Black Friday Deal: Nest’s fourth-gen smart thermostat isn’t cheap, but there’s a lot of power packed behind the slick screen and beveled edges. Even at full price, the Nest Learning Thermostat pays for itself in about a year, but you can now snag one for just $230 during Amazon’s Black Friday sale. That’s an 18% discount off the retail price, or $50 in savings.
CNET’s key takeaways
- $230 for a smart thermostat may sound like a tough deal, but mine paid for itself this fall, thanks to lower heating and cooling bills.
- Automated Eco Modes make energy saving easy, even if you don’t have time to plan out your schedule.
- Local utility rebates may also help make the thermostat more affordable.
When friends walk past my Nest Learning Thermostat Gen 4 for the first time, they often stop and stare. The thermostat can detect nearby movement and lights up with a beautiful display of the outside weather, like setting suns or shifting rain animations. That beauty comes at a cost, nearly $300 when not on sale, making it one of the most expensive smart thermostats I recommend.
Those numbers reflected my results fairly well. From early fall to the colder winter months, I saved around $10 to $15 per month with Nest’s tweaks and by balancing my electricity usage with less costly natural gas heating. As the months warmed up, that number grew higher for me, saving my heat pump work and me up to $20 during the hottest months. As autumn came around and I started saving money on cooling, I reached the breakpoint where I recouped the money spent on the thermostat. After that, it’s all gravy.
Smarts behind a pretty face
Given permission, the thermostat learns my habits and adjusts heating and cooling levels in response.
Auto-Eco mode, for example, will turn the thermostat down automatically if it senses there’s no activity in the house, which saves more money. Adaptive Eco will take care of the details for me, while Eco Hold will stick to a money-saving temperature that I choose manually. The Auto-Scheduling function does something similar, since it learns how I adjust the thermostat throughout the day and mimics my comfort preferences over time so I don’t have to keep tweaking the settings.
Adjust the temperature manually at any time and when you see the green leaf icon appear, you’ll know you’re in savings mode. That makes it easy to adjust on the fly when the temperature feels about right, but you’d like to squeeze more savings out of the thermostat.
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