Google Nest Learning Thermostat 3rd Generation, Stainless Steel - Smart Thermostat - A Brighter Way To Save Energy

For the 3-4 years since I had it installed, I struggled with a really rubbish Thermostat that came with my new combi boiler. For all intents and purposes it looked pretty good on paper; it connected wirelessly, was battery powered so could be placed pretty much anywhere in my house and allowed me to control and schedule the heating. What was there not to like? Well, its battery life was awful for starters - it was beginning to hammer through a set of two AA batteries to the point where a fresh set were lasting less than a month. After replacing its batteries, the process of getting the thermostat to 'talk' to the receiver next to the boiler was repetitive and tedious and often didn't work. The worst issue was simply when trying to set the temperature; I'd turn the dial, push it to select the temperature and it would often just sit blinking at me and do nothing at all, which was really frustrating! In the end, enough was enough and I decided to look at getting a better thermostat to replace that clunky piece of trash and, being a bit of a gadget nut, I started looking at the new wave of apparently 'smart' thermostats that had recently appeared on the market. It ultimately come down to the Nest and British Gas's own 'Hive' as they both received very favourable reviews - but my mind was more or less made up for me when, during the last Amazon 'Prime Day' event, they'd slashed a massive amount from the cost of the 'Nest', so I took the plunge and bought one! >>>>>>WHAT'S IN THE BOX? In the very smart packaging for the Nest, you'll find the main gadget itself nestled at the top, and beneath that you'll find a set of instructions, a power adapter & cable, a controller ring, the 'heat link' receiver, wall-mounting plate and four screws. >>>>>>STAND AND DELIVER! One thing that wasn't made clear with the Nest when I bought it, is that if you want it to be 'portable' throughout your house, you'll need to get the stand for it. Of course, you can opt to have it wall-mounted if you desire, but I much preferred the thought of being able to put it on a shelf or a cable or something along those lines. The stand, of course, does add a bit more to the cost - and I'll do a separate review of it after I've finished this one. >>>>>>FIRST IMPRESSIONS? Once I'd received the stand for my Nest, I followed the instructions on how to attach it to the stand and by the time it was all connected together, I couldn't help but marvel at its awesomeness. The actual gadget is GORGEOUS - it's all brushed aluminium and thick glass and just exudes quality, as you might expect. It's pretty heavy too, which again (for me, at least) is a good gauge on the quality of it. Despite the fact that the 'heat link' wasn't connected to my boiler at this point., I decided to power up the Nest and have a play with it - and it was a good thing I did because, as is usual with new internet-connected devices, it required some registration and setting up. I registered it with my email account, set a password, entered my location details, set a location where the actual device was going to sit in my house and several other things and eventually came to the point where it started looking for the heat link - which it obviously wasn't going to find. >>>>>>CHECK YOUR BOILER! Not long after I ordered it from Amazon, one of the first things I did was that I got in touch with Vokera, the manufacturer of my combi-boiler to check that it was compatible with the Nest. Thankfully, they came back quickly with an email telling me that it should work fine, so I set about searching the web for hints and tips on how to connect the Nest to it. >>>>>>IF YOU'RE UNSURE, GET IT INSTALLED BY A PRO Now's a good time to say that I'm not en electrician, so while I'm happy with wiring plugs and mending wires, I'm not super-confident at doing more complex things - and doubly so when it came to the prospect of opening my combi-boiler and tinkering about with its innards. I procrastinated for a while but eventually decided that I should leave it to a professional, so set about the usual task of getting quotes from tradesmen. I'll save you the story of woe that invariably involved me being let down by the first company I chose (directly from the Nest website's list of recommended installers, no less) but I did strike gold on the second one and finally got it installed last week. If you're in or around West Lothian, I can highly recommend Edwards Electricals - they're a Nest Pro-Certified installer and did a grand job for a good price. The rule of thumb I would use here is that if you have any doubt in your abilities to install the Nest, get someone who knows what they're doing to install it. I'm glad I did! >>>>>>HOW EASY IS IT TO USE? Once your Nest Pro Installer has set your Nest and the heat link up, this thing is ridiculously simple to use. In basic terms, all you need to do is set the temperature and it will do the rest - the outer rim of the Nest acts as a big dial and you push it in to select things, but most of the time you simply need to rotate it left or right to select your desired temperature and leave it to it. >>>>>>A RIGHT SMARTY-PANTS Of course, with the Nest being a 'Smart' device it is able to detect when you're in the house or out of it by using a combination of the infra-red beam on the front of it to detect when you (or your house's other inhabitants) walk past it and, once you have set up the Nest app on your Smartphone(s), it will be able to also detect when it/they are close-by, so over the course of time it will be able to build a pattern of when people are in the house or not. The beauty of this is that when it thinks nobody's in, it will go into 'eco' mode and keep the house at a user-definable low threshold temperature, which should end up saving you money over the long term. Very smart indeed! And of course, once it detects movement or the proximity of your phone, it will switch to normal heating mode and warm the house up. You can of course set it to keep the house at a steady temperature or set it to turn on and off at scheduled times of the day and night - it's totally up to you. Another cool 'learning' feature it has is that it will learn how quickly your radiators are able to heat your house up and will then be able to tell you how long it is going to take until your house reaches a selected temperature. It's all very clever. Since it is an internet-connected device, it can also be controlled by smartphone apps and even from the Nest website, so it's possible to monitor what temperature you house is when you're out of it and even turn it on if you think it's too cold. This opens up the possibility of you being able to turn the heating on while you're on the way home from work, so you arrive to a nice, cosy house. In addition to that, the Nest can also be controlled by other home automation devices - I bought an Amazon Echo Dot and once I'd added the Nest 'Skill' to it, I'm able to instruct Alexa to turn the heating to a desired temperature by saying 'Alexa, set the heating to twenty four degrees'. Cool, huh? >>>>>>THE GOLDILOCKS EFFECT With that clunky old thermostat, the temperature in the house fluctuated too much into the 'too warm' territory and, once it hard instructed the heating to turn off, it strayed too far into the 'too cold' one before telling it to turn on again. Since the Nest has been installed, we've noticed that the house is staying at a much, much more consistent temperature as it is much more intelligent in the way that it controls the heating. >>>>>>SUMMING UP Wow, I am super impressed with this thing. Not only is it a beautifully tactile piece of kit, it's also brilliantly clever and simple to use. There are no doubt other features that I've not covered in this review (heck, I've only been using it for a week) but for all intents and purposes, it's so smart that you only need to tell it what to do and it really does the rest for you. The fact that it can be controlled by smartphones, computers and even Alexa as well as the device itself makes it incredibly convenient, too.

I really like this 3rd generation of thermostat. We used professional installers (booked through the Nest website). The product itself appears to have a relatively straightforward installation process. We have a conventional boiler (with a hot water tank) and the installation required a widget to be attached to the hot water tank connection and then the thermostat was installed in place of our old one in the hallway. The thermostat is actually much smaller than I anticipated being only 85mm wide (note the description here states it's 85cm!) and so had a smaller footprint than my old thermostat so I had to paint that area again! The controls are straightforward enough on the thermostat itself but it's actually much easier to use the smartphone app. It's all fairly intuitive. Feature-wise we've found the learning element to be quite accurate with only 2 glitches where we found ourselves nice and toasty at 2am! It does, however, have a traditional programmer so that you can set a loose schedule that will guide it through the process of learning your habits or if you are a complete control freak you can just set it all yourself with no learning at all. Do note that the temperate you set on the thermostat is based on the principle of that being being your target temperature. So if you set the heating to be 18 degrees at 6am, the thermostat will learn how long it takes to heat your house to that temperature and switch itself on BEFORE that so that it's at the specified temperature at the time you require. This does mean that if your house is hard to heat that the heating may be on a while. The net result for us was that in the first few weeks the heating was constantly on trying to get us to 21 degrees or thereabouts. By lowering by 0.5 degree (which you CAN do!) we were able to reduce the amount of time the heating was on and cut our bill as a result. This degree of fine control is great. The water function is fairly standard and matches the heating aspect. Other features we've leveraged and found working well are being able to control the heating when we're not home by using smart phone apps we've linked this up to our Hue systems etc. so that the house lights come on and the heating starts when it detects we're getting closer to home. The thermostat kind of does this itself but other apps allow for more control. Overall, it's a great leap forward and I'm very happy with the product. It has inclined me to want to look at their other products which should say it all.

Nest is one of those rare products that is impeccable in its design, functionality, quality and ease of use. All things considered, it is also extremely good value for money as well. However, like me, you will might only realise that once you have started using Nest. The positive experience of Nest actually starts on unpacking the product, the quality of the product is evident in every detail. Even the screws for attaching the product to the wall have a certain quality about them which just is not there in a normal screw. Prior to installing Nest, for years my house has been either too hot or too cold and rarely at just the right temperature. Now, less than two days after installation, with Nest, I can accurately control the temperature inside my house so that it feels comfortable all the time. I have no hesitation in recommending Nest as a new or replacement thermostat / timer. It has certainly given my old boiler a new lease of life, which in its last life was simply controlled by a programmable clock and the thermostatic valves on the radiators. For those interested, the boiler which I fitted Nest to, is the IMI / Range / Baxi / Potterton - Powermax 185 (yes, the boiler was sold and sold again from company to company like a hot potato!). This type of boiler has a chequered history due to a lack of knowledge amongst most heating engineers on the correct maintenance and repair but despite that, like Nest, I consider it to be a design classic!! If Nest can fit this old boiler and give it a new lease of life, then it will probably fit any boiler out there. But do your own research and check the compatibility for yourself. if you are not confident to fit Nest yourself then it is worthwhile getting a Nest installation professional to fit it for you. The installation process took me approximately 2 hours. I prepared well by having my boiler installation manual to hand as well as lengths of power cable and a variety of tools such as a cable stripper, drill, tape measure, electrical screwdriver, pencil etc. I also watched a few YouTube videos on how to install. One important safety point to remember is to switch off the bolier and isolate it from the mains during installation. Following installation, I can see, at a glance, the actual temperature inside the house and also when the boiler is due to be triggered to run and when it is not. When I walk past Nest, the built-in motion sensor wakens so that Nest displays the actual temperature and the temperature that the boiler has been set to come on at. This allows Nest to be setup and adjusted very accurately for each individuals requirements. Adjustment is made by either making adjustments on the Nest display itself or by using the Nest App on your phone. I have setup Nest to operate to a pre-determined schedule because I have a pretty standard routine, however, Nest has been designed to learn your home life patters and adjusts to suit and save energy when you are out. You will need to research this a bit yourself to decide if you want to simply set a schedule or let nest learn and react to your movements. When I am away from the house, I can check the Nest App on my phone to see how much the temperature is dropping throughout the day when the house is empty and Nest has been set to a low temperature, so as not to switch the boiler on unnecessarily. In my case this confirmed that the installation of the loft insulation which was upgraded a few years ago was actually worthwhile! There being a minimal drop in temperature throughout the day. In its history file, Nest stores the boiler's operation details which allows me to check how long the boiler has had to run for each day to maintain the desired temperatures throughout the day and night. This will prove to be helpful in adjusting the Nest settings so as to be as energy efficient as possible or for monitoring the benefits of other energy saving upgrades such as the installation of upgraded windows or loft insulation etc. On researching the possibilities of Nest further, it is apparent that the integration of Nest with other household products will limited only by the ingenuity of Nest's designers (which is obviously there in abundance) and the ingenuity and foresight of designers of other products. It was a pleasant surprise to find that Nest was already able to seamlessly integrate with my Logitech Ultimate remote control. As soon as I realised that this was a possibility, it was done using the Nest App on my phone. I would have never thought that a mere thermostat could be such a joy to use and into the bargain actually provide the very precise boiler control which is necessary to make the living environment as comfortable as possible. With Nest, the days of turning thermostats up and down to control the temperature or adjusting difficult to set time settings on wall mounted programmers are gone. Nest is an absolute pleasure to use and helps us to create a very comfortable living environment, which can only be a good thing. There are not many products on the market that I would take the time to review as most are here today and gone tomorrow. However, Nest is one of those products that stands out and I have no doubt will be here to stay for a very long time. Nest has clearly been designed and brought to market by skilled and enthusiastic designers and others with a vision who are passionate and determined in their efforts. Nest has created a product which can actually help to improve our everyday lives in more ways than you could ever imagine that a thermostat could. I did my research before purchasing and watched a few YouTube videos on the installation but I still felt uncertain about it whether Nest would work with my boiler. Having now bought, installed and used Nest, I would say its a no-brainer! I hope that this review helps a few people in their research prior to making their purchase.

I got my nest heating controls today first impressions looks ok but a few things bothered me first of all I was lucky that my old salus IT500 setup had the exact same wiring so it was pretty easy to do the wiring or so you would think! Installation asks you to mount the heatlink to the wall after installing the wiring I strongly suggest you do it this way otherwise its a right c*** to do it on the wall. The clamps for holding the cable in place were not to my liking they certainly were not designed for round cable in mind! That being said I carefully flattened a section of the outer casing on the cable so it would fit better. Then I had to tighten the screws very carefully because I think if id been a bit over zealous I would have snapped it. This plastic isnt designed for this task! See photo’s The outer cover on the heatlink is a bit poorly designed the clip piece on the top that holds it in position to keep it on after the screw in the bottom is done up is useless and this is the main reason this product lost a star for me. You can see in the photo’s how I can easily pull the top part away from the heatlink. Now the thermostat unit is very solid its so heavy I think there is a metal block inside it lol. Setup was fairly easy however there were no instructions on how to use the learning thermostat I had to look online to learn how t o use it. I thought it was a touch screen but its not. I initially used a phone charger to power the learning thermostat although there must be a battery inside as it works without it plugged in. so maybe that explains the weight of it. After this I dug into my plug drawer and found a suitable 12v transformer plug those ones you typically get what I call black plug transformers. So I wired this upto the learning thermostat’s base doesnt matter which way the wires go. Im glad the base has a spirit level in it that is a nice touch it makes mounting it to a wall easy although I just screwed mine into the bottom of my staircase (wood) about 1.5m off the ground. The app is a bit fiddly especially trying to make a schedule that was a royal pain in the a** but if you want to set the same for every day of the week you can copy monday and paste it to the rest of the days of the week. I havent had time to look into the app in depth but it seems comprehensive. Lets hope it lasts longer than my salus did. That lasted about 5 years although I cant complain too much 5 years is pretty good. But the salus was 1st generation so it wasnt as good as this I needed an extra device powered and plugged into the router. Having said that, now I power the thermostat so I guess swings and roundabouts. This is an early review I may change in the future but hopefully I dont need to.

Product received next day in good packaging giving a good feel of quality at the start. we had an old Honeywell Y plan gravity fed system with a twenty year old Worcester boiler. The boiler is going well and works at about 90% according to the service engineer. I know modern boilers are better, but allowing for the claims on the thermostat, which essentially helps you to not heat an empty house, I can easily see how the money will be clawed back in a year. The thermostat is easy to use and understand and features a fail safe minimum temperature to avoid freezing when off, as well as a minimum temperature setting, which we set at 9 degrees to keep our dogs warmer in case we turn the thermostat right down. The third generation links to the hot water system. There are really only two benefits for this compared with the old set up, that is the ability to set it remotely from a phone or tablet, and the fact that one unit now controls all. For us no more fiddling around in a dark airing cupboard messing with the timer. By the way the Nest timing is far easier to use and see than our old 7 day programmer. I installed the heat link myself. I'm not an electrician or plumber but as someone who runs a building firm has a reasonable knowledge of heating systems and electrical systems. Our wiring centre was a mesh of wires linking to two sets of four connecting blocks. I did take the time to log things as I disconnected and was a little unsure of what supplied what on the cables which went into the wall, but after a little research found out which was the thermostat and which was the power back to the boiler. The nest wiring diagram I used was pretty good once you understood the rudiments and the only problem I had was that there was no indication of how the pump should be wired. Having found a Y plan on Google it all became clear and then relatively easy. I did have an issue with the tank stat as the wires were labelled 1, 2 and C which didn't easily correspond with the Nest wiring diagram which did cause a problem at first in that it worked but I couldn't turn it off.. But thanks to Google it too became clear and after swapping too wires all sorted. My advice, is that if you can identify the various heating parts of your system and are happy with a bit of DIY electricals (safely though) then as long as you have a wiring diagram of what you've got, most people should be able to install the heat link without the need of a "professional" so save yourself a little cash. But do your research first and don't get to a point where you can't revert to the old system. I'm really pleased and the stat is working nicely, just as the weather warms up! However, my wife has an issue. The stat is a large round lit up screen with a shiny chrome surround so in fairness, does stand out in crowd so to speak and she isn't too happy with having a modern piece of equipment on show in our stone built traditional style house with natural wood furniture and apart from the stat, not a piece of shiny chrome in sight, apart from the kitchen, which is a bad room to fit a learning thermostat. The screen times out to blank but the chrome is a bit obvious. Suggestion would be that the unit is offered with a wood effect dial which I am sure would have kept the good lady happy. That aside, I would recommend the product.

Nest has been getting some bad reviews lately due to a faulty software update so I feel it's worth putting another side to the story. I bought my first Nest thermostat (2nd generation) in 2013 and found it reduced our heating bills but, more importantly, enabled us to control our heating via an App on my iPhone. At that time the house where it was installed was a holiday home as we'd bought it intending to move in but sadly the job I'd counted on fell through due to the financial crisis. It was great on our occasional visits to set the heating before we arrived and walk in to a nice warm house. We sold that house but I swore I'd install Nest in our next home as we were total converts. Last year we bought both a Nest Gen 2 and the new Nest Gen 3 for our current home. We needed a 2-zone heating system so the Gen-2 has been setup to control the upstairs zone, and downstairs a Nest Gen 3 controls that heating zone and hot water. For those not familiar with the Nest family the Nest 2 does not control the water heater, only the central heating or AC. Our home was built in 1897 so has odd heating requirements that are quite different upstairs and down, hence our need for a 2-zone system. Upstairs is poor at retaining heat whilst downstairs with its solid stone walls, is one big thermal store so only the upstairs zone needs frequent heating top-ups. Our new heating system was installed just before Christmas and getting a Nest installer at short notice wasn't possible. However, our plumber's electrician was able to connect up the 2-zone Nest system in about 45 minutes and it worked fine from commissioning up until the bad software update. Happily for us only the Nest 2nd Generation was corrupted by the update and became unresponsive; the Nest 3 continued working correctly so half our system was still controllable. I was able to manually select the upstairs zone valve to permanently open and the Nest 3 temporarily took over controlling both zones and the hot water. Fixing the Nest 2 software problem took a bit of trial and error. The fixes on the Nest website didn't work so eventually I decided to remove the Nest 2 from our house Nest account. For some reason that did the trick and I was able to interact again with the Nest 2 so I set it up from scratch and re-connected it to our 2-zone Nest account and it's all working brilliantly again. The point is that even the best companies occasionally have an issue with a software update so don't be put off buying a Nest. In over 3 years of owning a Nest the software glitch was our first negative issue, which I was able to resolve after a bit of experimentation. I'm sure Nest will be a lot more careful to debug software updates in future. For those left without heating it must have been a real pain but I'm sure they'll fell back in love with their Nest once it was sorted out. If not and anyone has decided to give up on Nest I'm interested in setting up a zone controlling my workshop so I'm happy to take it off their hands! Another benefit of the Nest system is that we've also bought some LIFX lights, which connect to the Nest via wi-fi to provide controllable lighting via a separate App. When the Nest is set to Away it tells the LIFX lights, which then turn off and on randomly to make it look as if someone is home and moving around the house. Overall I'm extremely happy with my Nest setup and would definitely buy another when I extend my heating system into my workshop. The ability to independently control heating in multiple zones is very attractive and if enough people have given up on Nest due to the software glitch, hopefully I can cheaply set up zones for our bathroom and bedrooms as well so they're always lovely and warm without chucking heat at the whole house. It really is a great system and I can forgive the 3-day outage whilst I sorted out the software glitch having had more than 3 years of faultless operation!

I'll admit, when I placed the order, I hadn't realised this item wasn't new. Nevertheless, you would expect it to be in working order. The item received had a faulty Heatlink (the bit that's wired up to the boiler). Apparantly, this is a common fault with the original devices from Nest, before Google bought them out. The diodes often burn out if there is a power surge. So after installing the heatlink , despite testing mains pwer going to it, there was no flashing blue light and no way to connect to the thermostat. By the time I discovered this, I was just outside the Amazon 1 month return period. An email sent directly to Smart Gadget Solutions in Bradford illicited no response and nobody answered the phone when I called their support number. This Amazon Marketplace trader has many similar bad reviews (also something I hadn't picked up on.) Really Amazon should be monitoring this and taking some action. Heatlink now replaced by a third party but overall a thoroughly bad experience

A great device, one of the few who deserve the lable "smart home". You can set it up yourself if you're an above average DIYer, it took me a couple of hours with some extra cabling needed from the distribution board for the hot water + concealing the cable the thermostat itself to the Smart Hive in the wall. A word of caution: DO NOT try to set it up yourself unless you're not absolutely sure of what you're doing: there's a risk of fatal electrical hazard -or, less dangerous but still costly, of damaging the thermostat. Do not play around with electricity :( Once the cabling and mounting is complete, setting up your Nest and pairing it with the app itself is a breeze: after connecting to your wifi network, a few questions about your household, the location of the thermostat, geographical location of your home, etc..., it's ready: just set up your ideal temperature and forget about it! After a week-10 days, the "learning" process will be complete and the thermostat will adjust the temperature automatically if you have set it up yourself a couple of times (e.g. lowering temperature at night and raising it again when you wake up). The "Away" feature is also excellent: when you leave on holidays for example, the Nest will automatically sense the home is empty (+based on your mobile phone's location), and set its function to "eco" an energy-saving temperature + turn off the hot water schedule. Just brilliant! Finally, the hot water schedule is also very easy to set up, bar a minor glitch in the app (Android version, at least), in which you have to set up each day separately for the scheduling to function properly instead of setting up several days at once. I would also have liked a little more flexibility in the duration of the boiler activation (it only accepts 30mins increments), I hope Nest will fix this in a future update. But these are minor comments in the overall experience. Conclusion: this thermostat can be a little pricey but it's arguably best in class, very efficient, and a beautiful object in itself. Highly recommended!

Il design e' veramente bello .L utilizzo e ' semplice per chi ha dimestichezza con i termostati di altre marche.Al montaggio ho provveduto personalmente visto che ho discrete conoscenze nel campo elettrico,certamente per chi non e pratico di elettricità consiglio di rivolgersi a un elettricista o al supporto tecnico della casa.Per quanto riguarda alla problematica della differenza di temperatura tra quella impostata e quella reale, io non la ho riscontrata,le due temperaturature coincidono perfettamente.La programmazione e' quanto di più semplice si possa desiderare rispetto a molti tipi di termostati sul mercato

Suddenly one day the device disconnects from wifi and cannot connect ever again. Known Google issue and read before buying. Spoke to Google and they said since bought through 3rd party (Amazon Direct) nothing can be done.

vengo de un termostato inalámbrico de hace 12 años... y aunque estaba muy bien, pero ya no se veía el panel. Me decidí por este por la opción de En casa/Fuera de casa que es realmente cómoda. La instalación la hizo un amigo que arregla calderas, no fue del todo fácil porque la caldera es antigua, pero tenía 2 cables para la corriente y 2 cables para indicar el encendido y apagado de la calefacción. con alguna prueba al final dimos donde era. Decir que los materiales tienen que ser de calidad, porque pesa la luyo, el doble que el otro siendo la mitad de pequeño. el funcionamiento es sencillísimo, tienes que perder un rato en configurarlo, instalar la app nest y poco más. se supone que después de una semana aprende de tus rutinas y se enchufa solo cuando lo necesitas, pero imagino que necesitara supervisión (como todo lo semiautomático). Se ve muy bien desde lejos y cuando te mueves se enciende para que veas la info de la pantalla.

Lo màs top del top en termostatos.

Top product, prima zelf te installeren. Heb een oude ketel daarvoor OpenTherm convertor er tussen om het werkend te krijgen. Het werkt echt top! De ai functie is ook grappig, ben je van huis dan gaat het soms vanzelf uit