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A Smart, Sleek, Money-Saving Thermostat
A Smart, Sleek, Money-Saving Thermostat
Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, both former Apple executives, founded Nest Labs in May 2010
with a mission to build a better thermostat. The startup took shape as many do, in a garage in
Palo Alto, California. The pair tinkered for over a year, until commercially releasing the Nest
Learning Thermostat, which takes an active role in saving energy around the house.
The device—about the size and shape of a hockey puck—has a sleek, modern look that is
reminiscent of the Apple family of products. That’s not by coincidence. Fadell led the charge to
design the first 18 generations of iPod, with Rogers at his side, and they both went on to
develop the iPhone.
At Nest, Fadell and Rogers have given the often-ignored thermostat more than a facelift. “It is
not just a beautiful looking thermostat,” says Fadell. “We built so much technology inside.”
Over time, the thermostat learns from the adjustments a user makes and then automatically
alters the temperature based on these patterned behaviors, as a means of saving energy.
I spoke with Fadell, founder and CEO of Nest, about the $249 gadget—now part of the
Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum collection—and its novel features.
You had designed the iPod and iPhone at Apple. What then made you turn to the
thermostat of all products?
When I chose to take early retirement from Apple with my family, I started immersing myself
in the design of a home in Lake Tahoe. I wanted it to be the greenest, most connected home
that I knew of, so I started researching all the different things about designing a home.
Through that, I found the thermostat problem. It just wouldn’t leave my brain, so I started
working and designing my own.
What are the biggest problems with standard thermostats on the market and how
people use them?
In the U.S., there are a quarter-billion thermostats in operation. A very tiny percentage of
those thermostats are ever programmed to save any energy, because they were too difficult to
learn how to program. The first thing that we set out to do was to make a thermostat that
learns from your behavior the temperatures you like and when you like them and then it
programs itself. We can actually get people to save energy without all the hassle of
programming and learning about it.
What is the waste, on average, in both energy and money, for consumers who
don’t use programmable thermostats?
First, between $1,200 and $1,500 per year is spent in the U.S. on heating and cooling an
average home. We typically see between 20 and 30 percent of that energy wasted because of
unprogrammed thermostats.
Since the first iteration of Nest in October 2011, the company has released
software updates. What, in your opinion, has been the most noteworthy
improvement?
I think the biggest one that we’ve been able to do was this spring. Even with Nest, people get
settled into a schedule that they like, a certain temperature at a certain time. [A new feature
called] Seasonal Savings is a challenge that you can opt into. It will actually look at your
schedule and figure out the times where it can shave off a half a degree or degree here or
there and, over a period of two or three weeks, create a new, lower-energy schedule for you.
The other feature is called Rush Hour Rewards. In times of peak energy use, during the hot
summer weekday, when everyone turns on their air conditioning at once, it is similar to a rush
hour, where everyone tries to use the road at one time and you get a traffic jam. In the case of
an electrical rush hour, we get brownouts and blackouts, or your prices go skyrocketing
through the roof. We have algorithms that will go in during those rush hour periods, if you opt
into this, and do some shaving.
The utility has to tell us when one of these peak loading days happens, maybe 10 days a year.
Then, we send out a notice to the individual Nest owners. They opt into it, and we modulate or
control their thermostat during that time frame. If you allow us to change your temperature by
one degree, we can move 50 to 60 percent of the energy usage during those peak times to
another time or not use it at all, so that we don’t put as much strain on the grid. If you opt into
that program, the utility will reward you with dollars.
Are there specific areas of the country where this Rush Hour Rewards program
has really worked?
We have run many, many events in Austin, Texas. It is working really well. Over 90 percent of
our customers are saying, “Hey, I did it. I earned money, and I actually didn’t feel anything. I
enjoyed it.” The utility loved it as well. Everybody is working together. The program is going to
expand across the country as other utilities work in concert with us.
Nest provides users with a free monthly report. What types of data does this
include?
We accumulate all of the savings that the Nest community has saved together. We are almost
at 1 billion kilowatt hours just 22 months since we came on the market. Then, you can see your
history of how much energy you used this month versus last month. We also break it down
into the individual reasons why you are using more or less energy that month compared to the
previous month. It could be because of the weather. It could be because of your adjustments
or that you were away. There is a whole host of factors. We give you that right in the report so
that you can make behavioral modifications if you want to save more. We also show things like
the typical nighttime temperature that people set in your region, to show whether you are
doing something that everyone else is doing or you are outside the average.