It's finally here—the biggest update ever to the Nest Learning Thermostat, and it finally works natively in the Apple Home app. Let me tell you about it in this hands-on review and why I think that price increase may be worth it. Before we start, be sure you subscribe so you don't miss my latest videos.
I've been a fan of Nest for ages. I had the OG Nest Thermostat, but I eventually gave up on the platform after the Google acquisition, and it became clear that it was never going to support HomeKit. I haven't been a huge fan of the last couple of generations of Nest thermostats, but this new one may have wooed me back.
You Might Like: Top 10 Considerations When Buying a Home Security Camera
New Design
To start, I'm a big fan of the updated design aesthetic. It's a large 3.9-inch dome crystal with a 2.7-inch LCD display that mounts to your wall with or without the mounting plate behind it. It looks better without the mounting plate, but some people are just going to need it. It comes in polished silver, gold, or in my case, obsidian—basically polished black, but even looking at them, I could barely tell a difference most of the time.
Inside the box, you have the thermostat itself, plus a temperature sensor. There's also the required mounting hardware. I've tested quite a few smart thermostats over the years, and it's usually a very straightforward process. Well, it's been a while since I've installed a Nest, so maybe this has been the norm, but the installation did not go well for me.
Nest Installation
This is my main downside to the whole experience. It took hours to successfully complete and required multiple devices to actually do. I'm not going to go into everything, but it gave me opaque errors and continuously failed until I created a whole new Google account and had to use an Android phone. Once it was installed, though, it was smooth sailing.
New Temperature Sensor
The new thermostat carries a price tag of $279, which is $30 more than the last model. But one of the differences is that it now comes with a new second-generation temperature sensor in the box. These are the new wireless sensors, and you can place them in a room in your home. The thermostat will then intelligently adjust to make sure that room is properly heated or cooled. They can be used to create schedules around these sensors, like adjusting the temperature in the office during the day, the living room in the evening, and the bedroom at night.
You Might Like: Best Smart Light Bulbs | Top Picks for Your Smart Home
AI Learning
The last-gen thermostat was able to learn how you like your home based on your actions. While the new one does that, it also uses AI to take things like the outside temperature into consideration when adjusting your heating and cooling. Right now, we're in the middle of a bit of a middle season here in Ohio—it's like the end of summer going into fall, and temperatures can swing wildly. It's done a great job of making our home feel genuinely comfortable.
This AI model can help anticipate things. If it's going to be a high humidity day, it will feel warmer inside, so Nest will compensate by cooling the house a little bit more than usual.
New Farsight Display
One thing that this has over Ecobee, my usual pick for best smart thermostat, is the new Dynamic Farsight Display. It lets you customize the home screen's appearance, which will change as you approach it. Even walking down the hallway, it's cool to see how it easily reacts to your presence. These views can include a bunch of different information, such as temperature, outdoor air quality, and weather. The one people have been excited about is seeing weather conditions like rain and lightning, and they'll animate on the display. It looks really, really cool—at least in the videos. I wish it had rained or stormed in my time testing this so far.
System Alerts
One last notable new feature is the System Health Monitoring. This can track how well it is heating and cooling your house to know if something is wrong. This way, it doesn't overuse your system or could save you a costly repair bill before things get bad. I can sometimes forget to swap out my air filter, so I wonder if this would be able to spot that when the efficiency goes down and give me a heads-up about it. I'll keep testing and find out.
Matter & HomeKit
Despite these new features, I would not be buying this new thermostat if it was not for one major new addition: Matter support, which brings it into the Home app for the first time. And I do say for the first time because this is the first learning thermostat from Nest to add Matter. The low-cost model did have Matter but lacked many of these high-end features.
To set it up, I went to the thermostat and used the intuitive controls that I vividly remember using all those years ago with my first Nest. I enabled Matter and put it into pairing mode, which gave me a code to scan with the Home app. I added the thermostat just like any other. I could adjust the mode, change the temperature, or disable it—just what you would need a thermostat to do. That means you can even ask Siri to control the temperature in your home or put it into any home automation routines you've created outside of Nest. So far, it works just as I expected.
The thermostat connects to Wi-Fi and does almost everything I'd expect from a smart HomeKit thermostat. The only exception is that the room sensors don't show in Apple Home, as the Ecobee does.
Nest vs Ecobee
Speaking of which, I wanted to also do a direct comparison between the Ecobee Premium Smart Thermostat and the new Nest Learning Thermostat. If you want to see my full review on the latest Ecobee, check out the video that I've linked here.
In my opinion, I think the Ecobee looks great. It can adjust the display as you approach, but honestly, the Nest looks better. I love the animations in the interface. In general, I just like rotating that dial and the customization. Nest also has a leg up with its AI learning capabilities. Ecobee does have smart algorithms designed to save you money with its "feels like" temperature, but it's not quite as capable.
After that, though, Ecobee basically steals the show. Ecobee is one of a few products that's able to act as a HomeKit smart speaker. If you have a HomePod in your home, you can talk to Ecobee to control your smart home, answer questions, message people, or anything else you can do on a HomePod. That includes playing music because it can act as an AirPlay speaker. I'll often play music or a podcast in the living room, kitchen, and the hallway through the Ecobee. It's kind of cool, even if it's just a small speaker.
Ecobee also has great integrations with its other products. When someone rings your Ecobee doorbell, it shows right on the Ecobee thermostat. Nest makes a doorbell, but it doesn't offer this feature. Then there are the sensors. Ecobee has a door sensor, which I love. When the door is open for too long, it'll pause your HVAC system so you don't waste energy—huge if you have a sliding back door. Those door sensors can also detect motion and temperature in a room and report that back to the thermostat. Ecobee sensors, while not as bespoke as Nest's, are by far more capable. Many of them can show in the Home app as environmental sensors that can be used for other automations and can help control your system. Ecobee will heat or cool the room you're actually in versus relying on a predefined schedule. This is more intuitive and less reliant on you setting it up. The fact that I can use an Ecobee room sensor to control stuff like my lights when I walk into a room is a big win.
Summary and Recommendation
Google has done a great job with the new Nest Thermostat. Even though it's now very expensive for a smart thermostat—more expensive than Ecobee—I think it can be worth it. It looks great, performs well, and will likely only be getting better. There are still situations where I'm going to recommend the Ecobee, but if you don't need those added features, I think the Nest is a fantastic option to consider. It's one of the few times Matter has been a game-changer and actually allows us in the Apple ecosystem to use a flagship Nest product.
Comments
Post a Comment