Lowes has the Nest Learning Thermostat 1st Generation (T100577) for $198 with free shipping. Learns your schedule to keep your home a comfortable temperature without wasting energy. Can be controlled via Wi-Fi from your smartphone or laptop. Former Apple and Google engineers are involved at Nest.
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Seems like a cool device, but $200 is still way too expensive. Get back to me when it's $100 or less.
I say again:
Well, my average monthly natural gas bill over the last 12 months was
$106.8133. The months of Nov. Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr average $142.51 while
the other 6 months average 71.1167. Since I use NatGas for cooking, water
heater, clothes dryer, I think it is fair to say the home heating usage is
142.51-71.1167= $71.39333/mo. for 6 months or $428.36 a year.
So, using 1% savings, that's $4.28 a year savings. Hummmm.
Oh, did I mention that I live near Buffalo NY? Pretty cold here.
I got one of these for Christmas. It sits here still in the shrink wrap.
Hey Petejc - no offense but I'll give you $70 for it
From what I've seen - that's about what a decent thermostat goes for on the street nowadays. It's hard to believe people would pay $200+ for one of these. They are cool though. But like eibgrad said - call me when they are under a Benjamin.
The only freakishly overpriced feature I would use is to set the temp from my smartphone or from a computer. At night I usually set the heater for 68F when I go to bed & up to 70F when i'm awake in the morning.
Short story (hopefully instructive): when I first moved into my house (electric with geothermal heating/cooling), I set the digital thermostat to 68F for evenings, and 60F for the day -- sorry, I should note that that is for the winter. However, every night when we came home and the heat cranked back up, I noticed the "AUX" light was lit on the thermostat.
"Hey, why is that?" I asked the geothermal guy, a few months later when he came to check the system. He basically explained: your geothermal heating system is designed to raise the temperature 3-5 degrees....since you let the house cool during the day almost 10 degrees, essentially the backup (furnace) system has to kick in around 6pm to boost the geothermal heating. In other words: you've basically defeated the whole point of having a geothermal system.
What I took away from that lesson -- at least for my particular home -- is that setting the house at 1 particular target temperature and keeping it there is MUCH more cost effective than programming the temperature swing up and down during the day. We still drop it to 60F (or whatever) when we travel for a week, but otherwise we never touch the dial.
TAKE THAT and smoke it, NEST thermostat.
These things must be made by Apple. They're freakishly overpriced, and the price never goes down!
phacops, I would love to take ou up on that but, it was a gift so I'll just bide my time.
#5 (Matthew)
You should add another entry into your thermostat... at 5pm (or 5:30) raise the temp 4 degrees. Then at 6pm it would only need to go up 4 more degrees.