Nest brings Learning Thermostat to the UK

Nest is finally launching its sleek Learning Thermostat in the UK, following a series of delays caused partly by our slightly awkward way of doing central heating in this country. It's simultaneously launched its first utility partnership in the UK with energy provider npower.

The Learning Thermostat has been available for some time in the US and Canada and has been widely praised both for its bold design and connectivity capabilities that allow users to remotely monitor and control the temperature in their house using an app.

Wired.co.uk has spent some brief hands-on time with the Nest and never imagined it would take such pleasure in using something as humdrum a thermostat. Two simple actions -- rotating it and gently pressing on it -- give you access to the full array of features, and even programming timers this way is astonishingly easy.

The thermostat was designed by Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell, who previously worked for Apple on designing the iPod. Nest was sold to Google in January this year for $3.2 billion(1.9 billion), but the company is continuing with its mission of reinventing household tech and making it available across an open platform.

The UK market has proved tricky for Nest to wrap its head around, but that the company's had a jolly good crack at making its popular piece of kit work for us, redesigning both the hardware and the software of the thermostat so that it will fit in with our way of heating our abodes. Nest has integrated the programmer and the frostat into the thermostat itself and there's an extra piece of hardware that comes with it -- a heat link, which will turn off your boiler automatically when we turn the temperature down.

There are a range of differences between the way we heat homes to folks in the US: we use boilers instead of furnaces; we don't tend to require air conditioning (no need, believe it or not); we have no idea what our exact "comfort temperatures" are and tend to go with how we feel and our main expectation of our central heating systems is to be able to turn of the boiler at a preprogrammed time.

Nest sure has done its homework alright, but it's been a longstanding ambition of the company to expand into the UK, which is why when it launched the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector last autumn that it did so here at the same time as it launched in the US and Canada.

"With the UK Office of Gas and Electricity Markets saying that UK residents spend on average about 1,342 per year on energy, and heating responsible for over 60 percent of the bill, it's the perfect time to bring the Nest Learning Thermostat to the UK." said Lionel Paillet, Nest's general manager for Europe."Nest Learning Thermostat customers in the US experience savings of approximately 20 percent on average off their heating and cooling bill and we're looking forward to helping customers in the UK save as well."

The potential for saving on energy bills is the main appeal of the Nest Learning Thermostat in the UK and the company knows it too. It's working with npower to provide thermostats to its six million existing customers and is also trying to incentivise other companies to advertise it to their customers by helping them relieve pressure on the grid and assisting with sales promotions.

Obviously the full range of scheduling features are built in to the UK version of the thermostat, but what Nest is really hoping will help sell it to us are the efficiency features, which are ultimately the elements that will help us to reduce our bills. The Nest Leaf appears on the thermostat whenever you are using energy efficiently and its True Radiant system that prevents your heating from overshooting or undershooting its target temperature. The smartest bit of the smart thermostat are the algorithms that learn your behaviour patterns, but it also helps you to recognise these patterns too by providing you with a monthly energy report.

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Nest brings Learning Thermostat to the UK