like this. I live alone, I have a gas and electric bill of £800 pa, often I'm not home, I'll work late, end up in another country that night etc. Having something that lets me switch off remotely the heating would be useful to a point. But I only have the heating on for maybe 5 months a year. What would be useful, is some software that realised I was heading home, automatically turning it on. That realised there is no way I'd be home within 30 min, so delayed heating going on. Without me interacting with it. As for control of the temp, well, as mentioned thermostatic valves do a great job of that. I just want remote On / Off timer functionality. £250 is far beyond what I'd consider reasonable for that. I'd sooner have an array of Zigbee sensors for the temp, a controller for the solenoid and something to bridge it to TCP/IP land. This strikes me as not only ugly (you wouldn't notice the current thermostat) but pointlessly over engineered in one aspect, whilst ignoring the most important one. If you have to remember to interact with the app, it won't work. I could save the odd £2 or £3 if I remembered to flick a switch before leaving home on a morning.
- 13y ago

gerbal 13y ago

#4 it has an autoaway mode, which will determine a using motion sensor if you are around. And if not it won't heat or cool aside from your scheduled events.

bananas 13y ago
So it knows you're in and tells everyone. No thanks. That data is pretty valuable to the wrong sort of people. There is NOTHING good that can come from this product.
- gerbal 13y ago
  Who does the Nest tell? It doesn't have any sort of social networking bullshit. The only way someone can find out if you are in or not is if someone gains access to your Nest account. When you are at home is pretty obvious to Google anyway.