Nest is now in The Home Depot.

Starting today, you can buy the Nest Learning Thermostat in over 1,000 Home Depot stores across the US and on homedepot.com. We’ve been in Home Depot Canada since 2012 and now we’re expanding our partnership. You’ll find Nest in yes, the thermostat section, but also featured in special displays at the end of the aisle.

Home Depot is the biggest home improvement retailer in the United States, attracting millions of customers every day to stores in every state and throughout Canada. Those customers are there to create beautiful, comfortable, efficient homes, and we can’t wait until they stop at our display and see how Nest can help.

With the addition of this Home Depot partnership, Nest thermostats can now be found in over 3,000 retail locations across the country. We’re looking forward to meeting all our new neighbors.

Nest acquires MyEnergy.

Today is a first. Three years ago we started Nest Labs with a vision of saving people energy, of changing the way people even think about their energy use. Today we’ve taken another big step in that direction with our very first acquisition.

MyEnergy is a fantastic company. They’ve put together a talented team to create exactly the kind of technology our customers have been asking for. Every day we get requests for more data: for spreadsheets, charts, detailed comparisons and, most importantly, energy savings translated into actual dollars.

We’ve acquired MyEnergy to help us do both: the details and the dollars. MyEnergy lets you track your electric, gas and water use in one place. It automatically reads your energy bills so you can see how much you spend month over month, year over year, and compare that to neighbors and friends. Their technology and team are fantastic, and their footprint is huge: they can access data from more than 1,500 energy providers and have users in every US state.

With their technology and level of access, we will be able to dig into your historical energy data and uncover interesting information to share with you. These capabilities also build on our existing energy services, allowing us to create even more connections and opportunities to save energy.

And MyEnergy’s focus on understanding and reducing home energy is a perfect fit for our company—just read their blog posts about which states use the most energy or how to heat your home efficiently (Texas and with a good thermostat, respectively). You can read more about what MyEnergy customers can expect on the MyEnergy blog.

As for what Nest customers can expect—we’re already working with the MyEnergy team to integrate their technology into our own. Keep an eye out for more in-depth access and analysis as we meld MyEnergy technology into Nest’s services. Together, we’re going to make Nest even better.

HVAC 101: To fan or not to fan.

People love their fans. They love to set them on timers, to schedule them to come on in the afternoons, to circulate air to keep the house from getting stuffy. We felt the full force of that love last week when we released Advanced Fan Control, a feature that can do all of the above.

Customers have already started using it. Many used to set Nest’s fan to Always On to bring cool air upstairs in summer or just keep air fresh, then they’d go to bed or leave the house and forget to turn it off. Now homeowners can schedule the fan to run from 6-11 p.m. or 8-10 a.m. and forget about it. It’s almost like having an air conditioner.

Advanced Fan Control is proving to be one of our most popular new features—the love for fans is ubiquitous. But so is the misinformation. With all this talk about fans, we’re hearing from more and more customers who’ve been told it’s energy efficient to keep the fan on all the time, 24 hours a day.

Whenever the topic is brought up, it’s a debate. Leaving the fan on seems to make sense, after all, especially in summer. If the fan can keep things from getting stuffy, you’ll use your energy-hog of an air conditioner less, and less AC will always save energy.

Turns out, it could cost you hundreds of dollars a year.

While using the fan instead of the air conditioner really is energy efficient, leaving it on all the time usually isn’t. The average air conditioner has a 500 watt fan, which can use about as much energy over the course of a year as a refrigerator. The costs of running it 24/7 quickly add up.

Newer systems have fans that use less energy, but keeping them on all day can cause other problems.

In the summer, the ducts that run through your attic or close to your walls can heat up, filling with warm air. Without the AC to cool it down, the fan just blows hot air into your house. You end up running the AC more, not less, to counteract all that extra heat.

Hot ducts can be a problem even if you don’t have the fan running all the time—you may be cool and comfortable in your bedroom, then when you turn on the fan on for the night, you fill the room with hot, stale air.

The fan can giveth and taketh away. That’s why Advanced Fan Control gives you a few different ways to control the fan, so you can find what works for your home. For those who want to circulate the air, we added an option that lets you run the fan for 15, 30 or 45 minutes every hour. You get the comfort benefits of a fan blowing all the time, but significantly reduce the fan’s actual runtime.

For Nesters who want the fan on for a particular period of time - while they’re asleep, for example, or just in the afternoon when everyone comes home—we’ve created a simple scheduler and a timer. You can turn on the fan exactly when it’s most efficient—when it replaces air conditioning—and it’ll automatically turn off when you tell it to.

The fan deserves all the love it gets—it can make a huge difference in your comfort and your energy bill. But as with all things wonderful and beloved—chocolate, Christmas, chocolate—you can get too much of a good thing.

This post is part of our HVAC 101 series about how to make the most of your heating and cooling system. Previously we covered finding holes in your ducts and insulation.

New summer software

Summer is coming. And temperatures may be just as sweltering as last year. So today we’re launching new Nest thermostat features to keep you cool, help with your AC bills, and satisfy some of our most requested product suggestions. Yes, as you can see, we’re listening.

If your 1st or 2nd generation Nest is connected to Wi-Fi, you’ll automatically get an update in the next few days that will include:

Sunblock
In 60% of homes, the thermostat is in direct sunlight at some point during the year, heating up and reading temperatures up to 25ºF (14°C) higher than reality. In the summer, that means the AC runs overtime. In the winter, the furnace may not turn on at all. It’s frustrating for customers and one of the big issues we hear about in customer support and our online community.

So Nest invented Sunblock for your thermostat. Sunblock senses when Nest is in direct sunlight and automatically adjusts so Nest reads and sets the correct temperature. It uses Nest’s built-in light sensor to track the sun’s patterns and temperature sensors to detect—and adapt to—heat spikes from the sun. Sunblock is enabled by default in every Nest thermostat, and will turn on after at least one day of Nest being in direct sunlight. Look for the little sun icon on Nest’s display and find Sunblock in the NEST SENSE section of SETTINGS.
More about Sunblock 

Advanced Fan Control
If we’ve learned one thing about our customers in the last year, it’s this: they really like fans. And for good reason: circulating the air keeps homes from getting stuffy, maintains an even temperature throughout the house, and can sometimes save energy. With Advanced Fan Control, you can now schedule the fan to run all night and turn off in the morning, run for a few minutes every hour, or just turn on at 6pm when you get home from work. To schedule your fan, go to FAN in SETTINGS.
More about Advanced Fan Control 

Cool to Dry
If you live in an excessively humid area (see: Florida) and don’t have a dehumidifier, you already know the only way to control humidity - and the mold that comes with it—is with the air conditioner. With Cool to Dry, Nest uses its humidity sensor to detect when humidity reaches potentially unhealthy levels. Then it automatically turns on the air conditioner when needed—for as long as its needed—to help keep your home dry. This feature is only meant for homes in extremely humid climates and can be found in NEST SENSE in SETTINGS.
More about Cool to Dry 

Enhanced Auto-Away
With our last update, we improved Auto-Away so it could turn on as quickly as 30 minutes after you walked out the door. Now, Auto-Away has gotten much better at understanding when you’re coming home. Say you leave in the morning and your schedule says to turn on the AC at 2pm. If Nest thinks you’ll be home in the afternoon, it’ll pause Auto-Away and turn down the temperature at 2pm so you’ll come home to a cool house. However, if you usually come home at 6pm, then Auto-Away will skip over that 2pm temperature and help you save energy all day long.
More about Auto-Away 

Mobile app updates
We’ve updated the Nest Mobile app for iOS and Android to make it more natural to change the temperature—it’s just like turning the ring on Nest itself. We’ve also added messages, so Nest can send you a message on the Web or Mobile app when you need to change your filter, for example.
Explore the Nest apps 

Auto-Tune
Auto-Tune technology finds new opportunities to save you energy, then helps you take advantage of them. We’ve created two features powered by Auto-Tune that are currently available to customers of our new energy partners:

• Rush Hour Rewards - You could earn $20-60 back from your energy provider this summer. It’s simple: Rush Hour Rewards helps you use less energy while everyone else is using more, which earns you money from your energy company.
• Seasonal Savings - Seasonal Savings automatically fine-tunes your schedule over several weeks to help you save energy and stay comfortable. In our trials, it's helped Nesters use 5-10% less heating and cooling.

Enter your zip code to find out if your energy provider has partnered with Nest.

We can’t control the weather (yet), but we hope these new features will help make this a better, cooler, more comfortable summer. Have more ideas about what Nest should do? We’re taking suggestions.

New features save energy & make money. Automatically.

You can’t force people to save energy.

We learned that early on at Nest. You can give people tools to help them save, like the Nest Leaf or Auto-Away, but you can’t lower someone’s heating or cooling bill against their will. Everyone’s first demand from a thermostat is comfort and control, so even if you set an inefficient temperature or use energy when it’s most expensive, the Nest Learning Thermostat will always listen to you.

Starting today, however, Nest can do a lot more than just follow your lead: with new Auto-Tune technology, Nest can spot perfect, personalized opportunities to save you money and energy and automatically take advantage of them for you. Even better? It makes sure you stay comfortable and in control the whole time.

Introducing Rush Hour Rewards and Seasonal Savings, powered by Auto-Tune. These Nest services are available to customers of our energy partners, progressive energy companies working together with Nest to put a serious dent in your energy bill.

Rush Hour Rewards could help you earn anywhere from $20-$60 this summer—it takes advantage of energy company incentives that pay you to use less energy when everyone else is using more. Seasonal Savings takes everything Nest has learned about you and automatically fine-tunes Nest’s schedule to save energy, without sacrificing comfort. Field trials have been impressive: Nest owners have used 5-10% less heating and cooling with Seasonal Savings and 80% said they'd keep their tuned-up schedules after Seasonal Savings ended.

Most importantly, both Rush Hour Rewards and Seasonal Savings leave the customer in control: if you don’t like a temperature that they set, you can change it at any time.

These services are new—radically new—and dramatically different than any previous efforts by energy providers and thermostat makers to get their customers to save energy. But they’re not new to us—we’ve been working on them for years. Even before we launched the Nest Learning Thermostat, we were designing our data services with these features in mind.

Everything your Nest learns about you—your schedule, your energy plan, the temperatures you like, when you’re home and away, what the weather’s like near you, how efficient your furnace is and how leaky your windows are—can now be used to take full advantage of every money-making opportunity and energy-saving tweak that makes sense for your home.

The level of personalization and customer control in these Auto-Tune features is revolutionary to the energy industry. In the past, energy companies that wanted you to use less energy could simply shut off your AC with special thermostats on the hottest day of the year. Or they’d email you with savings tips and hope you remember. Nobody has ever designed energy-saving services with the consumer in mind.

Rush Hour Rewards and Seasonal Savings are designed to be, at their heart, incredibly easy. Sign up for them and Nest will do all the work—you won’t have to adjust your schedule or change the temperature, managing your bill through trial and error. Nest will tweak temperatures for you, always keeping your comfort in mind. It’ll tell you what’s happening, how much it’s saving, and let you know before it makes a big change. It’ll sense if you’re home or not, sleeping or not, and make the biggest adjustments when nobody will notice them.

Everything Auto-Tune features do is personalized for your home and your schedule, and if you don’t like it, you can change the temperature and Nest will learn.

It took many, many iterations to get this right. Adjusting the temperature at night by 1ºF during the New York winter is one thing, but trying the same thing in the Florida summer is entirely different. Balancing savings and comfort is incredibly tricky, and changes radically for every town, for every home. You can see how we developed this technology—and the trials we’ve run—in our Seasonal Savings White Paper and Rush Hour Rewards White Paper.

In the meanwhile, we’re still working. Currently we have four energy partners offering our new services—Reliant, Green Mountain Energy, Austin Energy and Southern California Edison. Enter your zip code to find out if your energy provider has partnered with Nest, and if they haven’t, tell us your email and we’ll contact them. We’re adding more partners fast.

And Auto-Tune is getting much, much more powerful. We’ve just begun using energy company data to help you save; we’re already working on services that’ll track energy costs and not only show you when energy is more expensive, but actually adjust your thermostat to help you keep to a budget while staying comfortable. The more data we get, the more partners we work with, the more we’ll help you save.

We’re just getting started.

Welcome Doug Sweeny, our new VP of Marketing.

Nest is growing again. Everyone, meet Doug Sweeny, Nest’s new VP of Marketing.

You might know Doug from his work at Levi’s. He brought the brand back from the edge of marketing oblivion by architecting a new Go Forth campaign, which led to Advertising Age naming Doug one of the “Top 50 Creative Leaders” of the year.

He’s also spent time at the best advertising firms in the country, working with companies big and slightly less big: Adidas, Saturn, and Powerbar, to name a few. Doug has made a career of making brands sing.

But after 23 years working in marketing, there was obviously something missing. And that thing was a thermostat. Luckily, ours is the perfect fit.

Please join me in welcoming Doug to the Nest team.

HVAC 101: Small home upgrades that save big.

This is the first in our HVAC 101 series, where we look at how your heating and cooling system works, and how it could work better.

In many homes, the heater seems to be on forever before you get warm. Or the AC’s humming, but you don’t feel any cold air. So you think something big must be wrong: the heating and cooling system is broken or all the windows need replacing.

But before you start a major energy upgrade with major costs, do something simple: look up, look down. The typical home has holes that leak out a full third of its heating and cooling costs.

The biggest issues happen where you can’t see them.

Often the first things we focus on when thinking about energy efficiency are windows and the cracks around them. But those tiny cracks are, well, tiny.

The really big holes, the ones you can put a fist through, are in the places you don’t go—in attics, basements and crawlspaces. That’s where wires, plumbing or heating ducts enter and leave the house or where foundation meets frame.

Not sure if you have a leak? Go to your attic and look for dirty insulation. The dirty spots show where air is traveling through the insulation and out of your house. Then go to your basement and look for gaps between the concrete foundation and the wood frame of the house.

If you do find leaks, you can contact a contractor to fill them for you, or you can often fix them yourself if you’re feeling handy. Here’s how:

In the attic:

• Pull back the dirty insulation and find the hole. If the gap is under ¼ inch, use caulk. For larger gaps, use expanding foam or weather stripping. Then put the insulation back in place.
• Locate openings around plumbing vent pipes and electrical wires. Seal them and cover with insulation.
• Keep in mind, you may need more insulation. You can figure that out quickly by looking at your uncovered attic floor. You'll need more insulation if the rafters are visible.
• Complete the job by sealing your attic door with weather stripping so it seals when closed.

In the basement:

• Seal any gaps where the basement ceiling meets the frame of the house.
• Seal areas that go through the basement ceiling to the floor above. These are generally holes for wires, water supply, drain pipes and heating ducts.

Before you change your system, seal your ducts.

Some homes may be perfectly insulated with no air escaping outside, but they’re betrayed by bad ductwork.

If the ducts that carry warm or cool air throughout your home are leaky, you could be losing 20% or more of that air before it even reaches your room. And the holes in ducts—just like the holes in insulation—are usually where you can’t see them: the attic, crawl space and garage.

Most homeowners choose to work with a professional contractor for duct improvement projects. But if you want to take on duct sealing as a do-it-yourself project, here are a couple steps you can take to seal your duct work:

• Find any ducts you can access in your home’s attic, crawl space, basement or garage.
• Seal any air leaks you find using mastic sealant or metal tape. Although it seems like duct tape fixes everything, don’t use it here. It won’t last long and doesn’t react well to heat.
• Check and seal any gaps in the connectors where the ducts meets floor, ceiling and wall vents.
• Wrap any accessible ducts in insulation.

Not sure where to start? Get an energy audit from a Certified Professional.

If you’re not sure where leaks are or how to fix them, an energy audit from a Nest Certified Professional will help give you a complete picture of where your home is losing energy. It could also lead to 5-30% savings on your energy bill. Check to see if your utility offers incentives for audits or for insulation or air and duct sealing.

Have other energy saving tips or questions? Join the conversation in the Nest Community.

Why some like it hot. Or cold.

It’s an old stereotype: women always complain about being cold and men about feeling hot.

As a maker of thermostats, we hear about it all the time: from the husband who turns the heat down from his phone while his wife isn’t looking, or the woman who sneaks into Nest’s schedule and raises all the temperatures two degrees. It’s the cause of epic thermostat wars, where shouts of “Just put on a sweater” and “I’m already wearing a sweater” disturb the peace of many happy homes.

For centuries scientists have been searching for a cause for this phenomenon. In years past, the science was hazy, pushed ahead by creative scholars like 19th-century physician Dr. Carl Wunderlich, who determined average body temperature by collecting over a million temperatures from 25,000 patients. Or an experiment in which men and women floated in tanks of cold water and talked about how they felt.

A 2008 article most decisively answers the question. Women get cold because, strangely enough, their bodies are better designed to keep warm. Female bodies have a more evenly distributed layer of fat that can quickly pull blood back to their core organs. This is great for keeping alive in a snowstorm, but sometimes works to the detriment of their extremities.

As warm blood rushes back to keep vital organs warm, less reaches fingertips and toes. And while they may not be critical to survival, warm toes are important to comfort. You immediately feel cold when your hands and feet get cold.

So there you have it: the reason why my wife crams her ice-cold feet under my legs to warm up, the reason I throw the covers off at night, the reason for the thermostat wars. We can only hope this knowledge helps bring some peace to that never-ending battle; women can now be warmed by the knowledge that their bodies are actually more efficient and men, well, we can open a window.

EV stations and efficiency at the office.

The Nest office is many things: rigorously climate controlled, littered in exercise balls, packed full of inexplicable snacks. And now it’s one of the 11,000 ChargePoint electric vehicle charging stations in the US.

At any time from 8am to 8pm, you’ll see our three EV charging stations plugged into an impressive collection of electric cars. At last count, Nest employees had four Nissan LEAFs (including mine. I was a very early adopter - my LEAF is #821!), a Tesla Model S, a Chevy Volt, a Ford Focus EV and a Ford Fusion.

We installed an EV port in mid-January, when Kyle Domergue from ChargePoint —friend of the company and husband of a Nester—helped us get our first charging station. Within a month, with our Peak Daily Occupancy hovering at 100% (meaning all our stations were perpetually in use during the work day), we installed two more stations. Each station now averages five unique charges a day, a constant stream of electricity.

And it’s paid off. Over the last few months, Nest employees in electric cars have saved 374 gallons of gas and prevented 3,182kg of CO2 from going into the atmosphere.

And that’s not even counting the five Priuses and two biodiesel cars also parked in our lot. And it’s leaving out all the Nesters who forsake cars altogether.

On average, only 0.6% of American workers bike to work, but around 10% of Nest employees either bike regularly or bike from public transportation. That leads to quite a few requests for official Nest biking jerseys:

Here modeled by PT.

Our longest bike commuter? Shige, who used to bike regularly to the Palo Alto office from his home in Santa Cruz - a quick jaunt of about 46 miles. Michael gets second place, biking 10 miles each way, rain or shine, from his home in Sunnyvale.

Most impressive walk goes to Ed, who at 70 years old walks about two miles to the office every day.

The cheapest commuter award may to go Harry, who rides a $25 bike to get to work.

Fanciest rig may again go to Shige, who’s currently building a new super commuter bike in his ample spare time. Although Scott certainly did a great job Nestifying his own bike:

Every time I look at the bicycles overflowing the storage room or our perpetually full EV stations, I’m proud that our employees are green all the way through. They’re not just making a thermostat to save energy, they’re choosing to walk to work, or get an electric car, or bike from the Caltrain station.

As a company we want to help them do even more, save even more. And we have room to grow.

We can do more together.

It makes us really happy when your Nest Learning Thermostat helps you save 20% on your heating and cooling bill. Every little bit counts. Of course, that fact is a lot more interesting when you add all the little bits together.

And that’s what we do with Nest Together.

Every month we estimate how many kilowatt hours of energy Nest thermostats have saved by learning our customers’ schedules. So far that’s enough energy to fly a 747 back and forth to the moon six times.

It’s an amazing achievement in such a short time. And we want to do more.

So if you buy a Nest thermostat through the Nest Together page, the Arbor Day Foundation will plant a tree somewhere in the world—in the Amazon, or in Russia, or in a patch of land in New Jersey devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

We’ve already planted over 10,000 trees for Nesters who helped save energy—you can see which states planted the most here. But millions of trees are cut down every day. We have a long way to go.

So refer a friend through Nest Together. When they buy a Nest—with free shipping, of course—a new tree will grow somewhere in the world. Even better, they’ll start saving energy, and we’ll start adding those savings to our ever growing total.

This month it’s the moon. If we all work together, who knows how far we can fly.

Welcome to the Nest Community.

We like you. We think you’re smart, funny and, frankly, have excellent taste in thermostats. But we’d like to get to know you better, so today we’re unveiling the Nest Community.

The Nest Community is a forum where you can talk to us and, more importantly, talk to each other. We hope you’ll make this community your own, whether you’re sharing installation stories, cool photos of Nest in your home, your energy bills, product ideas, what you’ve named your Nest, or even things completely unrelated to Nest. The sky’s the limit.

For those of you who’ve become obsessed (in a good way!) with Energy History, the Energy Report and other Nest data, we’ve created an Energy board where you can find and share rebates for your Nest, post tips for how to save more energy, tell us how you’ve optimized your schedule or your solar panels, or share your thoughts on smart meters.

We’ve also created a Product Suggestions section for suggesting and voting on new features for your Nest thermostat. It’s already filling up with great ideas.

Sign in to the community with your Nest Account to get started. Not sure what to do? All’s explained in the community FAQ and About the Community board.

We can’t wait to see what you guys come up with. See you in the community.

Tom vonReichbauer & Shige Honjo join exec team.

It’s people who make a company. And I’ve always been incredibly proud of the amazing people at Nest. Today we’re adding one more: Tom vonReichbauer is joining as CFO. We’ve also promoted long-time Nester Shige Honjo to the Nest executive team.

Tom comes to Nest from Tesla Motors. He joined Tesla when it was a small startup, just beginning production of its first car. Through his leadership and involvement in financial and strategic planning and public and private financing, Tom helped Tesla grow into a major player in the global auto industry.

When he’s not disrupting industries, Tom’s on his bike. He’s even ridden California’s Death Ride, which is almost as impressive as getting America excited about an electric car.

Speaking of cycling enthusiasts, Nest’s second employee, Shige Honjo, is also joining the executive team as VP Program Management and Manufacturing. Shige has over 20 years of consumer electronics design, development, and execution experience on more than a dozen mobile phones and other products. Prior to Nest, Shige was the Lead Engineering Program Manager at Apple for several early generations of iPhone, from concept to ramp.

Please join me in welcoming Tom and congratulating Shige.

Understanding the Nest Leaf.

The Nest Leaf was designed to be simple: quick feedback when you do something that saves energy. It’s there to guide you towards efficient temperatures and reward you when you get there.

But it’s also a bit of a game, and people have been asking about the rules. Everyone wants more Leafs, others simply want to know why they got a leaf today, but not yesterday.

So here’s everything you need to know about the Nest Leaf:

1. It’s all about you. The Leaf isn’t related to overall energy use—it appears based on your interactions with your Nest, including on the Web and Mobile apps.
2. You’ll see a Leaf when you choose a temperature that saves you energy. The Leaf is different for each home. Each home has its own baseline, so you might get a Leaf at 72ºF/22ºC while your neighbor gets one at 68ºF/20ºC. You can see when the Nest Leaf has learned enough about your home and habits to set a baseline by checking in the Learning section in Settings on your Nest.
3. Just because you’re saving energy doesn’t mean you get a Leaf. Let’s say your schedule is set to cool to 76ºF/24.5ºC, but it’s a cool day and only 74ºF/23.5ºC outside. Nest isn’t using any energy, but since you didn’t make any temperature adjustment to help it save, you won’t earn a Leaf.
4. You can earn a Leaf when you’re Away. You choose your Away temperatures, so you can get a Leaf while you’re gone if your Away temps are energy efficient. You can also earn a Leaf every day by turning Nest off.
5. Earning a Leaf gets harder over time. The Leaf is designed to guide you to bigger savings, so while you may get a Leaf by turning cooling up from 72ºF/22ºC to 74ºF/23.5ºC on day six with Nest, by day 60, a Leaf may only appear at 76ºF/24.5ºC.
6. You can earn a Leaf while adjusting your schedule. If you prefer to change your schedule manually by adjusting temps or adding new ones, a Leaf may pop up if the new temps on your schedule are more energy efficient.
7. You’ll see Leafs on Energy History and your Energy Report too. When you’ve earned a Leaf for at least an hour a day, it’ll show up for that day on both your Energy History and will be added to your total Leaf count in the Energy Report.
8. Leafs can appear in Settings, but won't be added to your total Leaf count. You'll see a Leaf when you switch to a more efficient setting, like turning off Early-On or moving from Max Savings to Max Comfort in Heat Pump Balance. That Leaf doesn't add to your total Leaf count in Energy History or the Energy Report. It's just there to show you which setting will help you save more energy.
9. You can get a Leaf without doing anything, but you have to be super efficient. You’ll always get a Leaf by heating to 62ºF/16.5ºC or below or cooling to 84ºF/29ºC or above.
10. Yes, the plural of Nest Leaf is Nest Leafs. If the Canadians can do it, so can we.

Now, let the games begin. How many Leafs did you earn this month?

Nest Gift Guide 2012.

Our second annual holiday gift guide ranges from the reasonable to the sublime to the ridiculous. Once again, we’ve asked the makers of Nest—everyone here in our office—to share their wish lists. A fun game to play: guess which suggestions came from engineers?

1. Sam’s a fan of Boosted Boards, which turn longboards into electric-powered vehicles. They’re not quite ready yet, but you can pre-order for 2013.
2. David’s looking forward to getting his own ELF, a personal electric vehicle powered by you and the sun—and Kickstarter.
3. Henry wants the most handy of utility tools: the Haywire Klamer. It can securely bind practically any two objects together.
4. Shige and Amy love a company called Retrofitz. They’ll take any shoe and turn it into a cycling shoe.
5. Sugru is another all-purpose fix-anything tool, brought to our attention by Maxime. It’s a self-setting rubber that moulds like play-dough and turns into strong, flexible silicone rubber overnight.

6. Joseph wants Hue—a personal wireless lighting system that can be controlled from your phone or tablet.
7. Harry likes it old school. He’s planning to hang some Susan Kare prints around his apartment.
8. Matteo is looking forward to getting a Vitsoe universal shelving system.
9. Courtney wants to hang up art from Epic Frequency, which turns your audio recordings into paintings.

10. Jeff is wishing for a Canon 6D DSLR camera with built-in Wi-Fi so you can wirelessly share images and video and use your smartphone for remote camera control.
11. All Giovanni wants for Christmas are Oakley Airwave Snow Goggles. Which yes, look cool, but more importantly have a great name.
12. Another suggestion from Joseph: customizable 3D accessories from Fresh Fiber.
13. Daniel wants a BioLite Campstove. It cooks your food and charges your phone.
14. Alex has been hinting to his wife about this handmade leather wallet/phone case.

15. This SafePlug Energy Manager Kit may not look like much, but P T really wants it. SafePlug turns off appliances when you don’t need them and measures how much energy they use.
16. From Osborne, a USB squirming tentacle. It doesn’t store any data, but it does demonstrate your fondness for Cthulhu.
17. Perhaps my favorite gift on this list comes from Don. It’s the Popinator, a voice activated popcorn shooter that sends a kernel directly to your mouth on demand. Modern technology at its best.
18. From David comes an interesting suggestion: Fancy Hands. It’s a company that runs your errands so you can buy friends and family a bit of productivity.

And of course there’s one gift at the top of our wish list. Thermostats may not be the most traditional present, but Nest Learning Thermostats are warmer than a sweater and easier to wrap. They’re as smart as an iPod, look beautiful in any home, and can pay for themselves in energy savings.

And this holiday season, Nests are available everywhere. You can get yours at nest.com, with or without professional installation, at Lowe's, Amazon, Best Buy, or the online Apple Store. You can also buy the 1st gen Nest on sale at Lowe's.

Looking for a Nest in Canada? Here’s where you can pick one up today for Hanukkah or to stash before Christmas.

Happy holidays, everyone. We hope you get—and give—some great gifts this year.

Meet your new Energy Report.

We’ve completely redesigned our monthly Nest Energy Report—and we’re really excited. The Energy Report still gives you a summary of what Nest has been doing in the last month, but now it goes way beyond our original design and is available in multiple languages. When we sent the first Energy Report out back in May, we gave you the basics: how much energy you used, how many Leafs earned and how often you were Away. We asked for your feedback and were rewarded with a flood of requests. Mostly, you wanted to know why: why did I use more energy, or why was this month's energy use so different than the last? You also wanted to see how you compared to others—if you were doing better or worse than your neighbors.

So here it is: your new fully redesigned Energy Report.

It starts with the big picture:

Every month we’ll tally how many kilowatt hours of energy Nest thermostats have saved. The total so far is over 200 million, enough to power the Empire State Building for four years. (This, by the way, blew our minds. Amazing job, Nesters.)

You may also see a “Kudos!” at the top of your report. If you did something great—turned down the heat regularly, fixed up your schedule to be more efficient, earned a Nest Leaf every day—we’ll be sure to tell you. Your Kudos may also feature a special reward once in awhile, if you’re doing a particularly impressive job of saving energy.

Another addition we’re excited about at the very top of the report is social sharing. No more screenshots—you can now quickly share the top of the Energy Report on Twitter or Facebook with one click.

Keep scrolling down and you’ll get your month-to-month summary.

We’ll tell you how many hours of heating and cooling you used this month vs last month. Hours of heating are red, hours of cooling are blue. After you’ve had Nest on your wall for at least a full month—and we have heating and cooling info for most of the month—you’ll always see data from this month vs the previous month.

Below that you’ll see something new: the why. There are a lot of reasons why your energy use could change: the weather, your schedule changes, your temperature adjustments, Auto-Away and manual Away, Airwave, turning Nest off, adding a new Nest, the number of days in a month, etc. We look at all of them and highlight the top one, two or three that made the biggest impact that month.

You’ll see how many hours of energy each reason added or took away from your month’s total to help you understand why your energy use changed.

And now that you know how and why you’ve used energy, it’s time to find ways to use less:

Each month we’ll offer a different tip or perhaps a special thank you. We do our research for this part of the Energy Report, taking what we know about you, your home, the weather in your area and how much energy your neighbors are using. The more we know, the more personalized these tips will get.

And as you tweak your schedule and your settings to save more, we know you're wondering how you're doing compared to other Nest thermostat owners. So we added an “Interesting fact” to your Energy Report. This section changes every month, but generally shows you how you compare to other Nesters in your area or around the country.

Our inaugural interesting fact is about one thing that could make a huge impact this month: your Away temperature. This is the temperature you tell Nest to turn to when you're not home. An efficient Away temperature could be the best way to save energy in December if you’re planning to take a week or two to visit family or escape to Hawaii.

So this month we’re telling you how your Away temp compares to the average for your state (or province) as well as the entire country. We also give you a glimpse of how other parts of the country are doing.

One of the first things many of our customers looked for in the original Energy Report was their Nest Leaf count. You earn a Nest Leaf by doing something that saves you energy—like turning down the heat or adjusting your schedule to be more energy-efficient. It’s a simple reward for doing something good for your energy bill. In this updated version of the Nest Energy Report, we’re simplifying the Nest Leaf section to show you your total Leaf count and let you know if you’re earning more Leafs than other Nesters.

Want still more Nest news? At the bottom of the Energy Report we feature the latest info from our blog. We often explain new features or highlight exciting company developments.

And that’s it. We’re really excited to bring you more data, more tips, more facts about how people use Nest. And we’re not done—we have so many more ideas about how to make the Nest Energy Report better. Look for new updates, info and designs in the coming months.

So, what do you think?

Nest available in stores across Canada.

We’re excited to announce that the Nest Learning Thermostat is now available at some of our favorite retailers across Canada. Lowe’s, Home Depot and Amazon.ca are now carrying Nest just in time for winter.

We know it gets cold up there, so we think you’ll enjoy comfort features like Early-On and True Radiant. And we know you don’t like to waste energy, so Auto-Schedule, Auto-Away, Filter Reminders and Heat Pump Balance should come in handy too.

Of course Nest works in Celsius—and you can set it by half degrees—and can speak Canadian French. Our website and support are available in French too. And if you’d like some help with installation, Nest Concierge is available from the Nest store.

And for all of you that have been patiently waiting for us to launch at retail, thank you. We hope you’re as excited as we are. Here’s where you can get your Nest today:

Lowe’s

Lowe’s stores and Lowes.ca have 2nd gen Nests for $249.

Home Depot

Visit your local Home Depot to pick up the 2nd gen Nest Learning Thermostat for $249, or just stop by homedepot.ca.

Amazon.ca

Both the 1st and 2nd generation Nests are currently available on Amazon Canada. The 2nd gen Nest is $249, while the 1st gen is $199 while supplies last.

Here’s what your fellow Canadians think of Nest so far. We hope to hear from more of you soon.

Black Friday deals on Nest and more.

The day after Thanksgiving is filled with furious shopping, tearing of coupons and high-speed deal grabbing. And starting Nov 23rd, one of the best deals to grab is at Lowe’s: the Nest Learning Thermostat 1st Generation will be $198 through Monday, Nov 26th.

You can pick up your new Nest from your local Lowe’s or on Lowes.com on Black Friday. It makes a great addition to any home or an amazing Christmas gift for Mom and Dad. And rest assured, the 1st gen Nest has the same software as the 2nd gen, so you get all Nest’s amazing features at a fraction of the price.

Ready? You may want to put together a game plan for Friday. And if this Lowe’s video is right, grandma will be critical.

Of course if you’re venturing out into the world this Friday, you may want to make the most of it and pick up a few other great products. Here are the deals we’re looking forward to.

Dyson at Bed, Bath & Beyond

One brand we really like is Dyson. They have unquestionably revolutionized the vacuum industry and continue to innovate and design beautiful household products. That’s why we're so excited about Bed Bath & Beyond’s 25% off sale. The Dyson sale runs from Friday to Monday, but head in on Friday and you’ll get an additional 20% off your entire purchase.

Jambox at Best Buy

Jawbone’s killer Jambox speaker will be available for $129.99 from Best Buy. We love them and have a few around the office, not to mention in the homes of a lot of Nesters. That’s $50 off for this Bluetooth enabled speaker.

Herman Miller at Room & Board

Herman Miller makes beautiful things. Beautiful chairs, beautiful tables, beautiful pieces for your home. So we’ll definitely be dropping by Room & Board or roomandboard.com, where all Herman Miller furniture will be 15% off.

Good luck, shoppers.