The Nest learning thermostat, first conceived as a way for the smart home to control its own temperature, is venturing into new areas. Last week’s Sunday New York Times magazine contained a glossy four-page spread on home fires and the Nest fire alert.(http://paidpost.nytimes.com/nest/in-a-flash.html?_r=0)
It’s gripping to read. Whereas in the past ‘legacy’ home, the residents had an average of 17 minutes to escape, today’s residents have only three or four minutes. Why? Nest— which is now owned by Google— cites various reasons.
For one thing, today’s homes are larger, and open floor plans mean that fire travels faster, unimpeded by walls, with access to more airspace and more oxygen. Plus, the materials used for construction and furnishings today are more combustible. A chair made of foam and plastic, for instance, burns much faster than an old-fashioned chair with cotton-padded cushions. In addition, many of the materials used in home furnishings, such as polyurethane, an oil-based product, can be toxic when burned. And most fatalies are a result of smoke inhalation, not contact burns.
The point of this scary spread is that smoke alarms are critical. And— ta-da!— Nest now has an application that alerts the homeowner and even speaks to them about which room is on fire. Moreover, Nest sends a message to the owner’s cell phone (as long as the wifi is functioning).
Nest isn’t the only genius trying to make an impression. Honeywell has a thermostat, offered by Earth Networks, called WeatherBug Home. This links ‘big weather data’ (hurricanes? blizzards?) to the smart home. It also estimates daily and monthly heating and cooling costs and energy use, by measuring data models against forecasted weather. So state-of-the-art.
Which is why it’s kind of surprising that a news story notes that most Americans don’t use their smart thermostats— or they don’t use them properly. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that 42% of 192 users said their thermostats were programmable. But 14% of those people did not know how to find the settings; another 25% said they knew how to find the settings but not how to change them. About a third of respondents with programmables had their thermostats in ‘permanent hold’ mode— which basically transforms the smart thermostat into a dumb one.
So why not check the instructions? Two-thirds of the people said they had no idea where the manual had gone.
There’s more: Over a third of respondents thought that setting the thermostat higher would heat the home faster. The same percentage wrongly believed that programming a lower temperature at night would use more energy than keeping the house at the same temperature all the time.
The authors’ conclusions? One: Just installing a programmable thermostat does not result in energy savings. Two: A learning thermostat like Nest (which self-adjusts based on household routines and subtle cues in occupancy) would be most useful for teaching the occupants how to adjust their indoor temperatures.