I wanted to do a quick Nest thermostat review, since the timing is pretty appropriate, and I think I can find a way to make it financially relevant.
Why we installed a Nest Thermostat to begin with
We aren’t very fond of our house in North Carolina. It’s in a small development that was hastily constructed in a small town that even people from North Carolina have never heard of.
There’s something unsettling about small towns, where it seems like the dentist is the dog groomer, is the window repairman, is the grocer. I’m sure other small towns in America are very quaint and homey, but not here…
The construction quality of our house fits right in with this area. It’s cosmetically appealing but missing some fundamentals that you’d expect in a house. Financially, I’ve always felt that it makes sense to build equity instead of paying rent, when possible. But, like buying cryptocurrencies, it only makes sense to buy if there is value in it. Time will tell if this house falls into my bag of lessons learned as far as that’s concerned.
In any case, we are about to get slammed by our first, of hopefully just one, winter storm. It’s bringing cold temperatures and lots of snow and ice. Conveniently, we were gifted a Nest thermostat for Christmas. Even more conveniently, our auxiliary heat unit decided it was going to stop working two days ago.
Apparently the auxiliary heat kit has been defunct for quite some time, and it just hasn’t gotten unseasonably cold enough for us to take notice. Heat pumps work great as long as the temperature outside doesn’t get too cold; when that happens, they rely on a very energy inefficient heating coil to supplement and keep the house warm.
As it turns out, the contractor who built our house (and who probably also cleans our teeth, bags our groceries, and polices the streets) didn’t install the aux unit correctly. When I went to install the Nest thermostat, the heat pump control unit was a jumble of improperly labeled wires. A real mess. And I didn’t know the first thing about HVAC until 24 hours ago.
I went to install the thermostat, and the instructions were simple enough. As long as your thermostat wires are properly color coded (which ours weren’t), it’s a snap. So with the power to the unit unplugged, I started wire tracing. 4 hours later I was still taking my crash course in HVAC 101, and the temperature in the house had plummeted to about 50 degrees.
An hour or two later, I finally got the wiring hooked up to the right spots, as far as I could tell. Up to this point none of this was the fault of the Nest thermostat, whose instructions were actually painfully simple to follow. I managed to get the heat pump to click on again, only to discover now that the aux unit was not working.
If I’d still had hair on my head, I’d have started pulling it out. I went to sleep frustrated that I couldn’t figure it out, and concerned I’d have to buy an entire new auxiliary unit for an already aged system.
I woke up the next morning and tinkered some more. The temperature in the house had dropped to 43 degrees. The temperature outside was about 16, and in the attic it was 18. I decided it wasn’t worth any more time and called a technician.
For $60 and 8 minutes of work, the technician noticed a single wire between the thermostat, controller, and air handler that had either jiggled loose, or was never hooked up back in 2006 when the house was built. In went the wire, and on turned the auxiliary unit. I was pretty pissed that I’d missed it, but I’d wished that I’d paid the $60 up front instead of waste multiple hours of personal time on it. Return on investment is pretty obvious there.
Our aux heat kit was still only drawing 20 amps, when it should have been drawing about 40, but we attributed it to just being an old unit. The air was getting warm enough, so I didn’t bother pursuing the issue any further.
Back to reality.
With everything installed, time to run its through its paces
The setup was super easy once the wiring was done. I created a Nest account and linked it up to my WiFi. The Nest doesn’t need a WiFi connection, but it opens up a lot of functionality.
Immediately I noticed how cool the interface was. The unit itself looks really slick on the wall and has a cool ease-of-use feature that turns on the display by detecting when you walk up to it. This keeps it less obtrusive and probably also saves some energy on the display side of things.
The Nest thermostat tracks energy usage over time and is constantly learning. I haven’t experienced the learning part firsthand yet, but have seen many of the options available. It will automatically transition between heating modes in order to cool the house the most efficiently at specific times. Everything can be overridden but for the last 24 hours it’s been doing everything on its own and our house is quite comfortable.
It also has scheduling options which you can pre-program, or allow it to create the schedule itself. It can monitor when you are sleeping or when you are or aren’t at home. Very slick stuff.
The Nest Thermostat can help you reach your financial goals
Nest claims that the thermostat will pay for itself in savings over a 2 year period. I’m not so sure about that based on how spoiled we are when it comes to our indoor air temperature. But since it was a gift, it’s already paying for itself. Every dollar it saves is a dollar earned as far as we are concerned.
I’ll be able to check over the next few weeks how much we are actually saving. Going off of previous experiments with saving, we’ll take the excess and invest it somewhere or put it to use.
I’m a big advocate of living below ones means. Every time I get promoted at work, I try to spend using my previous pay rate. This keeps us constantly saving more.
There’s not a whole lot else to write about with regard to the Nest thermostat.
As a cost-saving way to heat your house, I think it’s at the forefront of the smart thermostats. There are a few other competitors, but Nest is already at its 3rd generation, meaning they’ve had a lot of time to iron out the wrinkles.
Financial freedom comes from a lot of different approaches. Unless you get lucky and win Powerball, or you just happened to have a few hundred Bitcoin from 2008, you’re likely going to have to approach it from several directions. Discretionary spending is important, and so is luck. But any time you can save a dollar here or a dollar there is important, especially if you then save that dollar and make it work for you.
If you can save $100/year on heating and cooling costs, this is a no-brainer investment.
What are your thoughts about the Nest thermostat? Have any others worked well for you at saving money? What other low cost, and energy efficient improvements can be made by the layperson to save money?