The Nest, A Geeky Mom's Best Anniversary Gift, or Bringing Back Portal into Our Lives

Last week we had our very first wedding anniversary! Just like everything else in our lives since the end of August, we celebrated it in a daze of happiness, grateful for the amazing people in our lives and the little miracle in our arms.

Greg's gift for us was a baby/house gadget that has definitely improved our lives in the past week! He learned of it from our friends Jason and Lindsey when they came to visit us two weeks ago, did the research, bought it and installed it just in time to make our first anniversary. That, plus he cooked us an exquisitely delicious dinner: Chanterelle mushrooms (which are harvested in the wild and really hard to cultivate) and Alfredo sauce pasta.

The Nest is a neat controller for your A/C and heating unit that does several awesome things.
First and foremost, it lets you adjust temperature from your phone/tablet or from any computer; this is worth its value in gold for me right now because I'm either pinned down nursing, or I have Mara sleeping on me and don't dare move to not wake her up, or simply am too tired to go downstairs where the temperature regulator is mounted. Ever since the Mara Era one of us had been making about two trips every night to adjust the A/C settings because of the outside temperature fluctuations and the uneven distribution of air flow in the 2.5 levels of our funky house.
This device now saved us all the trips!

Secondly, the Nest allows way more customizations for our system. The old one would let you set the fan to either "On" or "Auto". Here, I can turn on the fan anytime with a timer, or set it to run for some minutes every hour between a time interval every day. The reason this is very useful to us is that it circulates air through the system without putting in more energy to heat/cool, which not only regulates the temperatures a lot better throughout the house by redistributing the heat, but it helps get more oxygen in each room! For us this last part is a real help, we used to have to sleep with bedroom doors open in all previous houses in California, because Greg simply could not breathe after a few hours of closed air. Probably an after-effect of growing up in Florida's constant A/C. My body is usually more forgiving when it comes to this, but I have a feeling Mara is taking after daddy because now we are finally getting stretches of a few consecutive hours of sleep every night, after the fine-grained temperature control and regular air cycling.
Thus, tons of fan customization with the Nest is my second favorite feature (worth its weight in silver?).

Thirdly, I have to admit this little device has a dauntingly high awesomeness factor: it's literally a robotic eye in your wall! It's eerily dark, but suddenly and silently turns on as you get near it, drawing you even closer as if to tell you a secret:

"I knew it was gonna be cool being in charge of everything, but wow, this is cool! And check this out! I'm a bloody genius now!" (Wheatley, Portal 2)

Side note: The Portal games were so well designed and so awesomely funny that NASA is sending Wheatley into space! And it's so appropriate to have an environment-controlling robot as our anniversary gift: Remember we played the Portal and Portal II theme songs during cake cutting at our wedding? And there *was* cake!!

Fourthly, it has all these crazy learning modes about your house:
- How long would it take to reach a specific temperature so you can preemptively turn the heat or A/C on knowing the forecast for your area to efficiently maintain the desired temperature. This is also coupled with the next feature.

- Home/Away mode where if you leave the place it will keep it under minimal settings. This is quite useful if you travel a lot or if you happen to have multiple residences, e.g. you can set the Nest in your weekend house to "Home"  before you start driving there and it'll have a perfect environment by the time you arrive. It even has a motion sensor and can automatically set itself to "Away" if you haven't passed by the unit in a while! I guess this last part might not work if the unit is mounted high and you are really short :-P but hey, I love walking past "the eye" and noticing it turn on, so there's your incentive to do a healthy jump by it whenever you pass through the hallway, to imagine it asking:

“Can you see the portal gun? Also, are you alive? That’s important; should have asked that first.” (Wheatley, Portal 2)

- A "Cool to dry" feature that would probably be a lot more useful in Florida, but probably here too on special occasions, e.g. after a water leak in the house, or forgotten open door on a really humid day. We'll see if we ever get to use this and I may update this post.
- Whether your settings are energy-efficient - this puts a cute little green leaf next to a setting you've enabled, and be it just for the cute factor or the sense of accomplishment that you are earth-friendly it definitely works! I find myself proudly adjusting down one degree if it turns the little leaf on.

- A nice stats page where you can see how long you ran the system each day. This is really nice to see, and ideally you might be able to couple this data with the one from your Energy company to break down your energy usage in the house.
- So easy to install! Greg did it on a Sunday in less than an hour, here is his step-by-step post about that process for anyone who's interested.

What we wish it had? The Nest is pretty darn outstanding, our definite favorite buy this year. It has all we could have imagined wanting and things which we never even considered needing. If we really wanted to get nit-picky, maybe a way to export our energy data for further analysis... luckily there's a feature request for this!

“Science isn’t about *why* it’s about *why not*. *Why* is so much of our science dangerous? Why not *marry* safe science if you love it so much” (Portal 2)

Bottom line: loving our Nest, would so thoroughly recommend it to every one of our friends! Thank you, daddy-lootz!

P.S. After being pretty much on the most blessed forms of house-arrest for two months now (read as new sweet baby mommy time) I have to admit, it is pretty hard to be aware of the passage of time, so a part of me kinda expects the Nest to soon be uttering something along the lines of:

"To maintain a constant testing cycle, I simulate daylight at all hours and add adrenal vapor to your oxygen supply. So you may be confused about the passage of time. The point is, yesterday was your birthday. I thought you'd want to know."(GLaDOS Test Chamber 14, Portal)