The Nest

I have a big master list of plans that we have for our house. It's a (not very complicated) Excel file that tracks all of the rooms in our house as well as our yard. I have plans for what we want to get done, and those plans usually become a little more detailed and concrete the closer we come to being ready for that specific project. 

For example, for each room, I have one of the tasks listed as painting the walls. For most of the rooms, we don't even have the paint color chosen, but for some we at least have an idea of the color palette we're thinking about. 

So, all of that to say that one of the things that I had on that list from the very beginning was The Nest thermostat. I had read up about it and knew that I loved the idea of it. It's remotely controllable via our phones which is really nice. But the thing that I really love about it, is the electricity-saving capability. I've read that it can pay for itself in less than a year in energy savings. 

Our energy costs aren't outrageous or anything, but we know our 25-year-old house could certainly be more energy efficient. Richard has talked about wanting to replace the windows, but there are something like 36 of them in the house (I counted back when we moved in, you know, when we were rushing to get blinds for all of our naked windows). So the cost of replacing the windows is something that we would tackle further down the road, but wasn't something on our horizon for anytime soon. 

Well, enter the upstairs thermostat. It died. One night, the display screen just stopped working. We weren't sure where the temperature was set and if it was even on or not. Richard disassembled it, messed with the electronics behind the front panel, and got it working again. Then the next morning, we woke up to a 65-degree house. Which was not the temperature that we set. 

Richard finally acquiesced and bought The Nest. He was hesitant because of the cost (it's not an inexpensive thermostat), but he changed his mind pretty quickly. He loves it. He now wants to replace the downstairs (perfectly functional) thermostat with a Nest thermostat as well.  

  

The display that shows on the app when it's first opened. It shows the current temperature that is set for the upstairs. If we increase the temperature (at this point in the year), a little green leaf shows up to show that we are saving energy (and moneys!). 

All of our options for checking on and changing things remotely through the app

Our brand new Nest!