Now that Steve’s gone, who will look around for worlds that need changing?
Well, how about Tony Fadell? He seems to have the pedigree. He helped design the iPod. He ran the iPod and iPhone divisions of Apple for years.
He’s got that spot-what’s-wrong-with-it gene.
With his new company, Nest, he has decided to reinvent a tech item that hasn’t seen much innovation in decades: the thermostat.
Don’t snicker. This isn’t trivial. According to Nest, there are a quarter of a billion thermostats in this country alone; 10 million more are bought each year.
Half of your home’s energy is controlled by this ugly, beige tool. Most people never even bother to program their programmable thermostats. As a result, their houses actually use more energy than homes without them. Two years ago, the federal government eliminated the entire programmable thermostat category from its Energy Star program.
The Nest Learning Thermostat ($250) doesn’t introduce just one radical rethinking of the thermostat; it introduces four of them.
RADICAL CHANGE 1 The look. The Nest is gorgeous. It’s round. Its screen is slightly domed glass; its barrel has a mirror finish that reflects your wall. Its color screen glows orange when it’s heating, blue when it’s cooling; it turns on when you approach it, and discreetly goes dark when nobody’s nearby.
Sweating over attractiveness makes sense; after all, this is an object you mount on your wall at eye level. A thermostat should be one of the most beautiful items on your wall, not the ugliest.
RADICAL CHANGE 2 The Nest has Wi-Fi, so it’s online. It can download software updates. You can program it on a Web site.
You can also use a free iPhone or Android app, from anywhere you happen to be, to see the current temperature and change it — to warm up the house before you arrive, for example. (At this moment, vacation-home owners all over the world are wiping drool off their keyboards.)
RADICAL CHANGE 3 Learning. The Nest is supposed to program itself — and save you energy in the process. When you first install the Nest, you turn its ring to change the temperature as you would a normal thermostat — at bedtime, when you leave for work, and so on. A big, beautiful readout shows you the new setting and lets you know how long it will take your house to reach that temperature. That information, Nest says, is intended to discourage people from setting their thermostats to 90 degrees, for example, thinking that the temperature will rise to 70 faster. (It doesn’t.)
Over the course of a week or so, the thermostat learns from your manual adjustments. It notes when that happened, and what the temperature and humidity were, and so on. And it begins to set its own schedule based on your living patterns.
RADICAL CHANGE 4 Energy savings. Let’s face it, $250 is a lot to pay for a thermostat. But Nest says that you’ll recoup that through energy savings in less than two years.
The mere act of having a correctly programmed thermostat is the big one, of course. Why should you waste money heating or cooling the downstairs when you’re in bed upstairs? Or when you’re away at work all day?
But the Nest’s smartphone-based components offer other goodies, like Auto Away. The Nest contains two proximity sensors (near and far), which detect whether anybody is actually in a room. If the sensors decide that nobody’s home, they let the temperature drop or rise to an outer limit you’ve defined — say, 65 in winter, 80 in summer — even if that absence isn’t part of your normal schedule.
This feature is useless, of course, if your thermostat can’t see the room — say, if it’s in a closet or behind an open door. But often I’ll return from a day trip, having forgotten to turn down the heat, and see Auto Away on the screen. Good ol’ Nest!
E-mail:pogue@nytimes.com
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