Saturday, January 4, 2014

Nest - Data-free Badness

I have two Nests installed in my house for my upstairs and downstairs HVAC systems for some time now (since 2012-02-26), but I haven't written about it since I made my first post with my initial thoughts after installation.  I thought I'd share my current thoughts on the product.

What's Awesome (in no particular order):


  • Super easy installation.  Best in class instructions.  Covered more in my original post.
  • Ability to control my thermostat remotely via an iPhone app.  Cool stuff.  My kids (who live on the upper level) and I have a bit of a war with setting the temperature during the summer, but I always win.
  • Auto-Away: it learns when you are not around and automatically cuts back on your energy usage.
  • Monthly reports: Nest will email you a short summary of your energy usage and 
  • Beautiful design: it looks good and its easy to use.

What's (still) Not Awesome

  • I still can't get my data.  It turns out that I could have if I was willing to go through some gymnastics (see Gregory Booma's blog post - he provides a script to import the data into R, one of my favorite tools).  Unfortunately, Gregory has updated this as of 2013-12-03 saying that due to Nest introducing their API, the functionality described in his post is not available any longer.  I'm inclined to sign up as a developer, but would rather have intermittent access to all of my historical data, I don't want to have to set up a server to capture my data.  This was a $250 thermostat.  I think that they could give me the ability to download a CSV every so often.
  • Given that I can't look at my data myself, the app and website still seem very underdeveloped.  You just can't look at much.  10 days of history is it.  That is pitiful.  See the graphic below.  Its crazy how much more my system ran last night (almost non-stop) when the temperature fell to 10ºF.  Sadly, that's a lot of propane.
    • But what was running?  Was it just the fan running (I have the fan on the 15 minutes an hour schedule for greater comfort), or was the furnace chugging away burning propane?  Really guys, you couldn't figure out a way to represent this on the same graph?
    • Why are graphics covered up to the point I have no idea what they are?
    • Why can't I see a sparkline of the temperature in the house?  The humidity?  This seems stupidly obvious that I'd want to be able to see the history here.
  • I can't connect the Nest to supplemental temperature sensors.  I'd love to have between six and 12 wifi (or Z-wave) sensors reporting to the Nest and be able to set up rules such as:
    • Run heating (cooling) if any of the sensors gets below (above) a defined set point.
    • Warning if the temperature gradient is higher than a defined level (e.g., 10ºF).  Help me trouble shooting by showing me the variation of all of the sensor over time.  I'd love to be able to tweak my registers in a way that limits variation and increases comfort.
    • Allow me to activate register boosters (my term): basically, registers with supplemental fans to increase airflow to particular rooms or sections of the house. 


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