[Closed] Nest Thermostat users

It’ll come on early to reach 20C by 8.00. It’ll then maintain that temperature until the next set point (ie you might tell it to maintain 16C from 9.00, then 20C from 17.00.

Note that it pre-heats to reach your target, but it doesn’t switch off early to make the next, lower, set point. In this example it’ll maintain 20C right up to 9.00.

and only the temperature at the thermostat so other areas may be warmer or colder depending on how your mrs decides to understand or not thermostatic rad valves today

Gotcha. Thanks.

so I assume under normal circumstances when we're at work and school I would want the heating to be on in the morning for an hour while we get up, get ready and out, then off during the day then back on from about 16:30 for a few hours when we all get back home. So for Nest I'd set at spot at 20 degs at 6am and say at 7am set a spot at say 10 degrees (to force the system to switch off) then back up to 20 degrees at 16:30 then back down to 10 degrees at 7:30pm so it's not chugging out heat all night long?

I fitted our nest a couple of weeks ago and to be honest, I’m not over-impressed.
I don’t seem able to set the temp below 9deg C, so on very cold nights the heating comes on - which is noisy and not what we want.
You can adjust the nighttime pre-heating time all the way down to zero, so if your system is noisy and you don’t want it on too early look under systems>true radiant.
I also don’t appreciate having to jump through the google account hoops just to control it.
It’s a good looking piece of kit, but the login procedure and some of the features leave a lot to be desired.

You can set it so it knows your location and will fire up to get the house warm when you’re heading back and to switch off when no one is home.

Works very well in this mode. You can also use the app to fire it up when / if you want to be sure of coming home to a warm house.

Thanks will be a journey of discovery over the coming weeks I'm sure. The automated features is what I'm after but just want to be sure how to make sure it is on at the times we want it to be on. Programmed it with a nominal schedule but put all the settings to auto and eco so see how we get on with that.

Trek - know what you mean, the installation was the bit I was most concerned about but that was a doddle and it seems the software side is the more clunky side of it.

Trek, where are you that the house drops to 9 degrees! Even in the middle of winter our bungalow would take about 24 hours to get that low from a heating phase to 17 or 18 degrees.

Wobbliscott, I've got regular set points back to 16 degrees to make it a conscious choice to keep the heating on all day. Also the stat will sense when you walk past it, if you slob out in front of the TV for ages it will turn off as it thinks you've gone out. You can integrate it into Google Home I think, so it knows you are heading home.

Also I turned off the learning feature after a while, it seemed a bit dumb as I'd turn the heating on for a random day off, (I have a rolling day off each week) and it would add it to the schedule despite just being a one-off. The first few weeks we had it, I was going in and clearing the extra heating cycles it was adding. They may have improved this as we've had a Nest for about five years and its had regular software updates, so it will be interesting if you post back with how you find it works for you after a couple of weeks.

The smoke alarms also sense when you are in the house and feed back to the thermostat but they are a bit pricey so we didn't bother...but it would be handy to have one in the lounge.

My Nest now runs mostly as a dumb thermostat. It never really learnt my routines so switched that off after a few weeks. I also noticed a month or so ago when I got up at 1am that the heating was on (and it was already at 22c which is what it was programmed to be at 6am). Checking the logs it seemed to do this regularly, coming on around midnight - I don't understand why as it should have learnt it doesn't take 6 hours to reach 22c! I've ended up turning down the max time it will come on in advance to 1 hour and that seems fine but it also means it not using any intelligence, I could just have programmed a manual thermostat to come on at 5am instead.

So apart from occasionally controlling it via Alexa (to change the temp) or shutting it on/off remotely (not recently as I've not been away) it's basically just a dumb thermostat.

Thanks chaps. I realise it will take some getting used to in order to get the supposed benefits from a smart system. know loads of people with various kinds of smart thermostats who all seem to sing their praises and talk about savings but I was pretty frugal with the CH system before so might not notice significant savings...but more interested in the smarter features like knowing when you're out.

It seems to want you to interact with it more than a basic dumb timer, so it might be a case of for the first few months making more manual adjustments to help it know our routine...but having said that at the moment we're not exactly living our usual routine! I've already but some 10 degree spot points later in the evening to make sure it shuts down at bed time so it's not chugging away at night.

I've just ordered a couple of Nest smoke alarms too as our current ones are over 20 years old so well overdue replacing, so good to know there might be some additional benefits of going with the more expensive Nest ones over the cheaper standard ones with it being connected into the ecosystem.

The Nest smoke alarms seem to work well, I have a couple of the hard-wired ones. They're pretty sensitive (I got a warning from one whilst using deodorant with the bathroom door open), the nightlight feature is handy to. Gives you a shock the first time you hear it though (a woman's voice shouting a warning to start with rather than just beeps), freaked my plumber out after I left him working on his own whilst he was doing up my bathroom and I'd forgotten to turn it off, the dust from drilling triggered it - he had no clue it was a smoke alarm :p

My Nest now runs mostly as a dumb thermostat. It never really learnt my routines

This - I woke up a few times and it was going unnecessarily. The other thing I've turned off is the anti-legionnaires disease feature. I've coped for a number of years without having the ho****er at 70c for 2 hours once a week...

Why take chances?

Anti legionnaires thing wont work with my system. Water temp is still controlled by the cylinder stat rather than the nest system.

Replaced an old smartfit heating system which was getting a bit faulty with a Nest a few weeks back

And I'm running it dumb as well like most of us seem to end up doing

But i does look a lot nicer than the old thermostat - and lets be honest that's the main reason most people buy them - they look cool...- and the control while out of the home may come in handy one day...

I didn’t bother with the learning function in our Nest.

I just setup a basic schedule and use the location services on our phones to determine when we’re home or not so it never heats an empty home.

Anti legionnaires thing wont work with my system. Water temp is still controlled by the cylinder stat rather than the nest system.

The Nest could never control water temp. All the anti-Legionaires thing does it make sure the water in the tank has been heated once a week (for maximum of two hours or until the tank stat opens), so that when you come home from holiday and take a shower you can be confident the water is clean.