Really? $200 for a predictive thermostat, with a lame excuse to stream energy usage data and proximity data (Nest detects humans) out of your home? Id rather pay $99 to tell health insurance companies how often I exercise, live.
You could get the same benefit from a device for $30 of electronics. It's an overpriced gimmick to justify another selling off of your personal data forever in exchange for nothing but some minor convenience. The price doesn't justify the energy savings or by product manufacturing cost. If Google wants to know how much energy I'm using, they can buy the information from the utilities and subsidize my electric forever. I'm not paying to give it to them.
I could get the same benefit from a device for $30 of electronics, and however many hours of my free-time I decide to put into such a project.
Which would be a lot more than $250 lost, and not a trade I'd be willing to make considering I value my free time with the family a lot more than that.
For me this whole thing misses the point though. Saving money is a sort of minimum expectation. The thing that Nest delivers that the competitors don't is ease of use. The previous 3M and Honeywell thermostats I owned before were not cheap, but their displays were terrible and their UX was the stuff of nightmares.
It took me probably 10 minutes to setup the Nest by comparison and maintenance has been mostly hands-off. It'll tweak the schedule here and there as necessary.
THAT is the value proposition. To throw out the Indiglo monstrosities before it that were inevitably running on some awful schedule because they were too much trouble and came with 50 page instruction manuals in 5 different languages.
I don't have time for that.
So to me, that's why Nest is successful. It might also explain why their smoke detectors are meh to me. Having a nice UX for something I don't actually need to interface with beyond tapping the occasional "ignore" button just isn't very much of a motivation to spend $100.
Uh, good for you? That is not the value proposition, that is trivial information about your personal life. I don't know why you felt it necessary to try to duplicate a manufactured device by hand, but that is most certainly not the value proposition.
The value proposition is that $200 and letting Google extract value from your life by way of energy prices will somehow pay for the fractional energy saved when the device realizes that you work on weekdays.
I'm a troll because I pointed out how ridiculous his conceptualization of the price is? Ok, I am. With that kind of logic, you can justify spending $10,000,000 on a car because that's a fraction of the price of a manufacturing plant. That is not a "value proposition".
No. It's the opposite. You said I could duplicate the functionality for $30. I said that's only true if you believe the time you'd put into that exercise is worth less than $220.
I don't. But your circumstances may be different if you work for $1/day.
Does that mean you place no value on aesthetics or industrial design of a beautiful device? Don't get me wrong, I agree that it's overpriced, but I do at least place some value on a well-made device.
It actually has a backlight which is a step up from what I have today. It's just not important to me. Definitely not $250 important.
I could definitely use a smarter thermostat, but my vision of the future is a wireless dumb thermostat paired to a home PC that is connected to other sensors. While those dumb devices could be made to interoperate with a cloud service (this is probably where Google is playing), I'd rather keep that control in-house (haha).
Imagine you just, like me, bought your dream house. In the den you installed new hardware floors and custom builtin bookshelves, that you built yourself in a few hundred hours, using a gorgeous hardwood and a stain you picked after testing more than a dozen shades.
Which thermostat goes on the wall, about 15 inches from the bookselves. That POS or a Nest?
Honestly, I could be living in Bill Gates' house and I'd get the same thermostat. In fact, I'd be guaranteed to, since if I can afford that I can afford to squander some money on heating my home. I have one temperature that I'm comfortable at, and that's pretty much the end of the story. I think I've invested more time in this thread than I have interacting with my thermostat for the last year.
I don't care how it looks above some minimum bar, as long as it works, and works reliably.
(There's a caveat there - in a large home I assume you run into issues with uneven heating. But that's beyond the purview of a simple thermostat. Even a $250 one.)
Well, ok, now I disagree :) (because up to now, I was agreeing with everybody.)
It's not that ugly, but more important, it's white and not shiny. If I was looking for a thermostat for a completely decorated house, that's exactly the thing I'd look for (unless the walls were colored, in that case I'd get somebody to paint it). The one thing I wouldn't want people to look at in my house is the thermostat (and that's quite a thing for me to say, because my house has even decorative power outlets).
Somebody with a great sense of aestetics may be able to place a shinny thermostat in a way that it looks nice. That's not for 99% of us, and few people do hire the other 1% for helping them.
But, anyway, I'm here just for the fun, because I'm certainly not looking for a thermostat.
I don't like the aesthetics, no. From a engineering perspective, it is not much of an achievement of R&D, imo. They probably paid more for their Photoshoppers.
I was going to say that you should start a company to produce that competitive $30 thermostat but then you confirmed that you have no idea what you're talking about:
> The price doesn't justify the energy savings or by product manufacturing cost
This might be true if you live in San Diego but in much of the country people pay many hundreds of dollars every month during the winter or summer. If a smarter thermostat saves 10% of that, it pays for itself in less than a year.
"but in much of the country people pay many hundreds of dollars every month during the winter or summer. If a smarter thermostat saves 10% of that"
Not mathematically / thermodynamically possible, sorry. I live in a cooler area but not the real cold areas up north. During the recent polar vortex, which momentarily was centered over my house (and I'm not kidding) we got down to -15. (70 - -15) = delta t of 85 degrees. Lets say the magic machine dropped the temp by 5 degrees during the entire event 24x7 to save me energy. Why I'd pay $300 to simply permanently turn a thermostat down and leave it down is a mystery, but stick with me. That would mean a theoretical delta T of a "mere" 80 degrees. That means a maximum theoretical energy savings of (1-80/85)100 = 5%. Not 10%. No, I'm not setting my thermostat back 24x7. No, I don't live in a cold area like the folks up north where it was -30, in fact right now its somewhat above freezing outside. I just don't see it mathematically.
True, the weather is not always that bad. Right now its about 35. So 70-35 = 35 degree delta T, and dropping 5 degrees temporarily when unoccupied could save as much as (1-30/35)100 = 14 % if the weather was like this all the time and my house was perma-unoccupied. However, out of 168 hours in a week, my house is unoccupied for 18 hours. The rest of the time is filled by work at home, strange overlapping shifts, etc. So my house can only set back 10% of the time, so I only get 10% of the theoretical maximum savings, or a whopping .... 1%.
Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties, but we like it, keeps the riff raff away. So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039.
Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops.
I would come out ahead both in comfort and financially by purchasing a kerosene heater and $300 of kerosene. Or better yet, even more insulation, or newer windows or whatever.
The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.
The target audience of the Nest is someone who leaves their thermostat on the same temperature setting all the time, whose house is empty a significant portion of the time, and who doesn't have the knowledge or desire to buy a manually programmable thermostat. You don't sound like you are in that audience, but that doesn't mean the audience doesn't exist or that the product is foolish.
To give it the fairest possible test I will take your concerns to an optimistic extreme.
Given that I can set my thermostat back roughly part time, and most people work 40 hrs, and someone who can blow $300 on a thermostat probably works at least 60 hours, I will triple my theoretical savings to $36/year. Given a zero interest loan that would pay for itself in a "mere" nine years. Google products don't last nine years before being shut down but I will error on the side of optimism and assume this is an outlier. The problem is the 29.99% credit card to buy the $300 thermostat means it really costs $90/yr to buy one... and now we're saving $36/yr instead of $12, but its still an order of magnitude or so too little to run a profit before it requires replacement.
Still not seeing it.
The target audience is people who can't do math. Or like greenwashing. Or like showing off to other people that they can throw away $300 on a thermostat, or at least obtain a loan to do so. There's nothing particularly wrong with that as a market, either. I read an online article from three months ago that they were selling 40K/month and assuming they get a revenue of $100/unit (rest goes to retailer, warehouse, shipping, etc) thats a revenue of about $50M/yr which isn't bad. A 10% profit on revenue on electronics would be good, so lets say $5M profit per year. Well, I wouldn't pay about $4B today for $5M next year, but aside from that little issue...
I don't claim the product, in itself, is foolish at all. As a "hey look at how much money I have, err, had" $300 product, its probably a better long term investment than a $300 cellphone or a $300 computer video card or even a $300 giant TV. Some of the mathematical / economic rationalization is hilarious but that's orthogonal to the foolishness argument.
Actually no, I acted like at a zero percent interest rate / zero opportunity cost (which is a little weird) it would take about nine years, and at a typical 30% credit card for your average poor dude was infinity. Everyone will fit somewhere within those bounds.
A reasonable opportunity cost might be 3%, I'm too lazy to bother figuring the time till profit because nine years at zero is already too long.
A few things. First, it costs 250, not 300. Second, an alternative would be much cheaper, but it is non zero. Third, it provides other benefits than just potentially saving money such as a great user interface and apps with which to control it remotely.
So say an alternative is 30, the cost is 220, not 300. That takes several years off your calculation. Then having the benefit of an improved interface is non zero. Even if it takes a long time to pay back I plan on living in my house for a long time, and I liked nice things.
Now if you want to argue about overpriced absurd things, go with their $130 smoke detector or whatever it is. No thanks.
IMO, Nest appeals to the people for whom it does the least amount of good: engineers.
Engineers and technical people tend to analyze things like their energy bill already. They also tend to love gadgets.
A couple of parts of Nest that aren't usually factored in are the convenience factor of using your favorite device to control the thermostat remotely and the cost of your current programmable thermostat. If new home owners choose Nest instead of another thermostat they only have to save $150 to make it worth it. And they can factor in convenience.
Another words, it's not a crazy idea to pay a little extra for one these especially if you haven't already been analyzing your energy usage.
Their marketing message is definitely not aimed at engineers:
"Programming thermostats is complicated and irritating - but an un-programmed thermostat can waste 20% of your heating and cooling bill. So the Nest Thermostat programs itself."
I hate to reply to a reply, but if you'd like an example of saving 10% energy in a really cold area where bills are really high, lets take my sister, a 40hr a week worker where it got down to -30 during the recent cold snap. Now 70 - -30 = 100 degree delta T. Now the simple way to save 10% would be to permanently set the thermostat to 60F. But thats a bit chilly.
So she works 40 hrs a week which works out to 25% of the time. So we can just turn the thermostat down 4 times as far for a quarter the time. So... She leaves for work and the thermostat drops to 70-40=30. Which is unfortunately below freezing so all her plumbing pipes burst. But at least she saved 10% on her heating. Also she owns an indoor cat and at 30F she'd turn into a frozen cat-sicle.
So she pays $300 for a thermostat that can't save her 10% on her bill unless she destroys all her plumbing flooding her house and killing her cat. I'm not seeing this as a great selling point.
So, no, cold parts of the country are precisely the locations where you can't achieve great heating savings because its mathematically impossible because its so cold outside. Maybe a 20000 sq foot mcmansion on the coast in florida, it might work there. But not where its cold.
Just to say it again, extreme cold is where a thermostat is of little help.
But imagine that there are 4 or 5 months a year where the outdoor temperature is 15 or 20 degrees colder than a comfortable indoor temperature. And imagine turning down the thermostat during the night in those periods, not just during unoccupied times.
(I realize that more energy is used during cold periods, but some huge portion of the country lives in areas that rarely see 20 for the several months they are below 60).
The problem is that at 50 my furnace runs like 3 times a day because the house is built to be comfy down to -30, probably much worse (since it did OK at -20 last week). So you end up saving 25% of very little.
This mathematical model would work for a poorly insulated house in an area that never gets cold. So if in Atlanta the furnace is struggling at 50F outside, then this would mathematically work out. The problem of course is total annual heating bills in Atlanta probably aren't very impressive, so saving even 10% on them still wouldn't amount to much.
The broader point is that the average heating season temperature at the location is more interesting than the coldest temperature experienced during a given decade.
That still ends up being something like (1-8/50)/100 for a lot of people, so an easy opportunity for 15% during away times (and 70->62 isn't an absurd night setting...).
It sounds like what you really mean is that this is not a product which you benefit from, because you work from home and your house is actually continuously inhabited most days; it's an amusing combination of arrogance and naivety to assume that your lifestyle is the only valid option.
Beyond that, you're completely missing the point about a smarter thermostat: the savings don't come from the temperature outside is -15° and your heater is running almost constantly. You have to deal with that by adding insulation or living in a colder house. Where many people can save money is waste: when the heating or cooling would have run without benefit – e.g. it's 40° outside and you're paying to keep it over 65° but it'd really be perfectly fine if it drifted down to 50° for the 8+ hours in the middle of the day when everyone's at work. A serious miser will religiously turn it off before they walk out the door but most people won't. Many people even leave the thermostat set at a comfortable temperature because they dislike coming home to a very cold/hot house.
Those people are the ones who will benefit the most from something programmable but unfortunately most of the devices on the market have horrible UIs and none of the $30 ones will do things like detect when you aren't home, which is significant for people who don't have rigidly predictable schedules. Again, it doesn't have to be a game-theoretical optimum – only better than what most people are doing now.
> Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties
Head to New England and your new neighbors will complement you on your frugality, as most people have heating bills 4-8 times that high in the winter. Toss in, say, a spike in heating oil costs and anything which reduces inefficiency starts to look pretty cheap. Hint: none of them had McMansions, either – it's just cold during the winter in Connecticut.
> So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039.
Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops.
When you need to make up numbers so the math makes your argument seem less arbitrary it's time to accept that other people are allowed to make decisions in life without your approval. You're overstating the purchase price by nearly 25% and assuming the worst possible purchase method – and you're doing that for an amount which the average American household spends on cable tv / internet / smartphones every couple of months.
> The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.
You do seem to need a lot of external validation for your decisions. Hopefully the smug feelings will keep you warm.
1) doubling is the same as an order of magnitude (or more), ah math who cares.
2) it costs the same amount to heat a house to a given temp no matter the outdoor temp (for a house built to be comfortable down to -30, heating at 40 costs almost nothing)
3) The public is stupid, far too dumb to program something, so lets prey on them with something real expensive that tries to avoid that.
4) average and peak are the same. Pick whichever advances an argument more.
5) Its OK to rip people off as long as you don't rip them off for more money than other people do.
6) I do admit you are 100% correct on the price. And given the mighty power of Google and expansion and wider availability of capital not only are you correct that the price has slightly dropped, but I suggest going further and in the long run it could drop to $100 or so, maybe lower. Fundamentally, from an electronic standpoint, the inevitable Chinese clones will probably only be $75 or so. See also #1 above, 25%, order of magnitude, who's counting.
7) Paraphrase to something like I don't like the results of your math equations, so I'll call you smug instead. Come on, you can do better than that. If we're going to go all playground here, "Your mom" me or something.
Oddly enough you haven't convinced me you're correct and I'm wrong.
I selected the points which were well defined enough to respond to:
> 2) it costs the same amount to heat a house to a given temp no matter the outdoor temp (for a house built to be comfortable down to -30, heating at 40 costs almost nothing)
This is not about how much it costs to heat a house to a given temperature. It's about how often heating or cooling is used when the occupants don't need it.
> 3) The public is stupid, far too dumb to program something, so lets prey on them with something real expensive that tries to avoid that.
The only thing I said on this is that most programmable thermostats have bad UI and I'd extend that bad UI to note that they also tend to assume a rigid schedule.
It came as no surprise to me when I read the government studies concluding that programmable thermostats: the Honeywell which my Nest replaced allowed you to set two temperatures per day and there was no way to adjust for changes in your schedule without clicking through the entire schedule — 3 (hour, minute, AM/PM) pairs with two high/low temperature thresholds for 7 days or almost 40 clicks on low-quality buttons which would have shamed a $2 calculator. If you knew you were going to be out late one evening, do you spend 15 minutes clicking through that UX disaster or just say “Meh, we'll heat the house for a couple extra hours”? Maybe you plan to go out for a couple hours mid-day? There's no way to express that short of turning the entire thing off, which is fine part of the year and annoying during the rest when it means you'll come home to a very hot/cold house because there's no way to say “Keep the house over 50° (or under 80°) for the next few hours”.
That's not saying that the public is stupid, it's saying that there's been a market failure in producing decent thermostats. It'd be great if there were options between the Nest and the junk $30 thermostats for people who wanted more intelligence (or just the silly auto-away sensor) but don't mind, say, cheap plastic fittings or losing some of the more processor-intensive features.
> 5) Its OK to rip people off as long as you don't rip them off for more money than other people do.
You're arguing against something which I didn't write.
> 7) Paraphrase to something like I don't like the results of your math equations, so I'll call you smug instead. Come on, you can do better than that. If we're going to go all playground here, "Your mom" me or something.
Your entire argument has been that if people lived exactly the same way as you do and made the same decisions which you've made it's wrong for them to want a Nest. That's smug because it assumes that there are no other valid positions. Using terms like “ripped off” implies a moral judgement rather than, say, people making decisions based on different circumstances. Similarly, assuming that people will finance everything on a bad credit card is implicitly stating that most people who are not you make bad personal financial decisions — that's both insulting and irrelevant to the issue at hand.
I don't think this is strictly true. I believe rich and poor use Google search. Perhaps iOS and Android have different markets, but this acquisition will bring former iOS guys into the Google realm.
This is exactly what I was thinking. They will use their resources to make it cheaper, mass manufacture them, and start selling them to next to nothing just to get the data. More power to 'em.
The price makes me choke as well. But I think Nest's real value is as a market distruptor, the evidence being Honeywell's lawsuit and furious attempts to update their own products with comparable features.
Everyone who's complaining about how much Nests costs have obviously not graduated from college tastes into the world of interior decorating. There is a huge market for nice looking stuff to go in your house. Not everyone buys Ikea for their whole lives. Maybe they host parties, run in upper middle class social circles, etc.
There's $10K kitchen ranges out there, $50 beer mugs. etc. Design can carry premiums in this market, and Nest is trying to be the best looking thermostat in the industry. It doesn't matter if you can hack one for $40. It's a wealthy couple who doesn't hack who just want nice stuff in their house that works. And if you think that's weird, just recognize it's your taste, not reality. Why does West Elm exist if there's Ikea.
Agreed. That's where it feels dissonant to me: Google addresses mega-mass markets rather than luxury, to the point it degrades their products. Look at email: Yahoo! has practically delivered "Gmail without the inconveniences"...
$200 is simply a terrible price fit. The rich buy $10k+ systems, the poor buy $20 units at Home Depot. There is no middle class in america, only credit.
2. The relevant meaning for this particular discussion is "in a position to spend $200 on a thermostat but not willing to spend thousands". That seems like pretty much exactly the bracket a lot of US software people would be in.
(There is a phenomenon in US politics where people earning $300k/year think they are "middle class" and I agree that that's silly. But software developers on ~$100k? Middle class. No question.)
They have the classic business model of a better product for a higher price. If the thermostat market had consisted entirely of Nest and then Honeywell introduced cheap, crappy thermostats, that'd be disruption.
Well, Google might very well change the price point.
I really agree with the premise of that article, with one major exception: when the real price is your attention. Internal combustion engines, iOS, can legitimately be seen as disruption: they were more expensive than their equivalent, but thosed need so much effort… Nest might be the same for domotic.
You're certainly right that they kicked Honeywell in the rear. After years of making the same damned device, they finally released an actually nice thermostat. In fact, I was recently in the market for a new thermostat which I could control on my drive home, or from bed, or whatever. After researching thoroughly, and I opted for Honeywell's latest touchscreen device (over the Nest v2 which has apparently been having a lot of problems).
I must say it's actually quite nice to use. I can put it in a mode where it does precisely what I want. Hold a temperature until told otherwise, and let me choose that temperature from my desktop or iPhone from anywhere.
Such a mode so simple that the Nest refuses to allow it.
Nest can hold a set temperature like any other thermostat. It'll do so better than any other thermostat, in fact, by learning the efficiency of your heater and A/C so that it doesn't overshoot your targets, and takes into account whether the thermostat is in direct sunlight part of the day, and airflow in your house.
It can also be told to hold a temperature forever, to hold a threshold forever (cool if it gets above 75, heat if it gets below 60), you can set a detailed schedule manually, you can tell it to hold a temperature until a certain time, or you can tell it to just kick on the fan for the next X minutes without changing the temperature then turn back off.
Turning on/off auto-schedule is one click if you want that feature, like all its other learning features. I've never run into any kind of bug with mine. You can change the temperature it's holding at from your iPhone or desktop from anywhere, along with all its other settings.
> And the Nest doesn't have a Hold Temperature option, which is a feature even a $25 thermostat has. The final Nest deal-breaker for me is the +-3 degree temperature swing. If you set it to 72, it will keep the temperature between 69 and 75, a total of 6 degree swing, which sucks compared to the +-1 degree swing of the Honeywell.
That's a shame. He probably misled quite a few people into buying the Honeywell by being the top review. He admittedly never owned a Nest, and that's obvious in his comparison, as not a single point in it is accurate; one must wonder where he came up with them having no first-hand experience.
* If Nest isn't on a schedule (whether it's a manually set schedule or the "auto-schedule"), it's holding temp. Like every other thermostat.
* It is more sensitive than the Honeywell, not less; it kicks on at +1 degrees on AC mode, but -0.7 degrees on heat. If you really want, you can set fractional target temperatures too.
* He thinks Nest shows nothing on its display but the temperature, when it's actually a fully interactive computer. All the settings can be changed at the wall, not just using the app/website.
At least the number of Amazon reviews suggests Nest is outselling all the Honeywell wifi panels over 20:1 anyway.
Who knows? Maybe it was written by a Honeywell shill. Worked on me apparently.
I will note one other difference which helped sway me to Honeywell is the fact that the Nest requires a battery, while the Honeywell requires "bus" power. I actually didn't have a "C wire" set up before I installed mine, but it was trivial to climb into the attic and re-purpose the fan control wire to instead provide constant (24VAC) power.
Granted, changing thermostat batteries wasn't really at the top of my pet peeve list, but I did read that the Nest has the potential to suck batteries dry too quickly. Any opinion on battery life?
Nest uses your HVAC's power wire like other thermostats. There are no batteries to replace.
It has a permanent internal battery, charged by the power wire, which allows it to stay active in a power failure and to use more power than some systems provide when you're interacting with its screen. So there's no real difference between the Nest and the Honeywell in terms of power or installation except that the Nest has a built-in rechargeable li-ion backup battery.
Nest does have an internal battery than can be charge via a USB port if you ever need to. I bought my Nest used off Craigslist (substantial savings) and have never had any low battery issues. It's bus powered, but the battery smooths over power disruptions.
Honeywell has not licensed any technology to Nest.
There's nothing really fancy about a thermometer, humidity sensor, IR motion sensor and a bit of software anyway. Which is why Nest had no trouble identifying prior art to each of the patents Honeywell tried to assert (and made no offer to license). They carved their niche by being the only company that cared to make the most of some simple inputs and packaged them up in a way that looked different from the rest of the market. It's somewhat similar to the iPod/iPhone story.
That's a savings of $60 on heating per month, for five months. The laws of thermodynamics continue to be enforced regardless of bubble or not, so I think it quite impossible to save more than 10%. So you're averaging $600 or more to heat. Averaging...
I live in Wisconsin where I would be hard pressed to spend $300/month during the worst imaginable weather (and this is five months... the worst imaginable weather is .. January. Three months earlier or later isn't too bad, back to $100/mo or less). With the recent polar vortex event settled right over my house, maybe this will be a $400 month for me... maybe not.
I assume by "bay area" and spending $600/mo on heating you mean Prudhoe Bay on the north slope of Alaska?
They have a widget on the Nest store (https://widgets.nest.com/en/calculator/widget) that estimates energy savings. According to that, a $250/year savings is possible in SF with electric heating and a house over 2000 square feet. Though, the range they provide probably means:
a) It is a historically cold year for a prolonged period of time
b) You set your heat to 80F all the time
With gas heating, it looks almost impossible to save $250... unless you're heating an NBA arena.
You could get the same benefit from a device for $30 of electronics. It's an overpriced gimmick to justify another selling off of your personal data forever in exchange for nothing but some minor convenience. The price doesn't justify the energy savings or by product manufacturing cost. If Google wants to know how much energy I'm using, they can buy the information from the utilities and subsidize my electric forever. I'm not paying to give it to them.