Two surprises came in the mail this week.
One was an oil bill for nearly seven hundred dollars.
The other was a gift from an old college friend who’s been inventing things out in Silicon Valley.
First, the oil bill. Seven hundred dollars is a lot to spend heating a house for a few weeks of a very mild winter — the culprit being the cost of heating oil, which these days is running north of four dollars a gallon.
The Northeast is currently experiencing a home heating oil crunch, which has pushed prices about a dollar higher per gallon than the average price over the last five winters. The price spike is attributed to the high price of crude, coupled with the recent shutdown of several key refineries in the U.S. and Europe.
The average home in the region uses about 750 gallons of heating oil each winter. So the price increase — this year alone — amounts to roughly $750.
Which leaves us with two choices: dial back the thermostat and turn our dining room into a refrigerator; or buy stock in oil companies, so at least we can share in the industry’s record-setting profits while we’re paying through the nose.
Enter the second surprise that came in the mail: a brand-new smart thermostat called the “Nest.”
For years, my friend David worked on this little beauty in secret. He couldn’t tell me anything about it, but he did mention some of the talent that the company had brought on board, which included the designer from Apple responsible for the iPod and the iPhone; the Head of Innovation from Google, who also happens to be a MacArthur “genius” grant winner; a world-renowned expert in Artificial Intelligence; et cetera, et cetera.
You get the picture. Top Silicon Valley talent; money from the hottest venture capitalists; a secret 24/7 skunkworks; CIA-level security. And all for…
…a new thermostat?
This is less crazy than it sounds. Thermostats control about 10% of all the energy used in the United States, the equivalent of 1.7 billion barrels of oil a year. But that 10% figure is somewhat misleading. In most households, the thermostat controls 50% of the energy bill, as much as our electronics, appliances, lighting, water heating, and refrigeration combined.
And that energy bill is much higher than it should be. The EPA estimates that up to 20% of our household energy is wasted. Most of us simply set the thermostat once a day, or perhaps twice or even three times, if we’re diligent. But there are tremendous savings to be found if we could better tailor the temperature to our needs; i.e., in the winter, turning down the heat at night and up when we need it in the morning; then down when we leave for work and up when we come home; then down again at night. Not to mention turning it way down when we’re away for business or vacation.
The answer to this problem is pretty straightforward: a programmable thermostat. Many homes already have one. Unfortunately, they’re a pain to set. Something like 90% of the homeowners that have a programmable thermostat still set it the old-fashioned way. In fact, a few years ago, the entire genre of programmable thermostats lost its Energy Star rating; they simply weren’t returning the energy savings the industry boasted about.
The people at Nest saw a huge opportunity here. What if a thermostat were as beautiful and easy to use as an iPhone? What if it had an on-board computer that could communicate with the Internet? And, most radical of all, what if it had artificial intelligence, so that by monitoring the way you set it manually, it could learn your habits, and then replicate, and even improve on them?
Thus, the Nest Learning Thermostat.
Having lived with the Nest for nearly a week, I can attest to its beauty and simplicity. There were a few installation glitches, but excellent customer support made it possible for a do-it-yourselfer like me to wire it up.
The device itself is round and glassy. It’s controlled by an outer ring that you turn back and forth, safecracker-style, and by pressing its face like a big button. The user interface is everything you’d expect from Apple designers.
The Nest’s digital display can startle you by “waking up” when you pass by. This is actually one of its coolest features: it has motion sensors that can tell when you’re at home; if there’s no activity for a while, the Nest automatically puts your furnace or A/C into energy-saving “away mode.”
If you don’t want to wait for the artificial intelligence to learn your preferences, you can set up a heating and cooling schedule on the Nest website. This is quite easy to do, and provides the extra thrill of controlling your home’s temperature from any computer or smart phone anywhere in the world.
I do have some reservations about my thermostat’s transmitting constant, real-time data about our household to the folks at the Nest Corporation. Wherever the Internet is involved, there’s the possibility of being hacked. Or the much more likely scenario of the sale or other abuse of private information.
And then there’s the uncanny feeling that HAL is watching us through the new electronic eye in the hallway, sensing our comings and goings, learning our habits, patiently biding his time until the moment he’ll cut off our oxygen and purge this spaceship of human beings once and for all —
Oh, wait. Wrong movie.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 23 February 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
