September 2013 • 15
HVAC Controls
NEW THERMOSTAT TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING
the face of home comfort and opening new
possibilities for homeowners to improve
home energy efficiency and control the
performance of their heating and cooling
equipment remotely.
Thermostat manufacturers are bring-
ing exciting new capabilities to market,
including Nest, whose Nest
®
Learning
Thermostat
™
introduces a style and sensi-
bility reminiscent of Apple Inc. products to
home comfort while making energy savings
very nearly automatic.
Meanwhile, Honeywell and tekmar
have updated their thermostats and HVAC
controls to enable customers to control their
heating and cooling systems remotely via the
Internet. Honeywell has also added wireless
capability across its control and thermostat
product lines to improve communications
and eliminate wiring chores.
(Read about
Honeywell and tekmar on pages 17 and 18.)
APPLE INC. ALUMNI
The thermostat market was attracting
little attention before Nest burst on to the
scene in 2011 with a mission to change the
way that consumers think about energy effi-
ciency. Founded by Apple Inc. alumni Tony
Fadell and Matt Rogers, the Palo Alto, Calif.
company targeted the humble thermostat
as the vital link between consumers and
the energy they use to heat and cool their
homes.
“Our number one goal was to make
people care about thermostats,” said
Kate Brinks, Director of Corporate
Communications. “Before Nest came on
the scene, I don’t think people thought a lot
about thermostats. We wanted
to create something beautiful
and engaging so people would
want to interact with it, touch
it and show it off, because if
they think about the thermo-
stat, they may think of energy
efficiency as well.”
The sleek, modern design of the
Nest Learning Thermostat is critical
to the company’s mission. The device has
a clean, round shape with a simple digital
display that sets it apart from every home
thermostat that preceded it. “Tony Fadell,
our founder and CEO, talks a lot about
how, if we do not make Nest beautiful and
care about the design, people won’t cherish
it. We want it to be a cherished item on the
wall,” Brinks said.
AUTOMATIC PROGRAMMING
While the design is compelling, the key
to the thermostat is its ability to “learn” the
homeowners’ patterns and program itself.
The Nest uses a combination of hardware
(sensors) and software (algorithms) to
formulate a usage pattern for the home and
program it.
To support the thermostat’s learning
process, the homeowner simply has to
change the thermostat’s setting manually to
match their patterns. With each tempera-
ture adjustment, the thermostat learns the
homeowner’s preferences, and within a few
days it is making the adjustments itself.
“You have to teach it,” said Brinks.
“You just use it like you would a manual
thermostat: Turn it up in the morning and
then turn it down when you sleep or leave
the house. The algorithms in Nest look for
patterns. They notice similarities during
y
weekda s and weekends or even a
g bowlin
night when you come home late one day
a week. Basically it is programming itself
based on the input it receives, and it just
plays your own schedule back to you.”
Brinks said the self-programming
is great for customers, because while a
programmed thermostat provides great
savings, the programming itself can be a
serious obstacle. She speaks from personal
experience, because she and her husband
both failed in their attempts to set a pro-
grammable thermostat they owned.
“Also, once you program a thermostat,
you never want to change the settings,
because it is too tedious,” she said. With a
Nest, you use it like a manual thermostat
and it programs itself. Consumers are
learning to expect that kind of machine
intelligence, she said.
Nest regularly updates its software and
pushes the revisions out to every thermo-
‘Learning thermostat’ programs
itself and reports energy savings
By John MacKenna
Continued …
