cts | Volt a Day | the Nest November 19, 2011

This is not strictly a post about the Volt, but I have decided this is my all-purpose technology blog as well. As a brief update: I have 6,500 miles on the Volt and I have put in twelve gallons of gasoline. So don’t bother putting in the Keystone XL pipeline for me, I’m trying to get off the pipe as much as I can.

(Google or a link might have brought you here so I’ll save you some reading and tell you that to install my Nest thermostat here in Los Angeles I used Bay Cities Heating. 310-394-3229. I talked to Sheryl in the office and Omar came and did the work. Both were very friendly, professional and great to deal with.)

I love engineering, efficiency and technology. Tony Fadell, the fellow who developed the iPod at Apple eventually tired of making yet-another-iPod (after eighteen generations of the iPod and three generations of the iPhone). He took a year off and then contemplated what to make next.

He came up with: a thermostat.

Who would have thought that was the next exciting thing. For anybody. But it’s a pretty great first-world idea. (Good third world ideas would be a toilet, a water filter, and a bicycle.) Fifty per cent of the energy your home uses is spent heating and cooling it. In general, houses are heated and cooled more than necessary. So if you want to drastically change the amount of energy you use, the thermostat is a good place to start.

There are already fancy thermostats out there. We had one installed which listened to the alarm system. If we armed the alarm in “away” mode the thermostat knew to go into away mode itself. That’s a tiny thing, especially since you could also get to the settings over the ‘net and manage your AC and heating that way.

But it could be better. It could be smarter.

Enter the Nest.

You operate it just like the classic, round thermostat at the top of this post. (That’s a Honeywell, designed by Henry Drefuss.) You turn it to make your home warmer or cooler. Over time, the Nest learns what temperature you like when you are home and at what times of day, on which day of the week. It creates a schedule and keeps to that. If you make adjustments, it tweaks the schedule. It has a motion sensor, so it gets some information about whether the house is occupied. It connects to your WiFi network so it knows where you live and what the outside temperature is. It plans accordingly.

You can, of course, connect to your Nest from the ‘net. There’s a web page, an iPhone app and an iPad app. This morning at 5:45am I happened to wake up a little before the alarm went off, so I flipped on the iPad and set the temperature for our cozy mornings.

It’s brilliant. It’s not cheap ($250), but in two years I believe it will pay for itself.

It’s all good news.

The company itself is facing the usual growing pains of a small technology startup trying to feed a national market. The thermostat is built in China, and there are the usual delays of manufacturing a high-end product and shipping it halfway around the world. This is something the team is familiar with, having worked at Apple on the iPod line. I would guess that they severely underestimated the demand for the first model. Maybe they thought, “About half the people that bought the first iPod will buy a $250 thermostat...” I bet it will turn out instead that “about ten times the people who bought that first iPod now understand how a $250 chunk of technology can greatly improve their life.”

(The unboxing experience, as with an iPod, is as beautiful as the item itself. The first Macintosh included the signatures of the team on the inside of the computer’s enclosure. You couldn’t open the computer without a special tool, so the signatures were there for the team themselves, not the customers. The Nest box arrived with a classy cardboard insert with the signatures of the team. Unfolded it says, “Dedicated to Steve Jobs, who brought us together and inspired us. We’ll miss you.” As far as I know, it is the only product dedication, elevating a mere appliance to the level of art, which is something Jobs would have approved of.)

Since I ordered my Nest in the first forty-eight hours, the company offered me “free installation,” something they were hawking on the site for another $175. I knew that this was a way for the company to try out their “Concierge Service” and get some feedback from customers, but I was happy to provide that. I replied to the email, called because the webpage didn’t work in Chrome, and signed up for it.

I was so excited when the Nest arrived, and no installer had yet tried to contact me. I watched the little video on the Nest site and figured I could do it. How hard could it be? I’ve installed hard drives in computers and changed tires on an airplane. I have a screwdriver (and, actually, the Nest comes with a gorgeous little screwdriver right in the box). I read through the steps (when you follow instructions always read all the way through the steps just in case one is “Solve the global hunger problem,” or something similarly thorny).

I pulled the face off our fancy thermostat to see if the wires the instructions mentioned were in there. I took a picture with my iPhone, as suggested. It seemed good to go. So I went outside and turned off the huge 50amp breaker marked “AC.” I came in and took the wall plate of the old thermostat off the wall, and loosened all of the little screws holding in the wires. Putting the metal mounting plate for the Nest onto the wall was a little more difficult, but not impossible. I had used their stickers to label all the wires and inserted them into the easy-close wire holders on the Nest base. I pushed the Nest onto the base, raced outside to throw the breaker and came inside to... nothing. Black screen.

Okay, maybe I was in a hurry. Maybe the wires needed to be straighten and stripped more. The instructions recommended one quarter inch to half an inch. That’s terrible to say to an architect and I carefully stripped each wire to 3/8th of an inch and used the needle nose pliers to squeeze them all very straight. I made sure they were fully inserted into the wire-holders and tugged them to make sure they were grabbed firmly. I did my little dance with the circuit breaker again. Nothing.

I decided since it was 8:30pm at night on a school night and the boys were getting into bed that I’d have to give up. I took the Nest base off the wall, put the old thermostat back up and wired in the wires to the old spots. Circuit breaker on and... nothing.

I am so glad I live in Southern California. (Nell was in NYC in freezing rain.) I told the boys to put an extra blanket on their beds and worked a little more in my little office off the garage (it’s own heater keeping me toasty). In the morning, when asked how they slept, both boys said they were totally cozy. I was awake most of the night with chilly feet and terrible guilt (apparently baseless guilt).

After getting the boys off to school I called Nest support (I had sent them an email the night before). I had checked the web site to see if I could locate my installer. My zip code did not bring up a single service provider. I tried a few more in Los Angeles. Nothing. On the phone the customer service agent clearly ran into the same issue. I am not sure why I was offered free installation in an area which he said was “outside our coverage area.” Or why Los Angeles would be outside anyone’s service area. He said that he was writing up a ticket and someone would get back to me with some suggestions soon. When? One or two weeks. Oh, the pain of a technology company trying to deal with the dinosaurs in the heating and ventilation business.

I called a friend for his recommendation for a HVAC contractor. He recommended one, who I called and was awful (“We only can send someone out to work on equipment we have sold you...”), but then he called back to say, “Wait, this is the good one...”

They are: Bay Cities Heating. 310-394-3229. I called at 8am and talked to a guy who was probably the owner. He said he’d leave a note for Sheryl, but they were really busy. Probably too busy to get to me that day. I called Sheryl back at 9:30am and she said the one guy that could come see me had to be all over that day, so it was unlikely he could make it, but she would call me after lunch. At 11am she called back, he was finished early and on his way. Omar showed up twenty minutes later.

In fifteen minutes he had it fixed. The circuit breaker was for the AC compressor. The air handler and furnace in the attic is just plugged into an outlet up there. So when I turned off the breaker the 24v control wires were still live. As I undid the thermostat I crossed the ground and power and blew out a (five dollar) 3amp fuse. He replaced it, wired up the Nest base, I pushed the Nest in place and it booted up. Thrilling.

At about 3pm that afternoon an outfit phoned to say they were calling to arrange installation. I said I had installed it myself (sort of true) but did they really have someone ready to send out? “No, we’re just trying to set up appointments. We starting a little after the 20th of November. We’re having to bring in technicians from Arizona.”

I think that Nest should probably instead have a section of their site where you can (as a Nest account holder) recommend an installer or review one. Then the community will do their work for them, weeding out the bad ones and boosting the good ones.

I wonder what they are going to do about my “free” installation, since I’ve certainly given them a bunch of valuable information about a customer installation experience (and a possible lead for a service provider here on the west side of Los Angeles).