Nest

Some of you might have heard about the Nest smart thermostat. I had been looking at these and if not for the bungled software when used outside of the US, I would have found a way to replace our thermostat chez nous with one of these fancy things (the other technical problem is that the Nest is a low voltage device, and thermostats in Euroland run on the full 220V). As it happened, my parents' fifty year old thermostat was not regulating temperature anymore, so I told them about the Nest. My mom accepted the idea with some trepidation, we went to Best Buy to get one, and I pulled off the old thermostat. The old thermostat was quite a simple device, with a HUGE glob of mercury jostling around inside an ampoule

Nest make it pretty easy to do the install, but they cannot help you if the wires are fifty years old, are fabric insulated and have no markings whatsoever on them. The good news is that there were only two wires, and I happened to guess correctly regarding where they should go and we were quickly up and running. There were some hijinx with the Nest account, but that turned out to be on the Nest server side. I suspected my parents older router but that happily turned out not to be the case. I downloaded the Nest app to mom's iPad (and my iPhone -- hee hee!) and set up here account. It worked pretty much instantly and I'm really impressed. At first I thought that it was kind of a lot to pay for a thermostat but having actually installed and used it I think it is well worth the money. If they ever get their act together for a Euro version I will probably get one. The only Nest "competitor" is the Tado (http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/11/15/will-europe-warm-to-the-tado-smart-thermostat/), which seems to have gotten every part of it wrong. Annual subscription, smartphone dependent, generic white box… what's the opposite of a home run?

Anyway, my parents are officially high tech now.