Home Nest Thermostat: Game Changer or Gimmick?

You have seen the ads for the Nest Home Thermostat and marveled that a former Apple executive left to reinvent the thermostat industry that had been stagnant for decades. Perhaps you did some cursory research on the Nest to see if it was worth it for your home. To find out if the Nest if worth it, you need to look at the bigger picture.

Price point
The first thing that jumps out about the nest is the price. The price of the nest is around $250 which puts it at about the top of the range of programmable thermostats on the market. If you only intend to use it the same way that you would use your current $50 programmable thermostats to achieve your current comfort level, you need to decide if the Nest is worth the extra $200 for a more esthetically pleasing thermostat. But if you plan to put the Nest to work utilizing all the bells and while to achieve greater energy saving then the cost may be recouped in energy saving through the lifetime of the unit.

Talking and Learning 
One of the advantages of the Nest is that if you have two of them, they can talk to one another. This is an excellent feature in a dual zone home so that the upstairs and the downstairs units are not working against one another because someone decided to leave one on "hold". While other thermostats are programmable they work on an individual level so you have to know when you will be in each zone and manually program the units accordingly.

Most programmable thermostats are only programmable; the Nest selling point is that it learns your habits. It can tell when you are not home and after working with it for a couple of weeks it automatically learns your patterns and follows them. This system can help reduce energy use in your home, but this is not necessarily an advantage for a family with an erratic schedule. Your pattern may be so distinct that it is not able to be learned for more efficiency. This is probably not a problem for most people, but it may be for you.

Wi-Fi capable
The ability to control your thermostat with your phone is cool and being able to check the heat from miles away can be fun but is it worth it. Before the invention of the Nest how many times did you sit at work and ponder the temperature of your home? Probably not much, so why would you worry about it more now that you can change the temperature from your phone? There is a time when you forget to change turn the temperature down, but do they justify putting in a new device for that ability? Only you can decide that. Even though the Nest is Wi-Fi capable it is still a stand able device that cannot be integrated into a whole home automation scheme which may need to be considered when looking at your big picture plans.

The bottom line is that whether replacing your existing thermostat is worth it is an individual decision. It may be worth it to one person and not to another, depending on the cost and overall home heating and cooling strategy. Only you can decide if the Nest fits into your budget and overall home automation plans.