Gadgetory

the nest thermostat they say it learns how you live in a program your heating and cooling to save you a bunch of money its internet accessible it's real simple to use kind of like an iPod on the wall and it looks pretty cool but is it all of that stuff two hundred and fifty bucks worth I'm Brian Cooley with a how-to we'll show you how to get this guy installed and get started using it let's go now you know how cryptic and tedious modern programmable thermostats are with all those little menus and configurations and buttons they just no longer make sense in our world full of connected devices with elegant interfaces the nest includes the thermostat itself some base plates now before you even get your nest they make you take a little poll on their site when you order it to check if your system and wiring are going to be compatible when mine arrived I didn't like the silvery color you see mostly around the body they say it picks up the color of your wall and kind of becomes a chameleon within your wall color hey I didn't buy it and B I like to save silver for things like the backs of iPads not in my home so I painted it the color of my home now this is almost certainly going to clobber your warranty but aesthetics matter you can separate the ring from the body via four small screws and a ribbon connector then mask everything on the ring except that outside part you're going to paint luckily the paint brand I use on my house also sells some of their popular colors in rattled hands already mixed so I got an exact match now put the thermostat head back together in the reverse of disassembly be careful putting in those four little screws the trick is to start them counterclockwise till you feel them click then go clockwise to tighten that way you're not going to recut the threads a second time and weaken the assembly pull out the old thermostat make a note of the terminal each wire was connected to and now it's time to start installing your nest now as you can see I installed mine with a wall plate you can go with this square one there's a bigger rectangular one they include or none at all it'll be a combination of what look you like and also what kind of holes you're trying to cover up and of course I also painted the wall plate to match the thermostat and the house there's a little level built into the nest backplate but I found it wasn't exactly accurate so I grabbed a real and of course also eyeballed it attaching the wires now is easy especially for me since I only have two in my forced air furnace but in every case the wire terminals on the back plate are tooless and clearly labeled very nice now just snap the thermostat head itself onto the back plate and let it wake up no batteries it's powered by the voltage from your HVAC control circuit now the cool part it asks you a bunch of questions like how to get on the Wi-Fi network and how you want to configure it it's kind of like when you take a new iPad out you set that thing up this is not like any thermostat you've had before it'll ask you for some mode preferences minimum away temperature and then let you know it's going to start learning for the next week as you turn it up and down at various times you can also program it more traditionally and it will learn on top of that now if the thing goes black don't panic it does that it'll wake up every time you walk by it it's got a proximity sensor or you can press the face to wake it up rotate once you're there on that main menu around the perimeter navigate to any function press to select etc and perhaps best of all changing temperature is the old-school way you just turn this thing totally intuitive no button button button button to go up or down go to nest comm to set up an account and then you can access your thermometer from there app or a browser to do almost everything you can do here in person now I'll be honest with you putting it in was pretty easy just to find 250 bucks not as easy I'm not sure it'll ever earn back its price differential especially not in the house it just has a simple heater however for the remote access ability the easy programming function the great interface and the great looks it is the iPod of thermostats