OMG, to coin a phrase: The power bill that arrived yesterday was only $128.89. That’s down from last month’s of $209.58 and August’s of $218.91. Both of those are below the budgeted high of $225, which the Salt River Project has attained in the past.
This, we might add, is with my turning the thermostat down to 77 degrees at 9:00 p.m. in hopes of sleeping all night long. Forlorn as that hope is, there’s absolutely zero chance that I’ll get to sleep when it’s 80 or 82 in here.
I guess the Nest gadget my son gave me for Christmas last year is working! ♥ It’s attached electronically to the iPad. So in theory, if you have nothing better to do with your time, you can control it remotely.
Check out this report the company generated and sent by email:
How kewl is that?
The “Away” business has to do with an interesting feature on this thing. The thermostat has a sensor that records whether anyone walks past it. If it can’t detect any activity for a while, it turns the system way down. Or “up,” I suppose, in the summer: it gets into the middle 80s in here if I’m gone for a long time. Or not moving: Take a nap and you wake up to an 86-degree sauna.
However, so far I haven’t found that especially inconvenient or annoying. When you walk past the thing or wave your hand at it, the AC immediately comes back on. I’ve never been really uncomfortable, as I have been in the past. When I first learned about this feature, I was worried about the dog, but she insists on laying on the tile floors (even though she has plenty of soft things to lounge on), and the tile stays quite cool even when temps indoors are in the upper 80s or low 90s. She doesn’t seem bothered by warmer temperatures in the house.
Salt River Project provides some monthly usage figures, which show, among other things, the average daily cost of power in your house. In October 2012 it cost me $4.30 per day, on average, to cool the shack. In October 2011, the average daily cost was $5.29: a dollar a day difference. The daily bill in September (which covers the hot and humid month of August) was $6.76. In September 2011, it was $7.62 a day: again, about a $30/month saving. Over the course of a summer, that’s a saving of about $90 to $100.
So. It’s a pricey little doodad. But it works.
I think it’s great when people have remote control of their thermostats. It can save a lot of money, espeically if your schedule changes around a lot. If you go on vacation and the weather back home changes a lot, you can adjust what you have it set at , easy! It’s nice to see that your gadgets are paying off for you.
@ TB: Yes. Especially in parts of the world where it gets cold enough to freeze the pipes!
That’s a pretty nifty sounding little device. Something to look into for sure.
It is nifty. I, too, worry about my dog during the day. Something to consider one day.
I’m glad to read your update! I was looking at the Nest website just last weekend and saw that they have a second generation version coming out in a few days. The new version has something called True Radiant that may work for my home. My heating is from a boiler that circulates hot water through copper coils in the floor (basement), ceiling (main level), or radiators (second level). Standard programmable thermostats are optimized for forced air heating/cooling, not the slow-to-build and slow-to-dissipate heat that is typical of radiant systems.
I’d like to see some feedback of the new True Radiant feature before I invest so much in a thermostat, though. If it works well for heating, I may spring to replace both thermostats for the heat (one of the main level and one on the second level).
I’m not sure Nest would work for the thermostat that controls my high-velocity central air conditioning system, though. The thermostat for that is on the second floor and I rarely walk by it. Nest would think I’m not home and turn off my A/C; that would not be a good thing!
@ Linda: If you explore the Nest website, you’ll find a place where you can find local contractors that the company has trained to install the thermostats. It’s well worth the relatively modest cost to pay someone to put it in. I think if you call the company or one of the local company-trained service guys, they can tell you if they think the gadget would work on your system.
You can turn off the “Away” function, so it doesn’t decide you’ve gone on vacation to Timbuktu just because it hasn’t seen you lately.
Glad to hear you like the nest! We leave our doors open so much – even in summers around here we keep our two sets of sliders to the pool area wide open for most of the day. They only really get shut and the AC turned on if we’re cooking, ironing, or headed to bed. I’d be afraid it wouldn’t realize the doors were open and would just want to pop on. Does it harm the learning process if you turn it completely off to open the doors for a while?
@ Mrs PoP: It doesn’t seem to be bothered by being turned off. At this time of year, when it’s uncomfortably hot for only a few hours a day, I turn it off most of the day; then turn it back on for a few hours before bed time; then jam the bedroom slider open a few inches so no one can get in (it’s alarm, too); and turn the Nest off again.
In September and October, though, some days are warm enough to want the AC on all day; when I turn it back on for those days, it doesn’t seem to have forgotten its programming.
You can program it manually, too; you don’t have to rely on it teaching itself.