ability to figure out when something might be going wrong with your HVAC system. Now,
we’re taking steps to make that possible for most systems in Canada and the U.S.
with HVAC monitoring, which is rolling out today to all Nest thermostats in those regions.
Where did the idea for the HVAC monitoring feature come from?
Marco: It started two years ago, as a side project. The first question was “is this going to
be valuable for people?” and the answer was “yes.” When our customers had an HVAC
issue, they would call us assuming there was something wrong. We were trying to help
them troubleshoot and connect them to a Nest Pro, but we wanted to do it more
proactively. That led us to the second question, “can we do this?” and the answer was
also, “yes, we can do this.” Moving forward, we should be able to provide even more
context, so it will help people, and pros, even more. We already saw improvements since
we launched the beta earlier this year, so we’re really encouraged to provide more
proactive help to customers.
What made this possible?
Ramya: Cloud computing advancements, definitely. We used to run a lot of algorithms on
the device, that’s what got Nest started. Now, with cloud computing, we can aggregate
data anonymously from Nest thermostats to inform what sort of actions we take and
what we can suggest to owners. This helps inform features like Savings Finder and HVAC
monitoring.
Originally, each thermostat operated on its own, but now we have the power to make
intelligent decisions based on anonymized data, which might not have been possible if
we were just looking at each individual device.
How does a smart thermostat find possible HVAC issues?
Marco: We monitor the estimated ambient and target temperature and predict time to
temperature. We have predicted the expected behavior and then look for anomalies
which may be potential performance issues with the HVAC system.

© Temperature decline while the heat was on
March 6