Nest Learning Thermostat @ Lowes 224.99 - AC

respdoc said:   Item is at MSRP price. Given the 10% off works on thousands on items (MSRP and not)..it has no bearing..and does not make it a hot deal.
While I agree with you that the 10% coupon is always there, it's currently the only way to save a penny on the Nest.

BTW, they don't seem to stock them in a lot of stores. They have an empty box that's strapped to the shelf with a tag that says "available at Lowes.com" so I'm not sure if the movers coupon can be used online.

respdoc said:   Item is at MSRP price. Given the 10% off works on thousands on items (MSRP and not)..it has no bearing..and does not make it a hot deal.

And given that a hot deal is any deal that makes a product substantially cheaper than any other way to buy it, why don't you show us a better way to get Nest for under MSRP?

Until then, this is a hot deal. I love my Nest - and my energy bill is quite a lot lower than it was last year without it. By August, it will already have paid for itself.

These things are awesome!!! And I tend to agree. There is no other way to get a discount on them.

respdoc said:   scoobydooby said:   respdoc said:   Item is at MSRP price. Given the 10% off works on thousands on items (MSRP and not)..it has no bearing..and does not make it a hot deal.

And given that a hot deal is any deal that makes a product substantially cheaper than any other way to buy it, why don't you show us a better way to get Nest for under MSRP?

Until then, this is a hot deal. I love my Nest - and my energy bill is quite a lot lower than it was last year without it. By August, it will already have paid for itself.

Then it looks like you have no idea what a "hot deal" is.

If your goal was just to lower your energy bills...you could have done it with a cheaper electric programmable unit. You got this unit mostly for looks..which is fine..but again..and in no way adds anything...to make it a "hot deal".

If you still thinking it's still a hot deal, feel free to start listing all the other thousands of "neat" Lowes items that this generic coupon can be used on.

Okay folks, please stop piling on. This is a hot deal by the definition of a hot deal, and by the fact that the Nest is getting resold above retail. I think of this just like when someone posts an Apple deal or a new car... sure, you could save money by going another route, but if this is the route you're going, this will save you money.

Thanks, OP!

Redbeard25 said:    This is a hot deal by the definition of a hot deal, and by the fact that the Nest is getting resold above retail

I would hope as a senior member..you would check out the basics of a deal price finding. One of the first steps is to check a companies website for price comparisons. (Which you will find in this case, the unit in-stock and at regular MSRP).

False hype is not a hot deal.

Honeywell goes after Nest Learning Thermostat for patent infringement

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/6/2775190/honeywell-goes-after-ne...

TowHead said:   But while we're at it, let's talk about the Nest's flaws. For example, I've learned that it will not turn on the system ahead of time so that if you've set it for 70 degrees at 7 o'clock, it'll turn on at 7 o'clock and bring the house up to 70. My ancient Honeywell Chronotherm III isn't even that stupid - it figures out when to turn on my furnace so that by 7 o'clock, it's 70 degrees. To that end, the Nest should be able to adapt to a variety of conditions so that if it's 68, it only needs to turn on a couple minutes early than if it's down to 65, requiring a 15-minute early run.

What good's the Nest if it can't do that ... ?

It does - just not in schedules. Time to temperature is part of its learning process, but it only applies that in manual settings:

http://support.nest.com/customer/portal/articles/178873

onsale said:   \the latest update added several cool features including AirWave.

While it seems a neat product they seem to have a lot of marketing hype going on. It is very hard for me to believe that running the fan after the compressor is off is going to save you anything like 30%. Additionally many modern systems already do this. Both my circa 2003 Lennox system and circa 2006 American Standard (Trane) with variable speed blower motors do this as part of the logic of the system. And both were very middle of the road systems.

A Thermostat that costs 250 bucks? your kidding ...

For that much my kid will stand there and adjust it for you..

scoobydooby said:   

My energy bill begs to differ. Sure, there is a draw for the gadget crowd, but thanks to ComEd, I can see how much savings are compared to previous periods, and I see considerable savings.

Again..you would see the same actual energy cost savings from a decent (but quite a bit less costly) programmable unit. If you need to spend $200+ for someone to put those same numbers that in a pretty graph for you...I'm not sure what to say.

respdoc said:   scoobydooby said:   

My energy bill begs to differ. Sure, there is a draw for the gadget crowd, but thanks to ComEd, I can see how much savings are compared to previous periods, and I see considerable savings.

Again..you would see the same actual energy cost savings from a decent (but quite a bit less costly) programmable unit. If you need to spend $200+ for someone to put those same numbers that in a pretty graph for you...I'm not sure what to say.
This product saves energy, fancy graphs aside. Not sure why you hate it so much. It's a thermostat, lol.

If nothing else, being able to set it from your smartphone makes it worth it for many. I, for one, would like the ability to set the house to cool when I'm on the way home from vacation. It's just too expensive as it stands for my needs.

cool offer, thank you!!

AirWave is humidity control, many thermostats have that.

The Nest is a pretty good thermostat if you have a basic heating/cooling system. Complicated systems with dual-stage heating and cooling often aren't compatible. And even more weirdly, they don't have any kind of compatibility chart. They have a tool which tries to guess compatibility from the wires you see though.

All these limitations is why I got an EcoBee instead. It is even more expensive, but it does the job I needed. It also uses the internet to get info about the outside temp in your location to select dual fuel options (if that applies to you).

Anyway, if you currently don't program your thermostat because you can't figure out how or can't be bothered, this thing could save you a lot. If you already program you thermostat, the real advantages are more limited.

People sure are angry about thermostats in this thread.

I only run full synthetic in my learning thermostats. j/k, premium entertainment value tonight!

mannyv said:   Also, the Nest may solve this problem (which is somewhat obscure):

If you set, say, leave 60 at 10:00 am and return 70 at 5pm, the thermostat will turn on at 5pm and try to get to 70. That's because the thermostat generally has no brain. If it did, it could figure out that it's actually cheaper to start warming your house at 4pm and get it to 70 slowly (which may be more economical) than doing a high burn between 5pm and 5:15pm.

I actually don't know enough about my furnace to know...but Nest apparently can figure this kind of junk out and factor it in. Am I going to go out and buy 4 nests? No, at least not right now. But it is tempting.

That doesn't seem obscure at all to me. But I have to ask, how is the Nest going to figure that out? It's not like it has an electric meter or gas meter built in. It's not like it can measure the total gas or electricity used to effect a particular temperature change.

Also, unless you have a two-stage heater, the Nest cannot decide to heat your house slower or faster. The heater is either being told to be on or off.

Finally, every moment your house is hotter than it could be, you are losing more heat through the walls (etc.) than you need to. So it's unlikely it's more efficient to begin heating sooner so you can do it more slowly. This is the basic principle behind setback thermostats!

If you do have a system with a heat pump and a gas/oil heater (a dual fuel system), it might be cheaper to heat with the heat pump slowly than using the backup heat and doing it more quickly. But then again, Nest doesn't support dual-fuel systems so that's moot in this case.

http://support.nest.com/customer/portal/articles/244085-i-have-a...

Well, I'll chime in here. Have two Nests in my house, and absolutely love them. And for the $500 that I paid for them, believe me, I'll get my return on them within 12 months by micromanaging the hell out them to achieve breakeven. The coolest aspect of these is that with my Smartphone, I can easily adjust/manage temperatures from anywhere making sure my family doesn't jack up (or down ) the temperatures. Everyone I've shown the Nest Apps are floored that this is possible and that one can remotely control/manage temperature settings.

In addition, the learning and auto-away settings are very cool. Have I saved money for first month year over-year? I was even this past month in electricity, but I can't remember last years temperatures - so, not sure. I'll know over next 6 months.

And finally, what pushed me to finally buy them is because of Honeywell's patent lawsuits - figured the little guy needs help, and wanted to give them some $$.

So far, I love these things.

baladent said:   Instead of the Nest, i would highly recommend t-stats available from Bayweb.com. They have been doing sophisticated controls and t-stats for years, and blows away the NEST (well, maybe the interface isn't quite so pretty). I bought it for the remote feature, but the capabilities and reporting are incredible. E,g, you can set at what outdoor temp stage 2 heat will kick-in. Plus, it offers basic intrusion alerting via email and texting. There is no monthly fee. It can utilize multiple remote motion detectors to let the system know when the home is occupied to self-adjust the indoor temp. Outdoor temp is pulled in through the nearest airport weather service data. Tech support is outstanding, they usually reply within 20 minutes. I have no connection to the company (they are primarily a commercial company), but the t-stat was the best purchase in years. Again, checkout www.bayweb.com

I switched to Nest from my Bayweb unit. It is indeed a good unit, but the control pad is a bit sparse. It also uses X10 sensors for the motion sensing, which were not always as reliable. Still, it served me very well. They just released apps for iOS and Android.

So if I use this $225 thermostat, I will save money on my power bill? Considering that I don't turn on the heater or AC, that's amazing! Nest is going to pay me money, like a rebate!

Seriously, the big mistake that everybody is making, is that we all consume different amounts of energy to make ourselves comfortable. No one is specifying how much energy that is. So this argument is no different than saying "I get great gas mileage after using Brand X oil". You did not state what your mpg was before, and after, what type of driving you do, what weight, how many quarts of Brand X your crankcase takes, what your vehicle is, etc. Additionally, giving mpg as "x miles on a tank" is worthless, because we don't know the size of your tank, or how many gallons went in to give you x miles.

To the hotness of this deal, aside from the consequences of incorrectly installing the thermostat, if the selling price of this gadget is never, or rarely under $225, then 10% off will pretty much remove the sales tax (California sucks). At that point, the nest for $220 at Amazon (tax free) is the same out of pocket expense. If it were any other product, would that constitute a deal?

Maybe this is like an Apple product. Where in the past, there was MSRP and nothing else. So getting that highly desirable iPod 30gb for any amount off, even if 10%, was a smoking deal.

I used to live next a family that had no conception of cause and effect. They left the front door wide open, regardless of the weather, 24 hrs a day. And then complained that their power bill was over $1000 a month. So if I said, that for only $10 a month, I could reduce their power bill significantly, he might be interested. All I would have to do is shut the door when I saw it open.

So, is this analogous to how people are claiming to save a lot with the thermostat? Maybe. Perhaps the device does find holes in people's logic as to when to turn on/off the fan and raise/lower the set temperature.

Some quick tips to save power.
1. Super insulate attic and walls.
2. Use double or triple pane windows.
3. Heat you, not the whole house.
4. Heat with a blowing type heater, or better, an IR (radiant) heater.
5. Put in those stupid CCFL bulbs. Yeah, they make an ugly light, but they do consume less power.
6. If your humidity permits, use a swamp cooler instead of AC.
7. Portable AC units are not efficient, and only give the perception of cooling.
8. On hot days, take a cold shower to lower your body temperature.
9. When you are using the central AC, hose down the outdoor heat exchanger, this will improve its cooling.
10. If certain household members won't turn off lights, unscrew a few light bulbs. Less lights left on is better than all lights left on.
11. Buy a Kill-A-Watt power monitoring device to "see" how much power appliances, lights, computers, etc., actually consume.

Lowering your energy consumption and saving on your power bill is all in making sacrifices to comfort. You trade money for comfort.