Nest has finally arrived in the UK and is now widely available from stores such as Amazon and John Lewis. There are 2 parts to the Nest, the actual Nest control unit and a small white box. This box sits between the Nest and the boiler. In my setup I was lucky that everything could be wired up close together and so the boiler powers the box which powers the Nest, meaning it just sits on the wall, looking like it’s floating , very sci-fi!
Arranging installation of the Nest turned out to be a tad tricky due to the original installers having to cancel the proposed installation date due to a medial issue with staff. The next available date was a month away and so Nest were contacted to arrange a replacement installation firm. Unfortunately this is where things got a bit tricky, they might design a cool product but they’re not very good at customer service, I was on hold for close to 20 minutes only to be told I couldn’t change to a different installer. Unhappy with this answer an alternative installer was contacted and within 5 minutes they’d arranged everything for me, with installation taking place ahead of the original plan. If you’re thinking of hiring an installation company I’d highly recommend nationwide-heating.co.uk as they were very professional and did an excellent job. You should expect installation of the Nest takes up to 2 hours depending on where it is to be located, as my setup was very straight forward it only took about an hour an a half, including the demonstration.
The Nest control unit is brilliant, you can see the designers have put a lot of work into making this a modern thermostat. Controls are intuitive, the screen is nice and clear and it doesn’t take long to get the hang of it. The outer silver ring rotates allowing you to change the temperature or scroll through menus and you push the Nest in to select items.
There are a couple of key features that make the Nest really stand out. Firstly, the learning feature. In the first few weeks you are encouraged to manually set and change the temperature to suit your needs, the Nest takes note of these changes and automatically populates a timer schedule. The schedule can be manually adjusted, something you’ll need to do if, like me, you have the unit installed at the start of a long weekend when you’ll be in the house more often than usual. The schedule can be different for each day of the week and this has giving me far greater control over the old timer function I previously had to use.
If you happen to be going away for a bit there is a dedicated away mode you can set for when you’re on holiday which suspends the schedule to ensure you’re not heating the house unnecessarily. Brilliantly, because the Nest is internet enabled you can use the companion app to control your heating when out of the house, meaning you don’t actually need to be at the Nest to control it and you could get you house heating up when you’re on your way home from your holiday as you can turn the temperature up or down as long as your phone has an internet connection.
The companion Nest app is excellent, it replicates all functions of the Nest on your mobile/tablet, meaning you can turn your heating up or down from the comfort of any room in your house.
At the moment the Nest is going through it’s learning phase, but even after only a couple of days of manually adjusting the temperature it is providing a more consistent temperature, it’s proved to be far better than the old system of just have the heating on or off. The ‘True Radiant’ function is especially interesting, over time Nest will learn how long it takes to warm the house up to the desired temperature and will adjust it’s schedule accordingly, it knows when to turn the heating on to get it to your desired temperature at the desired time. Being internet enabled it also knows the surrounding weather conditions and it’ll be interesting to see how it uses this data, for example turning the heating off in a sudden heat wave (they do occasionally happen in the UK!) or turning it on for longer when the weather turns cooler.
Nest have truly created something remarkable, dragging the outdated thermostat into the information age and making it look a thing of beauty.
The Nest Learning Thermostat is available now from Amazon: https://goo.gl/h3lXRB
