Nest Usage 4 days later

You can only get so far reading the specs or reviews of a product in trying to figure out how it will work for you. After using the nest for a few days, I am starting to have a 'feel' for what it is doing.

In my situation, I live in a 2 story house with the thermostat on the first floor. The heater blows from vents on the ceiling. The system often causes the 2nd floor to be noticeably hotter than the 1st floor by somewhere between 4 to 6 degrees.

As it turns out, setting it to 72 is the same thing as telling the thermostat to turn on the heat at all times. It appears the heat loss through the windows and walls is enough to keep the downstairs temperature below 72F no matter how long the heater runs and no matter how HOT upstairs got. The first day of usage was a pretty hot day. LOL This also says something about my very inefficient single pane windows.

So with that, I it appears I cannot set it to anything higher than 72 to obtain room temp upstairs as a sort of limitation of my heating situation.

The high contrast OLED glow. No other thermostat is as over engineered as this one. But I am a huge fan of over-engineered goods.



Notice the faint white dot on the upper right of the nest logo. There was supposed to be another faint white dot symmetric to the one on the left side of the nest logo. You cant see these dots with the naked eye but my camera can pick up these infrared emissions from the IR LED. These sensors are able to detect movement as well as sense a user's temperature. Similarly you can use your camera's IR sensing abilities to look at the IR beams coming out of your standard TV remote control. Try it!

The nest as shown mounted on my wall. I am still exchanging emails back and forth with nest tech support on what the heck to do with the blue wire. I was supposed to connect this to the O/B grey connector but the computer didn't like that and refused proceed until I disconnected that wire. Tech support told me to connect it to the C connector as in 'common'. It didn't like that either. Still waiting for a response from them. So the final verdict is that they have determined that the blue wire is not connected to anything at all on the other end. Hence I should just leave it disconnected like I have all along. OR perhaps its because I told them what works for me and they just wanted to get rid of me?

After using it for a few days, I just didn't have the patience to allow it time to learn. I just went on the nest website and programmed the time and temperature times over the course of a week. I'll let it adjust itself around my programming instead.

I showed my coworker my ability to control my thermostat at work and he just said "Whoa! You've got this AND your remote IP Camera thing!" The IP Camera thing I shall write about in another post.

How does the nest power itself?

Your home heater usually has 24 volt power transformers (i.e. converts 110 AC into 24 volts) similar to those in your door bell. So the nest does some sort of vampire sucking of the power from the control lines without tripping the controls on the other side as none of the wires are dedicated for power. It will sit there and suck out the power from those lines in order to power itself.

From my usage, it appears that power sucking isn't enough to allow for the WiFi to turn on at all times. So since it cannot sustain this, it will disconnect from the WiFi when the battery runs too low and that is enough for its on board Li-Po battery to charge back up.

Why the heck does it have wifi? The nest polls its servers so that you can log onto the nest website to check on the status of your nest from anywhere and also to program it. It is unfortunate that it was not able to draw enough power for a constant WiFi connection.

One last thing to note here is that the nest appears to want to keep the battery voltage around 3.5V to 3.7V as shown in the tech info page of the nest. Normally laptops will keep its batteries around 4.2V which is 100% charge. Since the nest is vampire sucking power at all times, it has the luxury to try to keep the battery at a lower voltage which is very good for the life of the battery. Of course, it wont last very long in the unlikely event that you take it with you on a trip.  
  
Will I grow attached to it like the Roomba?

6 Days after using the Nest I have not really grown attached to the Nest other than really liking it. However, I think if it were to start talking to me when I walk by with a greeting or other personalizing features, I might just start to think differently. Maybe even give it a name... and have birthday cakes on its anniversaries... Before then, lets not get too personal with the thermostat.