I don't have the Nest, but I have the Ecobee, which is great, especially the wireless connectivity.

It's not "I need an exact 23.5 degrees when I get home", but rather, "I just left to go vacation. Maybe I should turn my thermostat off" and can do so from my phone, and also, "Looks like I'm getting home a day before I expected. I can turn my heating on so my home won't be freezing when I arrive."

Additionally, scheduling on the Ecobee is far, far easier than traditional thermostats.

I have an Ecobee as well (and a RadioThermostat brand one before that), and find the internet part the least compelling thing about these.

My Ecobee:

* Has remote sensors that depend on schedule

At night it is based on upstairs bedroom temperatures. During the day, it strikes a balance between the front and back of the house. The back of my house is south-facing with lots of windows, and the sun heats it up significantly compared to the front, and it skews the thermostat.

The result is that the temperature is more balanced: the south side a bit warmer on sunny days, but front rooms, like my office, are still warm enough.

* I can control it from bed

Normally the schedule keeps it warmer/cooler at night, but sometimes it needs tweaking, or it's a holiday and we're trying to sleep in (when usually we'd be gone to work), etc.

Yes, lazy, but very handy.

* Can run fan for minimum x minutes per hour

Helps with circulation and the temperature imbalance in my house.

* Looks nice * Easier to edit schedules * Runs my whole-house humidifier (and keeps it adjusted based on outside temperature so it's as high as possible without getting frost on the windows)

There's other stuff I don't use such as auto home/away, and "follow me", largely because software limitations with scheduling and, for example, at night the sensor is in the baby's room but the baby doesn't move enough to make it think the room is occupied.

Like most home automation, it's not about tweaking your house while you're not home: it's about automating it and doing things with software. The fact there is internet connectivity and remote access is just a side-effect. (I realize that's not how most "IoT" companies look at this, but IMHO that's one of the problems).

Many people live in houses with poor insulation or other such problems. They may be tenants with landlords who will not fix this, or live in areas where fixing it is regulated in way that increases the cost by 5-10x (think building regulations where new windows must look like old ones).

Come home to a cold house, wake up in a cold house, heating system that overshoots, forgot to turn it off once when going on holiday etc etc. Even if they have a timer system, it probably has an awkward interface or is in located in an awkward place and some of these problems are still relevant.

Not the worst problems in the world but certainly something they wish was solved. And they like sexy little gadgets too, I expect.

I see the market. I have been part of it more than once.

I'm in that situation. I cannot mess with the HVAC stuff in my rental unit. I suspect many are in a similar boat. Nest can't help me.

And I bet your VCR never flashed 12:00, either. You are not a representative user.

There are hundreds of millions of families out there that have no idea how to program their thermostat beyond changing the current temperature, so they just leave it running all night and day, whether they're home or not.

The appeal of the Nest thermostat is not so that control freaks can fine-tune the temperature at home while in an airplane. It's so that regular people can just have it installed and forget about it.

I'm genuinely curious about how many of those "regular people" replaced a working thermostat with a Nest. Anecdotally, it certainly seems to me as if it's the geeky gadget types who get all excited about things like the Nest.

But the group of people within your anecdotal range is a heavily-skewed sample set.

Maybe. Certainly almost all of the people I associate with regularly could afford a Nest if they chose to do so. My experience is that most of the ones that I know who have actually done so are the same people who are always buying and trying out various types of gadgetry. I know lots of people who are technical to various degrees but aren't especially into electronic devices.

But wouldn't those people not able to program their current thermostat, for whatever reason, would have to be able to program their new fancier thermostat?

They don't scream this like they used to, but it's called the "Nest Learning Thermostat". There's one control, a ring that you turn left for colder and right for hotter. Over about a week the thermostat takes your inputs combined with the weather and develops a schedule it thinks you'll find comfortable. As it misses, you override it (again, just turn the ring) and Nest learns and updates its schedule for you.

You can use the app or the website to input a specific schedule if you prefer, which is still simpler than 99% of conventional thermostats.

Anecdotally I just programmed my grandmother's thermostat for her and it took me -- a 30-something with deep technical experience -- way too long to figure it out (I even had to break out the manual). What if grandma could just turn the ring left or right and the thermostat would come up with a schedule for her, wouldn't that be better?

But isn't that just a small part of the Nest idea?

Wouldn't the same thing be accomplished by getting someone to do it for them? Much like your grandmother and you? You set it up for her, she likely has to rarely deal with it again. All Nest does is take you out of the equation but you work for free.

Except the next time I visited, her thermostat had messed up its program and it was set at 80 degrees. Whether it was a power outage and dead backup battery, or she somehow fiddled with it and messed it up herself, it was once again in a broken state.

I hate to invoke the overused phrase, but the nest thermostat Just Works™.

Could not the same things happen with a Nest?

Not really, because it continually adjusts its schedule for you depending on your manual inputs, is powered by the HVAC wires themselves (and charges a small backup battery that you never have to worry about), and if you really wanted to you could log into her account and fix the thermostat remotely if somehow she managed to really break things. If all you do is turn the ring right or left for colder and hotter, it'll do its thing just fine.

You could hop into the menus and.. forget the wifi password or something I guess?

One thing nest handles really well is "I'm feeling a little too cold/hot tonight and I'm going to adjust the temp". You walk up and twist the ring and you're done. You don't have to disable scheduled mode or enable override mode or anything like that. Twist and done. I have a feeling that's how grandma messed up her thermostat, she was feeling cold so she turned it up to 80 (lol) and then the thermostat said, ok I guess this is my life now. 80 degrees forever.

I hate that this sounds like I'm arguing, because I'm not. I just find this discussion interesting.

If the device learns over time from grandma turning the dial up and down, does that not create strange data for the device to figure out? Take your example, grandma is cold so she turns the temp up; does this count as a manual input? Does that not eventually create a problem? Much like the original thermostat but takes longer?

Although, the account thing is interesting. Can you set the schedule and then disable the manual interface to let grandma change all she wants with no changes?

Heh, no offense taken.

I don't know the internals of how nest deals with wild swings in manual inputs, but I haven't seen a problem. Although even if it results in a "nights are 80 degrees" situation, the rest of the day is unaffected so at worst it's still better than the other thermostat.

Yes, you can set a schedule and disable the physical interface.

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but the whole point of the Nest thermostat is that it can still do a pretty good job without its owner having to do any programming.

On the flip side I'm exactly their target market. My house has two heating zones - one for the main floor and one for the basement. In the winter the basement defaults to 60 degrees because it's not a regular living space. That being said if I go down there to watch movies or play video games on my office computer... I don't want it to be 60 degrees. Rather than freeze for an hour while that zone heats up after manually setting the thermostat, I can just adjust it from upstairs.

Is that lazy? Sure... but the convenience is worth a couple hundred bucks.

Don't you still have to wait the same amount of time for that zone to heat up? I guess I value a couple hundred bucks differently.

I guess I would just walk down the stairs, manually adjust the thermostat and walk back up, but then again my parents just told us to put sweaters on if we were cold.

The amount of time wasted doing that every couple days walking from one end of the house to the other, and interrupting what I'm doing? Well worth the price of admission. I get it's not for everyone, but the annoyance factor alone makes it worthwhile. The same reason I have a smart garage door opener, so when I get to the end of the street and can't remember if I closed it or not, I can just pull out my phone and check instead of driving all the way home.

Smart homes for me are about removing everyday annoyances. Is the price to entry higher than it probably should be? Absolutely, but that's the way it is with any new technology. I would be shocked if 10 years from now the norm for every new construction is anything other than a smart thermostat.

60 sounds like a pretty normal winter time temperature to me :-) (OK, I usually turn it up to 64 or so if I'm around.)

It sounds cold to me when I'm playing a video game and not getting any blood flow to my hands.

So much of "SmartHome" is solutions in search of a problem.

In the case of Nest, I suppose I can imagine that I took off on a trip and forgot to turn the thermostat down. But I balance that against the cost, the "it ain't broke" thing, concerns about decreasing the reliability of my heating system in a cold area of the country, and a sufficiently variable schedule that I challenge any non-omniscient device to learn my patterns.

There are some useful things like leak detectors, low temp warnings, and general piece of mind visibility into what's happening with my house when traveling that I've installed. But most of the non or minimally automated things (I do have a couple wireless X10 lights) around my house work well enough that they're pretty far down on the list of stuff that I wish I could improve to make my life easier/better.

"So much of "SmartHome" is solutions in search of a problem"

Being a bit neurotic about switching off appliances before traveling and leaving our home unoccupied for a while I would throw money at any service that could allow me to tell what devices were on or off in my home at any time.

I do sort of have a solution involving an iPhone that I use at the moment - but it's a bit silly....

I can tell you for free! Your smart devices are on. Always.

On the flip side everything in my house has been automated and it makes our life better and easier, especially with a young kid around. One thing I don't have to think about. Additionally, the Echo makes a fabulous input device.

Is it a must have? Not yet, but definitely worth the initial setup time.

I actually have an Echo and find it modestly useful--worth the $100 I paid early on in any case.

I also think it's fair that some of the automation devices start to make more sense with a family than they do for mostly one person as in my case.

Also have a young child and curious about what stuff you have automated.