Nest Thermostat
The latest in life-changing technology, the Nest thermostat intelligently finds the perfect temperature for your home for every occasion. By learning how you adjust the heat at different times of day, the thermostat will start to automatically adjust itself to fit your pattern of adjustments - within a few weeks you'll hardly ever need to touch it.
The product saves energy by monitoring to see if you're actually around. When you're not in it turns the heat down, which will save both the money in your bank account and the planet around us. It does this using sensors within the device which when they don't detect movement for two hours (any less and it might be you're just sitting in a different room) they'll turn the heat down to low.
The product is designed with the planet in mind, and has ways to encourage you to save energy such as displaying a leaf when you're using less than
you would with a standard thermostat. This means if you've turned the heat a bit too high Nest is giving you a subtle prompt that this might not be the
most energy efficient thing you can do.
Everyone forgets to turn the heat down when they go away, with everything else from keys to phone you need to remember when you leave the house it's no wonder. While nest will turn the heating down after two hours anyway, you can speed up the process as you can control your Nest thermostat both online and from an app on your phone.
These online systems also display a detailed history of your energy usage from heating and give you help in reducing this by making the sorts of lifestyle choices with heat that mean you're still comfortable but your energy bills go down.
Nest might seem an expensive choice compared with standard thermostats, but considering how much energy bills have increased in recent years the savings you could be making from using less heat could easily pay for it within a few months or a couple of years. The technology is built to last, so the long term value of this device far exceeds its initial outlay and is a far better investment than putting a similar amount into a savings product. A survey of Nest customers found they saved an average of $360 a year, over $100 more than the cost of the device.
Consider this: everyone looks at energy efficiency when buying white goods items such as refrigerators and appliances, or even items such as lighting. But refrigerators only use 8% of your energy, appliances 9% and lighting 11%. Heating, which is controlled by your thermostat, uses a total of 50% of your energy. A modest reduction of 20% of your heating bill is more than not even running your refrigerator at all! And this is quite easy to achieve with nest.
These kind of reductions can in theory be made using traditional programmable thermostats, but the problem is that to make a correct programme you need to have a very rigid schedule that never changes for anyone in the house - or you have to be willing to manually change it daily. With Nest you just adjust the thermostat for a single week and it will have enough data about your heat preferences to continue saving your energy while keeping you warm for years.