The Nest thermostat is a thermostat you can control remotely with your phone, learns your climate preferences and when you’re home over time. It allows you to essentially keep your house the right temperature, all the time, and save some money by not heating or cooling your house when you’re not home. And now it’s going to save you a lot more money.
How? By using data from your power company to use less juice when it costs the most:
The new system links the device to a collective, cloud-based knowledge of utility companies. If you’re with an Energy Services-aware power company, the thermostat will learn of upcoming peak energy periods—where power is in high demand and prices rocket as a result—which are sometimes known as rush hours. With that data, it will fine tune your heating, using less energy while it’s expensive.
You might be wondering what the power company gets out of people giving them less money, and the answer is actually it saves them money during peak times: There’s less strain on their equipment. For example, if everybody had a Nest installed, it’d help with the inevitable brown-outs that strike every time the temperature gets above 95 degrees in some places.
In the long term, of course, this also helps the environment: Less power used means less crap dumped into the air. But mostly we’re interested in this whole “saving lots more money” thing.