Nesting Time

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Simon Phipps

Are Nest Labs through to open ground at last? After its brush with an especially unpleasant patent troll, the tide seems to be changing for the makers of the Nest Learning Thermostat who have been able to get both Apple and Amazon to carry it in the USA. If you’ve not seen it before, do take a look – it’s a smart domestic heating controller that learns your lifestyle patterns and programs itself to manage your heating (and cooling) efficiently. It’s a product I would really like to try, but there’s no sign it’s heading to Europe at the moment.

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4 Responses

  1. michaelkdolan (@michaelkdolan), on June 7, 2012 at 18:56 said:

    Unfortunately they don’t support the new “smart” A/C units that have 2 stage cooling… so while I’d like to get it, I’d be less efficient with it…

    • Simon Phipps, on June 7, 2012 at 18:59 said:

      All a mystery to us here in the UK, where the weather is once again driving wind & rain and you need two layers of clothes just to walk to the car…

  2. Sean Dague (@sdague), on June 7, 2012 at 21:39 said:

    Also, unfortunately, they don’t have an API for their thermostat, so it’s a walled garden in which you can’t get your data out of, or iteract with it with open tools. I’ve emailed them a few times about it, and they have no plans to change that.

    • Simon Phipps, on June 8, 2012 at 13:00 said:

      Thanks – that’s far more of a problem. Hard to see how that will be a sustainable position in a world with so much open hardware hacking.

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