My nest paid for itself in the first 8 months of use. The difference in my utilities was that dramatic. And I was a person who had actually bothered to set his thermostat and thought I had a decent setup going.

I'm not so interested in the Protect product. I just need a smoke alarm to wake me up. The rest is just bloat to me. :-)

I have a very efficient setup that's also very new construction. Steel framed, mostly polished concrete floors, lots of large windows and thermal heat pumps. Plus the thermostat I originally had I felt I had set conservatively.

Bought a Nest, and it still managed to save enough to pay for itself in about 15 months. Staggering to have an electric bill in the $40-50/mo range.

We had a thermostat that was just plain confusing to program, plus it was damned ugly.

I am not sure if the Nest has saved me any money but it looks a lot nicer on the wall than our old thermostat, and really is nice and easy to use!

I still find myself showing it off when friends come to visit...need to stop doing that probably. :-)

That (looks nice and fun) is the only reason I kick around the idea of getting a Nest. Living in San Diego, there's not much reason for a thermostat. It does get chilly in the winter, but we use firewood to heat the house. We use the A/C maybe two weeks a year. But that UI sure looks nice.

Would you mind explaining where your savings came from?

(to be clear: I'm curious, but I don't mean to pry and understand you may simply not want to)

Not at all; the biggest difference was electric for cooling, though there were savings in natural gas heating too.

I believe the biggest nest concepts to help were the clever fan operation (allowing cool air from the basement to circulate after the AC unit itself had shut off), and auto-away.

Apologies if I sound like a shill; I really am just a very satisfied customer.

The nest is a little pricey, but it is really worth it. My family loves ours. We are thinking about replacing our smoke detectors with the protect next.

Just be careful about two things about the Nest protect, which are not obvious when you first purchase it.

1. If your house has the 3rd wire running between all the smoke alarms, so if one detects smoke, they all ring, Protect will not work with that system. It doesn't have the hook up for the 3rd wire. Nest will tell you to replace all the smoke detectors with the protect if you want the alarm to go off in the entire house.

2. If the Nest does detect smoke, it goes off and there is no way to turn it off until it thinks the smoke has cleared. Short of climbing up to the ceiling and ripping it off the power supply it will not turn off. You can't turn off the alarm via the app or by physically pressing the button.

I was originally very excited by the nest protect, but now not so much.

I replaced one of my smoke detectors with a Protect, planning to replace another. Just really like the look of the product, plus the pathlight feature (it shines a light for you at night if you walk past it) which is a nice plus.