House thermostat that "learns" from iPod designer

[Video Link] The Nest thermostat was designed by Tom Fadell, the "father of the iPod." It will cost $250 and will be available next month.

Nest learns from your temperature adjustments, programs itself to keep you comfortable, and guides you to energy savings. You can control the thermostat from anywhere using a smartphone, tablet or laptop, and Nest never stops learning, even as your life and the seasons change.

Nest (Via Cult of Mac)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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glatt1

It’s so much simpler and more elegant than the programmable one we have right now. But I’m pretty cheap, and $250 is a lot. I really like the remote feature though. I hate coming back from vacation in the summer time and it taking several hours for the air conditioning to get the house cooled off. It would be sweet to turn on the AC a few hours before we expected to be home.
dculberson

74 in the depths of the winter! No wonder they need a “smart” thermostat!

More seriously, before anyone complains about the $250 thermostat – that’s more than average but not ridiculous compared to a nice 365-day programmable thermostat. A Honeywell Chronotherm, for example, is over $150. And it looks about like the digital thermostat in the “before” part of the video. A basic web-connected thermostat is typically around $200. Not that this is necessarily any better, that remains to be seen. It’s certainly prettier!
- Mark_Frauenfelder
  
  I was hoping that it was summer and they were setting the air conditioning at 74.
  - Guest
    
    not that that scenario is much more responsible.
  - dculberson
    
    I had hoped the same, especially considering how they were dressed in their house, but then the man walks in bundled up in full winter gear, scarf, etc, and cranks the thermostat to 74. Yikes! They could save a bundle by putting on a sweater and lowering the temperature by 8 degrees.
- Paul Renault
  
  I agree: 74°F?! I bet they cool the house down to 68°F in the Summer, though.
  
  I replaced (almost) all the thermostats in my house with digital TRIAC thermostats – Aube Electronic’s TH104D (now a ‘Plus’). They cost less than $50.
  
  Bonus: as the temperature approaches the setpoint temp, the thermostat pulses the power to the heaters, so that the heater’s effective wattage decreases. No more pinging from the baseboard heaters when they turn on or off and no more overshooting the setpoint temp.
  
  I suspect that less heat is lost through the wall where the heaters are, as most of the time the heaters are only a few degrees hotter than the room temperature – which my furniture and drapes appreciate.
  
  Oh, and I set the temperatures to 15°C, except for morning and evening at 17°C When I use the wood stove, none of the baseboard heaters in the house have to turn on.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  74 in the depths of the winter!
  
  I keep it at 80° in the winter. And 80° in the summer, as well.
Guest

Wow, not once was the thing set below 70. That device has a lot of learning to do.
glatt1

It really is pretty. And I like how it learns based on your daily input over time.
rabidpotatochip

I am extremely interested in this but the video left me with one major question: how long does it take to learn? For example, is this thing going to try heating my house at night for the first week or two or will it “get it” after the first day?

And as a complete aside: that’s the prettiest thermostat I’ve ever seen.
flowergardenslayer

I’ve got an installed a number of programmable thermostats. For the most part, people’s routines are fixed by their working lives, and a simple $50 programmable thermostat is all they need. I’m pretty dubious of their claims of being able to improve things 2-3x fold (10% ->20-30%). I think this is mainly another gizmo to get a very expensive “Wow” out of your friends.
- slab99_99
  
  My new air conditioners came with programmable thermostats. I’ve read the manuals several times, and still can’t figure out how to get them programmed correctly. So, they stay on “HOLD” and I manually change them. A learning thermostat would be much more simple for most people.
frijole

FWIW, the “father of the iPod” who founded Nest was Tony Fadell, and the designer was Mike Matas (http://www.mikematas.com/)
Knarf Black

This might be right up my alley. The little lady is a teacher, and it is annoying to reprogram the whole home/away schedule twice a year.
- b h
  
  for $150 i’ll do it for you and you’ll save $100
Dave Bullock

This is great, I’d love to buy one… but the store is overloaded with bb traffic! Oh well, I’ll just have to wait. =]
yadayada

Man, what I wouldn’t give to “learn” from an iPod designer!
Emo Pinata

I like it because it looks a hell of a lot better than an off-white square, rectangle, or circle: http://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&q=thermostat&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1920&bih=1075
Justin Sabe

I have wondered why thermostats haven’t been part of hacker projects more. You have a relay, temperature sensors, and an interface. I don’t see why we don’t have $45, flat, touch screen, e-ink thermostats yet.
- rabidpotatochip
  
  I would love a moddable thermostat, specifically one that would keep the inside temperature relative to the outside temperature, to a user-defined minimum, during the summer. For example, if it’s 28C outside it’s 25C inside, if it’s 30C outside it’s 27C inside, but if it’s 20C or below outside it doesn’t do anything. I find that too great a temperature differential between inside and out makes for feeling pretty crappy.
ppdd

ZOMG ITS A WASTE OF MONEY BECAUSE IT’S PRETTY!

I have no idea what people are complaining about. $250 is *nothing* for a product that adds this much control to my heater. This pays for itself in 2 years if it cuts my bill by 5%. 10 years if it cuts it by 1%. I have no doubt it can do that just by applying some more fine grained control over my furnace and giving me the ability to tell it I’ll be getting home a couple hours late. Weekends are especially troublesome, since I never know exactly what my schedule will be.
http://profiles.google.com/jwbaker Jeffrey Baker

Pre-ordering is for suckers. Doesn’t anybody launch a product *after* it’s ready to be produced any more?
http://claimid.com/jpw JPW

EFFING CLICHÉ SOUNDTRACK! Immediately I sense I won’t want to buy this, and I’m right.
geekcalif

NICE!!!
http://egypt.urnash.com Egypt Urnash

Damn. I want onea these.

Except I have three rooms in my apartment, each with their own separate thermostat, so I actually want three of these and I don’t think I want them $750 worth.

I think I’m going to subscribe to their blog and see if they come down in a year or two.

(And this thing is in stark contrast to other thermostats. When I was living with several people, my housemates installed a “programmable” thermostat that was nearly impossible to use – I was never sure if I was telling it to change the temperature right now, or attempting to edit its program.)
Aleknevicus

I think this could work great if you had a lifestyle that was easy to predict. (But then, how much better is it than a standard programmable thermostat?)

The real problems arise when your lifestyle deviates from what your thermostat expects. Stay up late one night? Suddenly the house is cold because your thermostat thinks you’re supposed to be in bed. Going on vacation? Your thermostat doesn’t think so, so it’s been diligently heating the house the whole time.

I expect the device features overrides for the situations I’ve described, but I’d rather not have to consider my thermostat’s “needs and desires” when heating my home. I’d prefer a device that was dumb but obedient.
jgs

It’s pretty and as it happens, my current thermostat is on its last legs so it’s timely too. However, I am somewhat skeptical about the whole ‘learning’ thing in the face of a highly unpredictable schedule such as my own. I also wonder whether it has some kind of child-proofing lockout — it’s pretty, shiny, and to judge from the video, a single touch will adjust the temperature. Not a great mix with a three-year-old.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BOOM27DBLMZQIJVK4BQLE7K5YA Nagurski

I remember in 1986, a Japanese friend of mine asking in astonishment, ‘In America you DON’T have any way to warm up the house and run your bath so they are ready for you when you get home?’
InsertFingerHere

Arduino this plz.

Very sexy though.
Ipo

My observation seems to indicate that obese-ish people waste energy on ridiculous AC cooling in summers, while skinny peops heat insanely in winters.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  My friends who keep their AC at 72° self-describe as ‘fat, sweaty people’. I’m on the thin, always cold side.
penguinchris

I haven’t had control over a thermostat at any point in my life… my parents’ house in NY (with central air and heating) has one, but I never had control over it and I haven’t lived there for extended periods since leaving for college in 2004.

I guess I hadn’t really thought about it, but I’m really kind of amazed at how much most people attempt to control the temperature in their house through non-passive means. I guess I’ve just been living with other cheap young people but the electricity for air conditioning is so expensive it only gets turned on when it’s really, really hot.

I’m not amazed at the technology, just that people are willing to pay whatever price to have their house be exactly the temperature they want. Temperature differences just don’t bother me that much, I guess, and most can be countered with varying amounts of clothing, etc.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  …the electricity for air conditioning is so expensive it only gets turned on when it’s really, really hot.
  
  For about a quarter of the country, it’s over 100° for 3 – 4 months per year. And another half of the country has dewpoints in the 70s.
Jeremy Wilson

The order form supports Canada but doesn’t allow non-US postal codes. Typical crap web design.
http://twitter.com/hybridtoaster chris

I really want one of these, but I don’t think I’d ever use it. My apartment building doesn’t have A/C (I’d only use it once or twice a year if it did), and I’ve never needed the heat. The heater is basically a small space heater mounted in the wall, so it doesn’t even support an external thermostat.

Oh the joys of living in Seattle where the only temperature control I need is my window :)