Anyone on here had a nest thermostat for a while?

How are you finding it? Do you use the learning mode, or do you just set a manual schedule?

Did you find that it started using more gas than with a dumb thermostat? Or less?

What’s your opinion of them?

Happy with ours. Had for a bit over a year. I don’t like the learning mode but as a timer with extra smarts it’s great. Not sure about costs but it’s very good at not coming on when we are out so hopefully saving there.

Had one for years at work which is essentially one giant room… have very regular hours so just use a manual schedule. Being able to access it remotely & alter the schedule etc is very handy. There are a lot more systems available these days though… considered Nest for home but just fitted Drayton Wiser instead.

Had one for 4 years and 2 boilers. Its been great and the learning function works well so much so the house is always warm when i get home from work.

It’s great. We’ve got a Big drafty house and we’ve saved a couple hundred over the 2 years we’ve had it, plus no more cold house complaints. Paid for itself financially and also happy kids/wife, though we use manual mode.

Very happy with mine. Ended up programming the schedule but that’s fine. Best bit is being able to switch it on after a week on holiday when you land at the airport. Worth it for that alone in my book.

We have one, very pleased with it. Coming home to a warm house when you have been on away for weekend etc is bliss.
Being able to easily set it ‘away’ when you go out for day is very useful too. We use the learning setup which seems to work fine.

Does anyone know if it works on a single circuit system? My hot water is on the same circuit as the heating.

Got two. One in the CH of the house and one controlling the wet UFH in the extension. The latter is in learning mode and works fine. I’ve still got the other on a timing schedule but I’m stingy on the CH so its set to a relatively low temp for a short time (the wife is always complaining of being cold) and just manually demand heat when we want to. Now we’re working from home I might try it on learing mode but don’t want the CH on all day. Would prefer just to have a small heater in the one room where I’m working. But works fine.

Not sure what you mean by the hot water being on the same circuit as our heating. Do you have motorised valves to control the HW circuit and the Ch circuit or are you heating the water whenever the CH is on and visa versa?

Had one for a few years. Great piece of kit. Learning mode is redundant for us as we both work completely random shift patterns.

Thanks All – I have just fitted one , and its seems fine, just wondering whether to use the auto learnign schedule, or just put my own manual one in. It seems like if I know when I want heat etc, there’s no benefit to the learning schedule thing.

Does anyone know if it works on a single circuit system? My hot water is on the same circuit as the heating.

What do you mean by a single circuit system – do you really mean that you cant have the hot water being heated without the radiators coming on at the same time? That would be very odd,must be terrible in summer when all you want is hot water. Or do you mean that you can have the water on, or the water & radiators on, but not the radiators without the water? If so, thats the same as mine and its known as a C plan heating system.

Most houses with a system boiler have what is known as a Y plan, S plan or the less common C plan heating system. The nest will work with any of them, but the instructions only say its compatible with S plan or Y plan.

As I said my house is C plan, which I had to do some googling to get a wiring diagram for how to wire the nest up for this , but the pages below talk about it, and I can confirm that the diagram in post #39 on page 3 sets the nest up fine for this.

https://www.diynot.com/diy/threads/nest-learning-thermostat-3rd-gen-c-plan-heating-system-help.499316/

Had one for a couple of years – really pleased with it. Have set a schedule but on top of that it will shut off if it’s set to ‘ON’ if we all go out (using the phone tracking to determine when we’re away) which works really well. It will turn on shortly before you get home (if it’s still within an ‘ON’ period) but generally we try and remember to turn on when we begin the journey home to give the house more chance to warm up. Have never tried the learning mode…

I think if you can tolerate the learning mode during its learning process it works fine in the end. I think alot of people bail out too early. Obviously the more random life you lead the harder it will be for it to learn your movements, but even then it can start to second guess your activities and knows when you are coming home and when people are in the house. Before lockdown when I was working in the office I think it would have worked quite well but maybe now we’re working from home. I think it is inevitable that in learning mode you will have to interact with it via the app or the actual thermostat more…that is one of the primary learning parameters. If you want to set and forget then use the schedule function.

had one for years. basically

paid for its self.

reduced costs

learning mode woke us up at 5 am too many times and came home to a cold house 2 many times. it relies on you changing it when you want it initially.

large digital display means i can tell if the missus whacks it up to 25 or down to 15.

would recommend. Mines the first gen tho and it would be nice to have the hot water for the new one.

We have one. It’s very good, but the learning mode was a pain in the jacksie. As was the ‘heating the hot water for two hours to get rid of Legionnaires’. Kept going off at 3am, which would wake me up…

but I love it apart from that. I have a lot of Google products, and the Home Hub has just had an update which means it’s a lot easier to control the nest (and lights!) from there. But the ability to turn the heating on by asking it to, or from the car on the way home from holiday etc is invaluable

We had one installed in March this year and it died 2 weeks ago though I suspect that was installation error as the guy was an absolute cowboy.

Had it set to “learning” but often had to adjust it myself as it didn’t seem to do anything different from the manual schedule.

We’ve replaced it with another (better installed) nest as I was generally happy with it but would have liked to have had time to see what alternatives there were on the market before hand.

large digital display means i can tell if the missus whacks it up to 25 or down to 15.

yeah the actual thermostat unit is brilliant… it’s the one thing Nest has over all the other systems (although physically operating a control is not that necessary with smart devices.) Plus it makes you feel like a safe-cracker when using it 😀

Had it set to “learning” but often had to adjust it myself as it didn’t seem to do anything different from the manual schedule.

Well that is what is intended in the learning mode. It learns from your manual inputs, also tracking your whereabouts from your phone location and measuring the number of occupants in the house from the sensors in the thermostat itself. the idea being that over time it learns patterns in your movements and behaviour and anticipates your heating demand. The intention is that over time as it learns your movements you should have to interact with the system less and less. I guess the more random your life the harder it is to learn and predict. But if you’re fairly routine, like most people are, then it should pick things up. If you want a ‘fit and forget’ then just programme the schedule but you might not realise all the savings the system is able to deliver. It’s as much about not turning the system on when nobody is in the house as it is being on when you want it.

It’s as much about not turning the system on when nobody is in the house as it is being on when you want it.

From what I can gather – and its quite hard to understand with the limited info out there. The learning schedule is seperate from the functionality that switches the heating off if you’re not at home. So you can still set a manual schedule and benefit from the automatic detection of whether anyone is home .

It seems to me , from reading the google documentation, that the learning schedule just is just a different way of setting a schedule , and regardless of how the schedule was set , either through learning or you manually creating one, all the ‘smarts’ still work. Ie it’ll turn the temp down if no-one is home, it will turn the heating on at a dynamic time in order to hit the temperature you have specified (or the learning shcedule has specified) at the time specified etc.

What’s your opinion of them?

Probably OK, but I wouldn’t consider a system that can’t have radiator valves integrated as well which I’m not sure Nest can. There’s whole house smart, which is OK, and there’s individual room smart heating which is where you want to be for real cost savings.

I have/like Tado, but would now also look closely at the Honeywell offering which didn’t exist when I was buying.

I’d put intelligent geo-location way above any intelligent learning of your schedule in importance. I find a lot of companies seem a bit vague on how their’s works and/or add it as an after thought. Some even seem to rely on you manually switching it off and on yourself (or having to use IFTTT to automate it). One thing I like about Tado is the geo-location seems particularity smart. It’s not just a geo-fence that when you cross it the heating turns on, it looks for instance at the speed you are travelling and calculates when you will be home. Also, for instance, the further you go from home the further it will allow the temp to drop.

I read the reviews and see these threads and end up completely confused, we had one put in and it was a total nightmare! heating came on during the night, it said we were heating 24 hours per day when house was cold ( the bills suggest that we were using a massive amount of gas!) persevered for 8 months before we got shot. i wont be allowed any more Smart home devices for a long time.

yea thats the learning thing for you.

Probably OK, but I wouldn’t consider a system that can’t have radiator valves integrated as well which I’m not sure Nest can.

yeah this was why I decided to go with Drayton Wiser for home rather than Nest

The learning schedule is seperate from the functionality that switches the heating off if you’re not at home.

yup, before I did some Googling we had the issue of the heating at work not coming on in the morning like it should despite it being in the schedule… the solution (fairly obviously when I thought about it 😃) was that no-one was “home”, and the Nest knew that, so it kept the heating off meaning it was freezing when we came in to work in the morning! So I disabled the “away” functionality and just kept it on the schedule (and remote manual control!)

@wobbliscott 7 months of learning and I’m adjusting it just as much as I was on day 1.

Drayton Wiser

oh yeah, it’s that one not the Honeywell I was thinking of as looking good.

We’ve had a couple of Nests at home for about 7 or 8 years. For the most part they’re fine – the ability to adjust the temperature while you’re out is grand, for example, and they have decent functionality. But they’re a long way from a panacea for heating or AC.
– The learning function is balls. You know better than a thermostat how warm or cool you like it at certain times, and you know roughly what schedule your last thermostat had, so just set that up, it’s quicker.
– it only measures the temperature where your thermostat is, so probably in the hallway. There are now finally remote sensors that you can set it to use for temperature sensing, but prior to that it was just as useful as a ‘dumb’ thermostat.
– It just doesn’t work that well with radiators. Supposedly the Nest ‘learns’ that if you ask to heat the room to 22C, it should turn off the heat as it hits 21C, because the radiators keep radiating heat. Except it does nothing of the sort – it keeps heating until it hits 22C, and so your room ends up at 24 or 25C. We have cast iron radiators which really makes it worse.

Thepodge – that’s interesting. Sounds like its not too smart then. My UFH is on the learning Nest E the lag is so great with UFH it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on and you don’t want it to be turning off and on too many times through the day so I just leave it to do its thing and seems to work fine. Never on when I don’t want it to be and maintains the room temp at a nice even temp.

Never used the main house CH system on the normal Nest thermostat on learning mode so never really tested it personally.