Three months with the 4th generation Nest Learning Thermostat

After years with a standard thermostat, it’s been really handy to finally control my AC and heat with my voice or from my phone. That being said, my aging home isn’t built to take advantage of the coolest features, so buyers should be aware that your home needs to support it beyond just being able to be wired to the system.

The glassy orb look of the new Nest Thermostat looks incredibly sharp and offers great contextual information through the ‘Dynamic Farsight’ feature, which is something I’ve grown to love, but the actual usefulness of it will depend on its placement and how much you use the weather app on your phone.

Setting it up

The most daunting part of the new thermostat was setting it up. It seemed easy enough when I watched a tutorial, but since this was my first time replacing a thermostat, I was really hoping I didn’t mess anything up.

As I mentioned, I made sure to read the Google Nest support page and watch the installation video before diving in. Once I started, I was able to scan a code with my phone in the Google Home app to have it walk me through the installation.

As you’re walked through the setup, you can even use your phone to take a picture of your current thermostat’s wiring, which will give you a custom installation plan. There are helpful stickers included with the thermostat so you can label each wire so you know what you’re unplugging from your old unit and where they should go in the new Nest Thermostat.

Then, it was simply a matter of stripping down the old wires a bit more so they fit into the Nest’s sockets, plugging them in, and attaching the thermostat’s main hardware to the baseplate. This was all quite easy, and Google says the Nest Learning Thermostat is the most widely compatible Nest Thermostat to date. It also includes a plate to hide any large holes in the wall left by your old unit.

During setup, you can also link the thermostat to the Apple Home app via Matter if you’d rather control the thermostat that way. I did this and the Google app since I bounce between both ecosystems. The thermostat comes with one Google temperature sensor. I already have a myriad of Apple HomePods across my house, which also act as temperature sensors, so it made sense to tie the Nest thermostat to my Apple Home app. Since my house has such uneven insulation, I often struggle to keep the back half heated (or cooled) effectively, so I figured the more data I could feed the thermostat, the better.

This worked well and helped keep the back of my home warmer, but due to the inefficient nature of my house, I’ve yet to gain any leaf points because I need to run the heat or AC hard to keep the back room temperature controlled. If I switch the thermostat to Eco mode, I find that it keeps the front of the house comfortable, but the back will be too cold or hot.

The Learning Thermostat is also supposed to be able to work with the outside temperature to heat or cool your home, but I think for the same reasons I listed above, this never worked for me. The heating and cooling in my home need to work too much overtime to climatize my home, so a lot of the subtler features don’t work for me. That said, I still like this idea in theory, and if you really worry about your energy bill, it could be a good way to moderate your home’s temps without needing AC/heat.

The main smart feature that worked for me was that it created an automatic bedtime routine that turns down the heat by half a degree at 12:30 a.m. There was also a week when I stayed up later than usual, so it pushed this back to 1:30 a.m. However, beyond being interesting, I don’t think this is a very useful feature since most people would and can set bedtime routines on their own, and it doesn’t take very much time. Plus, only altering the temp by half a degree when I’m sleeping doesn’t seem like it’s saving me that much energy.

The other one is presence sensing, where Alex and I can use our phones’ location so the thermostat will know when we’re not home and not run, but since we have pets, this is something we opted not to use since we didn’t want the house to get super cold for our cat when we were away for an evening.

Heating and cooling with style

When it comes to controlling the thermostat, it took a bit to get used to the dial/touchscreen interface. However, since the touch screen is so large this year, I wish I could tap more on the screen instead of having to spin the dial to select things.

This is also annoying when diving into menus. For instance, if you go into a menu and decide you want to back out, you need to wait for it to fade back to the main screen instead of having a small back button on the touch screen. Having said that, when you simply want to adjust the temperature, simply turning the dial works great, and a small speaker inside the device provides a nice clicking sound.

A lot of these complaints aren’t that substantial either since you can control most things via your chosen home app. Once I’d set it up, I rarely touched the actual device unless I was walking by and needed to tweak the temperature by a degree or two. In that same vein, it was really handy to be able to

The large screen is great when using the Farsight feature since it allows the thermostat to display the interior or exterior temperatures as well as a clock. I have mine set to showcase the exterior temperature since I found it rather small to be a wall clock. The exterior temp screen is really handy, and I love being able to just pop my head out of my bedroom door when I’m getting ready and see what the temperature is outside. Plus, there are some cool animations when it’s raining, so this takes advantage of the larger screen, but I don’t know if I’d consider it a selling feature since I can easily look down at my iPhone’s lock screen to see the weather as well.

A lot of features that went unused

After testing the Nest Learning thermostat, I realized that many other smart thermostats, including the cheaper option from Nest, could accomplish the things I liked about it. I like being able to tweak the temperature on my phone. I like setting routines, and that’s about it. Sure, the new Nest option looks really slick, but at the end of the day, it’s a thermostat, and I don’t think most people care what they look like.

Farsight is also an interesting addition, but over time, I stopped using it since my iPhone lock screen widget and Android home screen tell me the temperature anyway. No matter what phone I was using, I was usually aware of the temperature before I even looked at the thermostat, and since I could control it from my phone, I rarely looked at it.

The included temperature sensor is a nice bonus, but for this price ($380), it would have been nice to get more than one in the box. I also found that the included temperature sensor wouldn’t show the temperature of the room it’s in from the iOS version of the Google Home app. It only seemed to work fully on Android. It’s also worth pointing out that you can buy these sensors separately and they also work with the cheaper Nest Thermostat.

At the end of the day, this is a really expensive thermostat, so make sure your home will be able to take advantage of all its unique features before you decide to drop almost $400 on it.