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Nest thermostats in the US and Canada can now monitor your HVAC system
The feature has started rolling out for all Nest thermostats in the regions.
The latest Nest thermostat isn’t the only model that can tell you if something’s wrong with your HVAC system. Even older models will get the capability, now that the Google-owned brand has rolled out HVAC monitoring to all Nest thermostats across the US and parts of Canada. According to software engineers from the Nest team, they started working on the HVAC monitoring feature two years ago as a side project. The company started testing it earlier this year, sending users who sign up for the Nest Home Report alerts if the system detects something wrong with their heating, ventilation or AC.
Nest’s HVAC monitoring capability will send you alerts via email or the Google Home app if it sees any signs of a malfunction. You’ll get urgent alerts for issues that may require immediate attention, such as if your house becomes colder even if it’s the heating you switched on. Nest will also send you early warning alerts within a week of detecting non-urgent issues, such as if your heating or AC stops several times.
Nest thermostats look for anomalies by monitoring the estimated ambient and target temperature and making sure it’s the right temperature based the amount of time the heating or AC has been running. The Nest engineers say they were able to develop HVAC monitoring due to cloud computing advancements in recent years. “Originally, each thermostat operated on its own, but now we have the power to make intelligent decisions based on anonymized data, which might not have been possible if we were just looking at each individual device,” they explained.
