Our Nest

Last week on a flight, I was reading Fortune magazine, and Tony Fadell, former VP at Apple and the founder of Nest, was profiled in an article on entrepreneurship. Turns out a few weeks ago, we jumped on the bandwagon Tony's leading now and bought a Nest for our house. I felt like a trendsetter!

The Nest is a thermostat, but it's no ordinary thermostat - it's wifi-enabled and looks like an iPod strapped to the wall. Yes, we now have a "wired" home thanks to our Nest thermostat. We (and by that I mean Craig) removed the old programmable thermostat that was set to permanent override mode and connected the Nest. Our house still has what appears to be the original thermostat (both shown below), so we now have the two dials co-existing on the wall, though the old one is merely for decoration now.

 We saw the Nest at Lowe's during one of our many trips there recently but decided to make it official after seeing one functioning in our neighbor's house (our neighbors have also spent a fair amount of time in Silicon Valley and couldn't help themselves). The display screens (below) show up on our iPhones and we can adjust the temperature from our phones, though we rarely need to since it learned our desired settings. It also shows us the number of hours a day that the furnace is running and includes a green leaf if that day was below average, or for days with high usage, it points out if it's due to a lower outside temperature. Yes, we are dorks but it's the coolest home gadget yet.