The Nest Thermostat's front screen
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Developer | Nest Labs |
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Type | Smart thermostat |
Release date | 2011 |
Website | Official website |
The Nest Learning Thermostat (or Nest Thermostat) is a smart thermostat developed by Nest Labs and designed by Tony Fadell, Ben Filson, and Fred Bould. It is an electronic, programmable, and self-learning Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat that optimizes heating and cooling of homes and businesses to conserve energy.
The device is based on a machine learning algorithm: for the first weeks users have to regulate the thermostat in order to provide the reference data set. The thermostat can then learn people's schedule, at which temperature they are used to and when. Using built-in sensors and phones' locations, it can shift into energy saving mode when it realizes nobody is at home.
Nest is compatible with most standard HVAC systems that use central heating and cooling and uses industry standard connections to facilitate the control of these appliances.
Nest consists of two primary pieces of hardware. The display contains the main printed circuit board (PCB) and rotating ring, and the base (pictured) houses the connection terminals, bubble level, and holes for wall anchors. Neither can function independently; if separated, the display becomes inactive until reconnected to the base.
A special version of Nest is available in Europe, which is capable of controlling 120–240 V heating systems. The Nest is paired with a "Heat Link" device, which contains the circuitry required for controlling the mains-voltage heating system.
The Nest Thermostat is built around an operating system that allows interaction with the thermostat via spinning and clicking of its control wheel, which brings up option menus for switching from heating to cooling, access to device settings, energy history, and scheduling. Users can control Nest without a touch screen or other input device . As the thermostat is connected to the Internet, the company can push updates to fix bugs, improve performance and add additional features. For updates to occur automatically, the thermostat must be connected to Wi‑Fi and the battery must have at least a 3.7 V charge to give enough power to complete the download and installation of the update.
The Nest Thermostat has had a number of software updates. A recent security update enables two factor authentication.