As someone who loves technology I am always interested in working to make my home the most connected home that I can. There are so many products on the market these days that allow you to have fun with technology and one of the ones I have been very interested in lately was the Nest. If you have never heard of Nest, you should. It is a WIFI enabled Smart thermostat that helps you save energy and money and best of all never come home to a cold house. The Nest balances the temperature in your home as it senses your activity, learns your preferences and can be adjusted from your smartphone, tablet or laptop (talk about cool!). The Nest WIFI ebabled Smart thermostat also allows you to connect to your existing router / network and develop a secure and reliable connection.

I was able to try out the Nest thermostat in my own home and I am so glad that I did as my existing one was about to kick the bucket. When the Nest arrived, as you can see in the pictures, it came packaged very professionally. Everything that you needed was included and it stated it would only take abut 30 minutes to install. I put the instructions to the test and started to do the install myself. Now, many of you know that I am not the most handy person, so taking on projects like this can sometimes go poorly but the instructions for the Nest were easy to follow and understand and within les than 30 minutes I had the Nest installed.

Once installed it did take a little more time as I also installed a new Netgear Router while I was at it as the router that we had was old and giving us issues and I did not want to have any problems down the road with our overall network. I chose the NETGEAR – Nighthawk DST AC1900 Wireless-AC Gigabit Router with DST Adapter as I knew that it would give me and my family everything that we needed to create a strong home network that could support connections across all of our devices. Also, one of the things I loved was that it came with set up and support via phone & web and 1 year of Geek Squad support. As I am not an expert on Geek related issues, having an expert in my corner is always a good thing! The Netgear Nighthawk also offered AC1900 with Dead Spot Terminator which will help to eliminate my Wi-Fi dead zones and in the end will supports 10+ connected devices which helps in an uber-connected home like mine!

Once I had the router setup I went to download the free app from GooglePlay (It is available in iTunes too) and once installed and connected I was able to easily adjust my thermostat from your smartphone, tablet or laptop. I even tried this from work, which is about 25 minutes away from home and it worked like a charm!

I feel so much more at ease with the additional alerts and reminders that I am getting now and as it monitors my equipment, sends service reminders and tells me if anything is not working correctly, I now will know right away is something like my home’s temperature goes above or below limits that I set.

While I have not yet been using this for a week, I know that from everything that I have read that after about a week the Nest thermostat starts programming itself to the temperatures you like and when you’re not at home, it will automatically switch to an energy-efficient temperature.

I am looking forward to tracking my own energy usage and see the tips that are provided to me about how I can conserve even more in the future!

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•             Xbox One

•             Smartphones and tablets (select operating systems)

•             Laptops and computers (select operating systems)

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