Protection!

I am renting out a room in my house and went downstairs to check on the smoke detector.  When I did, I found that there was no smoke detector.  I did some quick research on Amazon and found that I would probably spend about $40 for a combination carbon monoxide detector.  I thought for a bit and broke down and bought a nest Protect.  It came today.

While it was more complicated to install than your average everyday smoke detector / carbon monoxide detector, it wasn't very hard.  It does, however, require a mobile device to which you can connect to it via wifi.  Given that I already had a nest Thermostat (and a nest account), there was little to do during the setup process except for name the device (choose the room) and enter my Wifi network's password.  The folks at nest thoughtfully included the first batch of six AAA batteries; I'm hopeful that they last for some meaningful amount of time.  If things go well with this one, I will consider adding more to other levels of the house.  Or, it might be better to wait until they add thermometers to communicate with my nests.

Four screws (provided) later and I was good to go.  Now, my phone will get an alert when the house is on fire!

Frozen Nest

I've just had a reasonably bad experience with my nest.  I guess I had recently agreed for the nest to manage our heat based on the auto-away setting.  When I got home last night from work, the house was crazy cold (60º upstairs), despite the fact that the boys were home all day.  They were home, but by and large just sitting in front of their computers, not doing much of anything involving motion, which the nest would have picked up on indicating that they were home.

The reason that I'm unhappy with this nest experience is two-fold:

• The low temperature tonight is forecasted to be in the single digits and I'm concerned about pipes freezing.  I wanted to keep my house reasonably toasty to minimize the potential for burst pipes and expensive clean-up.
• The nest was never able to bring the house up to temperature.  When I went to bed, the nest was up to 65º - not comfortable - and the furnace has been running non-stop.

What this points to is the following:

• The auto-away feature should have an additional limit: this should be the amount of time that you are willing to wait for the house to get back up to the target temperature.  This should take into account your house's modeled behavior and the current and forecasted temperatures.  I should be able to say that I never want it to take more than 1 hour to get to temperature.  The nest would then ensure that it could get the house up to that temperature (and if somewhat extreme temperatures were forecasted, it would take that into account, dynamically setting the low temperature mark).

Let's get on it nest!  Or other software providers, now that the API is supposedly available.

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. 

Nesting

I decided to take the plunge and purchase some Nest thermostats when I read some of the early press about them. You couldn't actually buy one at the time, all you could do was put your name on a list to get them first when they became available. I did so and then waited.

My motivation was pretty simple: I wanted something that was easy to program and internet accessible. In fact, the joy of a "self learning" system wasn't one of my primary motivating factors. The interface for the Nest looked good and my understanding was that it should fulfill my other wants - so I went ahead despite the reasonably high $250/unit starter cost. If I really could schedule easily, I could easily save the purchase price in a couple of years. Despite the fact that we had two programmable units in the house, I found their interfaces to pretty much be impenetrable and, for the most part left them unprogrammed.

On February 14, I got a message saying that I could order my Nest. But, "Click below to order, but please note that you can only order once using this personal reservation page." So I decided to take the plunge and ordered two - one for the upstairs systems and one for the downstairs. They shipped within two days and were here quickly - it was just a matter of me finding a few hours to install them and configure.

The installation was not difficult and the materials provided were well thought out. They even include a screw driver with interchangeable heads to allow you to easily unscrew pretty much anything that you'd encounter. There were also nice little (blue) stickers that you could use to label each of the wires positions before undoing anything; this should ensure that you don't mess anything up.

Despite all of the good documentation, there was a cryptic note about not having to jumper the Rc and the Rh (both red) lines together. It wasn't clear if I needed to attach one of them or both, if they were separate wires. I eventually concluded that there is only one red control line coming from the furnace and just connected it to the easiest place on the nest panel.

One of the more painful parts of installing the Nest is finding a part of our wall that wasn't chewed up with past thermostat installations. It would appear that they have been replaced multiple times. Strategically choosing a good position took the most amount of time in both cases (and even worse when I had to pull off the Nest upstairs after the first time due to one of the wires not being connected well).

Here are all of the install pictures:


So downstairs, I was starting with a pretty old Honeywell control unit - this was the starting point for the downstairs thermostat - not sure of the vintage


The old on the floor - with the new


Wires all labeled


Connected to the Nest mounting panel - conveniently with a built-in level


Mounted!


Mounted - upstairs!

After all of the wires were connected, you simply pop the eyeball (in Christa's words) on. It will want to connect to your wireless network, so the first step is to put in your password. After that, it updates to the most recent software level (the one downstairs did this several times before it was done - the one upstairs, just once). After that you can begin the setup; the first step is to show you which wires it thinks are connected. It does this in an incredible simple visual way, making sure that there is no question about whether its done right.


The rest of the setup to do on the machine is a breeze. The fun part comes when you sign up for a nest.com account. When you do, it recognizes the thermostat on your local network and you are good to go. From there, I took two different approaches. For the upstairs thermostat, I decided to set a schedule and for the downstairs I let the system learn our behavior to set the temperature.

The web interface for scheduling is pretty good, though not great. It does include copy and paste functionality. I don't know if its just an early quirk, but I lost the schedule the first time I put it together. The upstairs Nest had lost its connection to our wi-fi network, so that could have been a contributing factor. The primary iPhone application doesn't do much more than allow you to adjust the temperature, but that is exactly why I bought it.


What Its Missing:

• My chief complaint so far is that Nest doesn't share any data with me. I should be able to access a log of all of the events of the thermostat (turn on, turn off, all of the relevant parameters at that point in time, such as why it was turning off or on).
• The units are designed to learn about your behavior to help you save energy. But when that happens, it doesn't tell you anything about what its learned or what you have saved.
• My wife doesn't like the aesthetic. It looks like an ugly eyeball in her opinion.