Using Nest To Reduce Your Heating And Cooling Costs
Using Nest To Reduce Your Heating and Cooling Costs
The Nest Learning Thermostat is an attractive and user friendly way to reduce the energy costs in your house. You can find them here.
The Nest Thermostat comes in four basic colors in a circular digital design (black, white, copper and stainless steel options are available). Instead of having your thermostat reading always visible, the device goes into sleep mode until you wave your magic wand or simply your hand or pass by to activate it. While Nest is easy enough for a child to use, one of the best parts about Nest is that you can adjust it from the comfort of your phone.
Say you drove to Disneyland and when you got there, you realized you left the air conditioning set to 65. Assuming you don’t have pets that wouldn’t enjoy the Phoenix heat, you can rest assured and with your phone, tap the buttons setting the air conditioning to 85. Is it a colder night than typical weather? Instead of plodding downstairs to adjust the thermostat, tap tap and you can turn the air conditioner off and sleep with the comfort of just your blanket. Did you fly across country for Great Aunt Edna’s birthday party and the weather here took a sudden dive? Open the Nest app and you can adjust the temperature to a more economic setting.
Nest also keeps log of your heating/cooling patterns and suggests little things to make it more eco-friendly. It can see you like to keep your house comfortable at 75, but notices during the afternoon when the sun shines brighter into the house your heating and cooling system works harder. It might suggest that you adjust the temperature by a degree or two to reduce cost. You can also utilize the schedule function to vary your thermostat hour by hour. If you are gone during the work day you can schedule Nest to begin lowering the thermostat at 2 pm on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and at 3:30 on Tuesday and Thursday. If you don’t manually schedule this, Nest will learn to predict your pattern and see the patterns that can make your energy use more efficient.
Nest also takes into consideration the weather and loves to tell you when you have been energy efficient. At the end of the month you can take the celebratory email and see how Nest has saved you enough to pay for a dinner out at your favorite restaurant. And who doesn’t enjoy hearing from your thermostat that you saved three hours of energy this past month?