A Nest thermostat helps you save energy without sacrificing comfort. It learns your preferences, adapts to your home, and provides tools to help you make smarter energy choices.
There are many ways to improve energy savings and lower your utility bills.
Energy-saving features on your thermostat
Here are some steps you can take that can help reduce your energy use:
Your thermostat can switch to Eco Temperatures when no one’s home to help you save energy. When you choose an energy-efficient Eco Temperatures setting, it prevents your home from wasting energy while everyone is gone. The more efficient your Eco Temperatures are, the more you’ll save. Be sure not to set your Eco Temperatures too low or too high if you have pets, plants, or delicate items in your home. Learn how to change Eco Temperature settings.
The Nest Leaf is an easy way to know you’re saving energy, and it encourages you to continually improve your savings over time. You’ll find the Leaf on your thermostat when you set a temperature that helps save energy. The more often the Leaf appears, the more you save.
Most people can’t tell the difference between a room set one day at 70°F or 22°C and the next day at 69°F or 21.5°C. In fact, the difference in temperature between your nose and your toes is likely to be more than 1°F or 0.5°C. Adjust your temperature schedule settings by just 1°F or 0.5°C, and learn how much you’ve saved compared to the previous month in your Home Report.
If you'll be away for an extended period of time, or you simply want to save energy while you’re at home, you don’t have to wait for your thermostat to automatically switch to Eco Temperatures. You can manually set your thermostat to Eco Temperatures. It stays in that mode until you manually switch to heating or cooling.
If you’ll be away for a long time, like a holiday or vacation, there are a few more options to save energy, like setting your thermostat to Off mode. Learn how to save energy when you're on vacation.
If you have a Nest Thermostat, you can get helpful tips from the Home app. When you enable Savings Finder, you’ll automatically get custom energy-saving suggestions to help you optimize your energy savings by making small changes to your temperatures. Learn more about the Savings Finder for the Nest Thermostat.
Most systems won’t heat your home any faster if you set your thermostat to a higher temperature, but your system will likely run longer and use more energy. If you want it to be 72°F or 22°C inside and you turn the heat up to 90°F or 30°C, it'll warm just as fast as if you set the temperature to 72°F or 22°C.
If you turn up the heat or AC often enough, your Nest thermostat will learn these temperatures and automatically add them to your schedule, which can use even more energy.
You can get the last 10 days of your heating and cooling activity in your Energy History. It’s a great tool to build better habits to save even more in the future. If you want to know your energy activity over a longer period, you can check your Home Report.
If you have more than one thermostat in your home, teach them to build schedules for each part of your home that they control. You can save even more energy when you close the interior doors between the different areas of your home. This will help keep the warm or cool air where you want it and prevent your system from turning on when it doesn’t need to.
If you have a Nest Learning Thermostat (3rd or 4th gen) or Thermostat E, it automatically builds a temperature schedule by learning each time you change the temperature. Your thermostat will never stop learning, so teach it good habits to save energy. Turn it down before you go to bed, or any time you would turn down a regular thermostat to save energy. Your Nest thermostat will remember these changes and adjust your schedule. You can find the results of teaching your Nest thermostat good habits in your Home Report.
Independent studies conducted in the UK have shown that Nest Thermostats, combined with Seasonal Savings save the average user 10% on heating bills over the winter season. For more information about these studies, go to The Behavioural Insights Team: Evaluating the Nest Learning Thermostat.
As you learn more about how and why you've saved energy with your Nest thermostat, you can keep up your good habits and make simple changes to be more efficient.
Impact of thermostats on energy use (US & Canada only)
In the average home, heating and cooling account for about half of energy use as determined by the US Department of Energy. This means that a thermostat with efficient control of your system can impact your home energy use significantly. One such possible benefit includes a reduction in your overall energy bill.
Google Nest thermostat energy savings projections are based on data from actual household use of our thermostats, studies and experiments performed by Nest. Multiple independent studies conducted by third parties and energy companies also contribute to this data. On average, customers who install a Nest thermostat save money on their heating and cooling bills.
In February 2017, the Nest Learning Thermostat became the first programmable thermostat to receive an ENERGY STAR® certification. The newer Nest Thermostat E and Nest Thermostat are now also certified.
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When you first install your thermostat, select your Eco Temperatures. These are used to help save energy. To help save more energy, keep energy efficiency in mind when setting your Eco Temperatures. You can always change your chosen Eco Temperatures at any time on your thermostat or within the app. The exact temperatures depend on your preferences. Consider your home's insulation, local weather, pets, and any other factors that influence your preferred temperature. Learn about Eco Temperatures, Eco when away & how to change settings. |
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Your thermostat can automatically switch to your Eco Temperatures when you leave using presence-based automations (Google Home app) or Home/Away Assist (Nest app). If you’ve chosen energy efficient temperatures, you’ll use less energy since your thermostat won’t turn on your heating and cooling systems as often while you’re gone.
You can also use Eco Temperatures while you’re home to help maximize energy savings.
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When you set Eco Temperatures on a Nest Thermostat or a Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen), your thermostat switches out of Eco. This happens at the next scheduled temperature change, but you can set a temperature hold if you want to stay in Eco mode. If you turn on the Adaptive Eco setting on Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen), your Eco Temperature preset adjusts based on the current outdoor temperature. Whenever you’re away from home, your thermostat will keep the temperature in your home within one hour of your Comfort temperature. To prevent your system from turning on while Eco when away is active, turn off Adaptive Eco. For instructions, go to Adaptive Comfort and Adaptive Eco. |
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If you set Eco Temperatures on a Nest Thermostat E or Nest Learning Thermostat (3rd gen or earlier), your thermostat will stay set at your energy-saving temperatures until you manually switch it out of Eco. |
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Presence-based automations (Google Home app) and Home/Away Assist (Nest app) can use information from your Nest product activity sensors and your phone location to know when you're home or away. If you're away, your thermostat can switch to your Eco Temperatures so that you're not wasting energy heating or cooling an empty home. Your thermostat automatically switches back to heating or cooling once you're home, so you won't need to worry about switching it back. Along with activity sensors in your thermostat or other devices in your home, you should enable phone location in the app. This helps your home know when to automatically switch between Home and Away with presence sensing. |
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- Smart Schedule (Nest Learning Thermostat 4th gen)
- Auto-Schedule (Nest Thermostat E and Nest Learning Thermostat 3rd gen or earlier)
- Quick Schedule (Nest Thermostat)
- Basic Schedule (Nest Thermostat E)
The savings calculator helps you find out how much you could save with a Nest thermostat. It will even tell you if there are utility programs in your area that offer rebates or other incentives.
The savings calculator estimates energy savings of the Nest thermostat by using some basic information that you provide. It uses your ZIP or postal code, home size, heating type, and whether or not you have air conditioning. Learn how the savings calculator works.Energy savings can be an important part of deciding which thermostat to purchase. But, not all estimates of potential energy savings from a thermostat are created equal.
Different ways manufacturers calculate energy savings
There are a few different ways that energy savings estimates are made.
Manufacturers can:
- Use a model with an imaginary customer and some assumptions to estimate savings.
- Examine real world data before and after installation in real customer's homes.
- Design a controlled experiment to measure thermostat energy savings.
- Use a mix of these and other methods.
Check out these different methods in more detail:
If you’re going to try to understand how much your thermostat can save, you need something to compare it to. In this method, a company will use some assumptions about the average consumer to create a baseline estimate of energy use (without their product). And then will compare it to projected usage with their product.
For example, you could assume that before installing a smart thermostat, a customer keeps their thermostat set at 72 degrees 24/7 all year long. This customer would find significant savings after installing a smart thermostat that has a schedule programmed and can turn down the heating and cooling system when they leave.
With this method, we’ve calculated that installing a Nest thermostat could save the average customer a whopping 25% on their heating and cooling energy use.
However, this savings estimate might be overly optimistic because the average person doesn’t leave their thermostat set at one temperature 24x7 all year long. If you already have a schedule programmed in your thermostat, or if you change the temperature on your own, you probably don’t have as much room to save as this model-based approach would suggest.
Since this estimate doesn’t accurately reflect what real world customers are likely to find, Nest doesn’t generally use this method for determining energy savings numbers.
A good way to use real world data to calculate energy savings is to check your energy bills before and after installing a smart thermostat. Energy bills show your total energy usage, so you can check for decreased energy usage after a smart thermostat is installed.
Other factors, like the weather, can also cause energy use to change significantly, so it’s important to include a control group. A control group is a set of customers, who have similar homes and live in the same area, that continue to use their old thermostat instead of installing a new smart thermostat. Control groups can help adjust for factors like changes in weather to help determine more clearly the amount of energy savings generated by the smart thermostat.
For example, maybe this winter was a lot colder than the last. If you installed a smart thermostat between the 2 winters, you could actually find higher energy use this year because your system has to run more to keep your home at your desired temperature during this colder winter. But, once researchers control for the difference in the weather, they might find that the smart thermostat did help you use less energy than you would have without it.
It’s also important to study different regions. Some parts of the world are more temperate, and you wouldn’t need to use your heating and cooling very often. This means that even though a smart thermostat could save you energy, it might not reduce your usage as much as it would for someone who lives in an area where heating and cooling usage is high.
By including control groups, accounting for weather and regional differences in heating and cooling, and comparing energy bills before and after a smart thermostat is installed, you can get a clearer picture of total energy savings.
Nest prefers to use real world data and scientific analysis when calculating energy savings to help provide savings estimates that are as close as possible to what you might find in your home.
Not all savings claims are based on scientific analysis or use real world data, and you should keep this in mind when comparing numbers from different manufacturers. Methods that rely solely on using an imaginary customer to estimate savings can result in an energy savings number that is much higher than you’re likely to find in your home.
Energy savings calculations are based on controlled experiments, and real world data gathered through multiple studies. For example, each of the customers' utility bills were compared before and after installing a Nest thermostat. This includes several studies that were conducted by utility companies and other third parties independently from Nest. The performance of our thermostats are also tracked using a variety of approaches, including the EPA's Energy Star performance metric developed for smart thermostats.
These studies all used established methods for measuring energy savings. They included methods to statistically adjust weather differences year to year, and control groups to reflect trends in energy use over time.
By using data from real customers and independent studies, we’re able to know that Nest thermostats save energy in real world situations, not just estimates or simulations based on imaginary people. On average, customers who install a Nest thermostat save money on their energy bill, and your Nest thermostat can pay for itself in under 2 years.