While the jewel-shaped Nest thermostat, which launched in October, was already well-equipped to satisfy home-energy data enthusiasts, the update allows users to dissect even more closely the patterns of their heating and cooling systems.
Updated iPhone, Android and web apps now provide a visualization of exactly when their energy system has been on and off throughout the day. If energy expenditure differs significantly from the previous week's average, it lets them know whether the change is due to weather, to the thermometer's auto-adjustments or to their manual adjustments.
When they make a choice that saves energy -- say, setting the thermometer to 68 degrees when they usually set it to 72 -- the app rewards them with a green leaf for the day.
"Some of the settings are already there, but customers have trouble finding them, so we listened to them and made them more visible," Nest Labs Product Marketing Lead Maxime Veron says.
Advanced players of the home energy conservation game will likely be more excited about Nest's second update: a new feature called Airwave that makes air conditioning more efficient.
Instead of keeping the AC running up until the home reaches a desired temperature, Airwave shuts it off a little bit before that point. It then turns on the system's fan, which pushes out residual cold air in order to finish lowering the temperature to its desired level.
It sounds like a small adjustment, but Veron says it can cut energy expenditure by 30%.
Nest Labs justifies its thermostat's $249 price tag with each such dent it makes in an energy bill. According to the 2007 Buildings Energy Data Book, 54% of Americans' energy bills are controlled by their thermostats.
Yet programmable thermostats have done little in the past to cut costs. The EPA yanked the devices' energy star rating partly because their controls were so confusing that many users never set them up.
Nest skirts this hurdle by automatically learning user behavior and adjusting itself accordingly. It can be controlled remotely via a Wi-Fi connection, and it’s easier to read, adjust and install than most other programmable thermostats.
So do its additional features really encourage energy cutbacks?