Nest Thermostat Please Help

suziebear1985

Hi All,

I had a Nest thermostat installed in October as I'd heard they were great at helping you to save on energy costs. I'd felt quite pleased with it as it was easy to use despite the fact we don't have to use it very often as it's quite a warm house (row if 3 houses and we are the middle house). I got a report for our November usage and my mouth hit the floor. Apparently tly we have heated the home for 58 hours in the month of November and are in the top 25% of Nest users. I've never even seen the thing on and I've literally adjusted the temperature a handful of times. I'm panicking now as I'm not ultra tech savvy but quivering whether I should turn the auto learning schedule off so it can't turn on unless I tell it to, although that seems to go against the point of the Nest. Looked at the schedule and nothing is set above 15 degrees all day. Thanks

Neil_Jones

58 hours?  over 30 days?  less than on average two hours a day, most of which is probably going to be in the morning after a cold night.

And you think that's excessive?

If you've never seen it on, surely warm radiators would imply that the heating has been on?

The auto-learn stuff doesn't happen overnight and it will come on and go off and alter itself automatically.  It doesn't stop learning: https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9247510

tim_p

Ive had one installed for several years and love it. That said I very soon realised it wasn’t going to save me any money, in fact more the opposite. I turned off all the smarts, set up a flexible schedule and then I did start to save money - whether it will cover the cost of the unit I don’t know!  The ability to control the thing from anywhere in the world came in very handy when we used to have holidays (remember them?) and many was the time we came home from a red-eye flight to a toasty warm house having turned the heating on from the airport. I bought a later version that controlled the hot water too but it’s still in the box!  

Nearlyold

You can check the heating "History" for the last 10 days,  on your phone tap on the current Temp display on the opening screen then select History (bottom right of the screen)   tap the orange horizontal total time bar and it will show you exactly when the heating was on and what temp it was set to at that time. 

[Deleted User]

When it comes to smart heating controls there are many false claims. The last BEIS-sponsored study that I read suggested that there was little international-based experience to support the claims that manufacturers are making. Before any heating controls are taken into account for EPC purposes, they have to be made available to the BRE for testing. There are not many smart heating controls listed in the BRE database.

Astria

The way all these thermostats save money is the same - they keep the house at a certain temperature rather than you just whacking the heating on and sitting in shorts and a t shirt. If you want to save money, turn the thermostat down and layer up.

First thing I did was to turn off all the "smart" things - I'll turn the heating on when I need it and off when I don't. No device is going to be able to predict when I need the heating. It's only good if your schedule is pretty much the same every day. Even the ones with geo-location features are pretty useless as even if I'm heading back home it doesn't mean I'm going to be staying there for any particularly lengthy period and heating up a house for the 15 minutes I'm there is a complete waste of energy.

What is useful is being able to control the heating remotely so I can turn the heating on when I know I'll need it soon, but it's not essential.

gsmh

I have a Tado smart thermostat and a Vaillant boiler. I have a schedule set, of course, but I love that the heating switches off when I leave the house - before I had Tado I even used to go away for the weekend and forget to turn off the heating so it would be heating an empty house. Now I don't have to think about it. Tado will modulate my boiler so that only the heat the house needs is provided. One of the myths Nest propagates is that you need to be constantly messing with the thermostat so that it can 'learn' your preferences. That isn't how a thermostat works. You decide what your ideal temperature is, set it and leave the thermostat well alone.

If you're regularly returning home for 15 minutes, then leaving again, I can understand your point - but I'm not sure many of us do that. I am more than happy knowing that if I'm not in the house, my boiler isn't heating it. Makes sense to me.