Your Nest Thermostat Just Got Smarter

No, this is not an actual Nest Press Release. It is a press release I would love to see Nest publish.

Palo Alto, California — March 28th — Nest Labs, Inc. (www.nest.com), architect of the thoughtful home, today announced two new features that will make customers’ homes feel more comfortable while saving energy.

Introducing Away Mode — allowing customers to quickly tell their thermostat to drop to their minimum temperature setting. More importantly, when setting Away Mode the Nest app will prompt the user to set their return time, ensuring their home will be at just the right temperature the moment they return home.

The new Work from Home setting in Eco Mode lets customers use a modified algorithm tuned specifically to remote workers’ schedules, giving them the cost and energy savings currently only available to those with more traditional work schedules.

Both these features can be accessed directly from the Nest App, or by logging into Nest.com.

About Nest

Nest’s mission is to create a home that’s thoughtful — one that takes care of itself and the people inside it. The company focuses on simple, beautiful and delightful hardware, software and services. For more information, visit www.nest.com.

These are admittedly small ideas, but there’s nothing quite like returning home to an icebox time and again, to motivate you to write a blog post.

Overall, I love my Nest thermostats; their installation and on-boarding experience are out of this world, with no detail left unattended. That being said, there are a few things my Nest could do better.

First, I work from home, and was surprised to discover that the Eco mode algorithm doesn’t seem to account for someone being at home but not walking past their thermometer often. With Eco mode enabled, you find yourself getting cold around mid-morning. Eventually figuring out that you have to walk past your thermostat at regular intervals to trigger your thermostat to turn on the heat. I eventually decided to disable Eco-mode; and started using my thermostat by setting target temperatures for certain times of the day … the same as the 10 year old thermostat my Nest replaced.

My next disappointment came when I decided to use the Away Assist feature when going away for a weekend, unfortunately I forgot to disable it prior to my return; and was shocked to learn just how long it takes a home to heat up from 50 degrees to 70 degrees.

Where I come at this from

My biases are relatively few, I know very little about this space except for some dabbling with a few ‘smart home’ products; my experience is limited to:

• Two Nest cameras
• Google Home & Amazon Alexa speakers
• Two Nest Thermostats
• Rachio smart sprinkler controller

Why Nest Needs to Get Smarter

I’m certainly not the only person who has decided not to use Nest away mode, because I can never remember to turn it back off before I get home. Similarly, most remote workers probably realize pretty quickly that Eco mode doesn’t really apply to their work-life habits. To net it out, there’s nothing quite like spending money on connected ‘smart home’ devices, and using them like the old disconnected dumb devices that they replaced.

Feature Considerations

It might seem counterintuitive to suggest someone should be prompted to manually set a ‘return time’ on a smart home device, ideally this would just happen automatically. This is certainly what Nest should strive for, but this is no small feat, there are countless data points that could be used to predict when someone will return home. And therein lies the added benefit of implementing this feature; not only will it ensure that customers come back to warm homes, customers will actually help Nest determine which of data points matter when predicting users’ return; in essence, Nest users will be training the Nest Away algorithm.

Solving the working from home dilemma is admittedly more difficult; the ability to optimize is much smaller than with traditional Eco mode, which seems to work well when a house is left empty for 8+ hours a day. Nevertheless, there are times when remote workers are not at home, whether they are out for a meeting, at lunch, or on a business trip.

Obviously, this feature would benefit from the aforementioned ‘training’ that is done by users turning on ‘away’ mode. Customers will not want to use a work from home mode that results in a cold home on their return; being able to predict an accurate return time is paramount to this features’ success.

To help with both of these features, users could be prompted to give Nest additional information. Take Google Maps, it offers me links to locations based on my upcoming Google Calendar events; perhaps Nest could use my Google calendar data to better predict when I will need my house warm (or cold) … it might even ask for access to other family member’s calendars.

What do you think?

Are these two features you’d like to see incorporated into your Nest thermostat? Would you be willing to share your family calendars with Nest to optimize your home’s heating and cooling?