Experience with Nest?

[chewie]

Hey guys, I have had my Z-Wave stats for a few years now and they are nice, I like the integration with HS and all, but really they bring very little to the table besides schedules and the ability to trigger events to them. Which I do very infrequently.

I have several friends who have gotten Nest stats and have raved about them and I know there are folks on the board here, and I believe that a Nest plugin was even written.

Would some of you with Nest stats mind sharing your experiences with them? What do you like? What do you not like? How is the HS integration?

[langenet]

A budy I work with showed me his Nest app on his iphone. The UI looks polished and I know that's one feature he likes. I'm thinking on make a nest my next thermostat when/if I go to HS3.
As for using it any different than I do with my TXB16 stat, I'm not sure if I would make use of the proximity feature of the Nest and would likely use it the same way I currently use my stat.

[jlrichar]

I have had the nest for a while. The best comparison I can come up with is to cell phones. My previous thermostat is like an 80's car-phone, and my nest is like the iPhone 4. I currently have an iPhone 5, and I don't think the nest is quite there yet.

The nest is very well made, extremely easy to install, intuitive, and mostly just works. The only thing I don't like is that they promised us an API so that we can finally have plugins, and Nest has not delivered this yet. They are currently past due based on when they said it would be ready. Granted, they did get purchased by Google between the promise and missed delivery date.

If the API is ever released then in addition to the temp, and humidity sensors, it could present light and motion to HS as well. The motion sensor seems to be much better than an x10 hawkeye I have close to mine. Also it could function as a night light.

If the nest protects are included in the API, then that is more motion detectors/night lights not to mention CO detectors. Of course those have to come back onto the market.

Hope this helps.

[Person]

IMHO Nest doesn't make much sense with HS or any home automation system. It is designed to run on its own. Z-wave/UPB/etc t-stats are designed to be run by HS (and on their own if you wish).

For example many folks asked for Nest app to tie into alarm clock on their iPhone. Why? Because nest cannot always predict your schedule. Nest didn't deliver that yet nor they opened API.

With HS this is simple - I have HS alarm clock that turn on heat 30 mins before wake up time and at wakeup slowly turns on music and lights. There is little to no value for nest in this system.

Here is good article where Control4 says same thing - yes we can integrate nest (poorly) if you wish. Using our t-stat you get full feature as we can control our t-stat fully:

http://www.cepro.com/article/nest_op...mation_partner

[jlrichar]

If all you care about is a dumb switch to turn on the heater then Nest may not be right for you. After-all, with homeseer that is all that is really needed. With the right dumb switch you can get most of what the Nest offers out of the box, and some stuff it doesn't. For the Nest, I do agree that the API needs to be released to get the full potential though. Until that happens it is just a really good smart thermostat, that can:

• Be setup and controlled via smartphone
• Be controlled remotely via cloud based login from any modern web browser
• Set your HVAC based on occupancy
• Track your daily/weekly/monthly energy usage and compare to area average
• Be used as a great night light because the motion detector works in complete darkness
• Is easily programmed, with a learning program based on when you are actually home
• Has an easy and very cool to use physical control (you turn the whole thing to raise or lower heat, press the whole thing to select)

All this stuff works when Homeseer doesn't (cough). All those features come within ~10-20 minutes of turning it on the first time. Name any other thermostat that can do all of that in that time-frame.

With a robust HS plugin the Nest could be notified by HS of occupancy, and the reverse, and setpoints could be programmatically set via scripts, events, and HSTouch (presumably).

I own a nest. I obviously like it a lot. I have owned a truckload of dumb programmable thermostats in my day, and they were all put to shame by the first thermostat I had that integrated with homseer--My HAI omnistat I. The main advantage was that I could program it with homeseer instead of the calculator watch screen it had. The NEST is just way way more engineered than that HAI though. I would still probably be using the HAI and liking it if I had not upgraded my Heater to a 2 stage heater, which the HAI did not support. But now that I have the Nest I would not like the cheap watch screen, plastic fantastic buttons, low quality electronics, and painful to program/setup/integrate thermostats of yesteryear. IMHO

It is hard to compare to other thermostat until you have owned it, had to set them all up, and had WAF assessed.