
Nest thermostat released in the UK - robmcm
https://nest.com/blog/2014/04/02/the-uk-just-got-a-little-more-comfy/
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bananas
Sorry but this product is horse shit. I have nothing but contempt for it.

1\. It's expensive at £250. I doubt it makes a saving on that scale over 10
years. In fact I suspect it costs more over time (i.e. when it goes wrong and
when it gets your routine wrong).

2\. Most houses do have thermostats. In fact most of them have remotely
programmable ones with week schedules at least and a precise user interface
(mine is down to half a degree). Plus every radiator (apart from one) has a
thermostat on it.

3\. Is this really a problem or a manufactured one? If I'm hot I turn the
thermostat down. If I'm cold, I turn it up. If I go out, I get back to a cold
house and make some tea until the heating warms up. I'll set a minimum
temperature at most.

4\. I'm sure this will quite happily piss away your gas if you decide to go on
holiday. I bet it didn't see that coming! Perhaps I've got the flu - does it
know that?

5\. Based on the fact that it connects to the WiFi, I suggest that it quite
happily reports your data away somewhere which is surely useful. And I bet it
knows who you are. How long before you start getting junk mail from NPower
saying "have you tried our new tariff"?

6\. There's even more shit to go wrong now which will require a CORGI engineer
to come out and fix at great cost.

Sorry but it's an excessive product for a non-existent problem.

~~~
onion2k
The average UK heating bill is about £650 a year (based on 2012 numbers with a
~10% increase). Assuming you have a reasonably stable routine I can imagine a
better thermostat could save 15% on your energy bill - amounting to about £100
a year. It _could_ be worthwhile financially.

Of course though, that would need to be tested. Fortunately there's a big
queue of early adopters just waiting to do that for us.

~~~
bananas
_could_ isn't enough to spend £250 on a 40% return in a year on such a low
value.

If you have £250 floating around then £100 difference over a year on your
heating bill isn't likely a major issue either.

It doesn't make sense, even as an early adopter.

It makes an interesting purchase for the shiny squad with a disposable income
but that's about it.

~~~
TheAnimus
As an early adopter, I would want it to have some kind of 'geofencing' logic.

Given that I currently use as my main mobile a Windows Phone and the
announcements that they are doing something around this area come (should be
detailed at Build), I'd like this.

I live alone, I have a gas and electric bill of £800 pa, often I'm not home,
I'll work late, end up in another country that night etc. Having something
that lets me switch off remotely the heating would be useful to a point. But I
only have the heating on for maybe 5 months a year.

What would be useful, is some software that realised I was heading home,
automatically turning it on. That realised there is no way I'd be home within
30 min, so delayed heating going on. Without me interacting with it.

As for control of the temp, well, as mentioned thermostatic valves do a great
job of that.

I just want remote On / Off timer functionality. £250 is far beyond what I'd
consider reasonable for that.

I'd sooner have an array of Zigbee sensors for the temp, a controller for the
solenoid and something to bridge it to TCP/IP land.

This strikes me as not only ugly (you wouldn't notice the current thermostat)
but pointlessly over engineered in one aspect, whilst ignoring the most
important one. If you have to remember to interact with the app, it won't
work. I could save the odd £2 or £3 if I remembered to flick a switch before
leaving home on a morning.

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jgrahamc
"Most UK heating systems don’t even have thermostats"[1]

I died laughing.

[1] Citation Needed.

Oh, but thank goodness this California-based company is here to save us with
their £250 thermostat because we just don't have them and we've been dying for
some way to control house temperature all this time.

Oh, wait, B&Q offers me a choice of "Wireless Thermostat | Room Thermostat |
Heating Controls | Central Heating Controller | Thermostat | Digital Room
Thermostat | Central Heating Programmer | Digital Thermostat (97 products)".

And every house I've ever lived in has had either a central thermostat or per
radiator thermostat.

Please, Nest, I'm begging you. Come up with some way to keep the ever present
rain from touching our heads. We don't even have umbrellas over here.

~~~
DrJokepu
During the course of last 7 years I've rented 7 different flats / houses in
the UK (all of them in London), 4 of them didn't have a thermostat, 3 had
centrally controlled thermostats, only one of them from the 21st century. They
were all fairly typical London dwellings. So there you go, anecdotal evidence
supported by some data points.

~~~
jgrahamc
Damn you and your data that doesn't support my outrage :-)

~~~
timthorn
Data suggests that all properties outside London have thermostats, those
within the M25 live cold and impoverished lives?

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Dale1
I'd love to see these British houses with "No thermostat and you can't control
anything".

Every house i've ever lived in has has not just a main thermostat but most
have thermostatic vales on the radiators too!

I'm 31 now and have lived in lots of houses both brand new and old victorian.
They do realise it's customary to modernise older houses after a while don't
they? Maybe not!

Talk about inventing a a problem that no one actually has!!!

~~~
andrewingram
I've been renting in London for the last 7 years, and in 7 different flats.
Roughly half of those places had thermostats, and they were usually poorly
placed. In all but one of the houses, the valves on the radiators had been
removed (the handles at least), so it was pretty much impossible to control
the temperature room-by-room. Have one flatmate who likes a cold room and
another who likes a hot room? Tough luck.

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arethuza
"Most UK heating systems don’t even have thermostats."

Is that true? It's a long time that I've owned a property that didn't have
both a central thermostat and per-radiator thermostats.

~~~
polshaw
In my experience, almost certainly not. I even find it kind of offensive that
they would say that.

There is some old and poorly maintained housing stock here, so there are
definitely _some_ homes that don't, but I would bet the majority of these are
rentals and a lot of them student rentals. My instinct would put the upper
bound at 20%.

I can assure them that people in these properties (old, poorly maintained and
usually rentals, correlating to low income) are not going to be buying a nest
thermostat. I would be amazed if more than 1% of UK nest sales are going to
homes without a thermostat.

~~~
leoc
It's hard to even imagine a radiator-based central heating system (whether
gas- or home heating oil-fired) that doesn't have one of those cheap little
bimetallic-strip thermostats, at least. Now lots of UK homes don't have per-
radiator thermostats, or don't have central-heating _timers_ : maybe that's
what Nest meant to say.

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polshaw
"Available Today", no mention whatsoever of price, or even a place to buy,
just a link to find certified professionals to do the install for you.

The lowest _installation_ price I could find was £75, some were £100.
Experience tells me that the $250 price in the US means a £250 price, a theory
backed up by the conspicuous absence of any pricing. That brings total cost to
£325-350, or at current exchanges, $540-580.

I think I'll wait for a cheaper alternative for what, although neat, is
essentially little more than a pretty raspberry pi with a small display and
temperature sensor. (Also it strikes me that the real savings will be made
when this is done on a room-by-room basis rather than whole-home).

~~~
robin_reala
It’s a bit hidden, but there is a UK store for Nest:

[https://store.nest.com/uk/product/thermostat/](https://store.nest.com/uk/product/thermostat/)

£179 for Nest and (slower) installation if you order this week, £250 after.

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makomk
Well, that's hilarious. Many UK houses to get their hot water from a tank
heated by the same boiler as the central heating system, with both turned on
and off by a central timer plus individual thermostats. It sounds like the
Nest can't handle that, meaning you still need a separate non-Nest timer for
the hot water as well with its own user interface.[1]

[1] See the comments on [http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nest-thermostat-
officiall...](http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/nest-thermostat-officially-
launches-in-the-uk-priced-at-179) \- I thought it was odd the Nest PR stuff
didn't mention hot water anywhere.

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mhw
As others are pointing out, Nest don't seem to understand their target market
if they think we don't have thermostats and timers already.

We also have other options that are already available. For example:
[https://www.hivehome.com/](https://www.hivehome.com/) or
[http://www.tado.com/gb/](http://www.tado.com/gb/) or
[http://www.scottishpower.co.uk/connect/](http://www.scottishpower.co.uk/connect/)
or
[https://www.inspirehomeautomation.co.uk/](https://www.inspirehomeautomation.co.uk/)

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ulfw
A solution the world has been waiting for...

~~~
twic
I just hope i can pay for it with my Coin card!

~~~
ulfw
Yea and the professional installer you need to call for this thing too.

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TenDnal
The design looks so good! I wonder has anybody tested it?

