Google Nest Thermostat Review
If you find a smart thermostat’s attempts at 'learning' your routine overbearing, then this convenient option may be just smart enough
By Daniel Wroclawski
The budget-friendly Energy Star-certified Google Nest Thermostat is polished and pretty, but it isn’t a true smart thermostat, at least not like its older sibling, the Google Nest Learning Thermostat, which attempts to learn your preferences and routine and creates a heating and cooling schedule for you. The newer Google Nest is essentially a WiFi-enabled programmable thermostat, requiring you to program it when you initially set it up.
This can actually be appealing for some people—not everyone wants their thermostat to adjust temperature settings for them, and there is plenty of convenience to be had in a thermostat that you can control from anywhere with just a few taps on your smartphone. Plus, the Google Nest Thermostat can still do some basic automating, using your phone’s location and the thermostat’s motion sensor to figure out when you leave and return home. Best of all, at $130, the Google Nest Thermostat is one of the more affordable smart thermostats on the market.
Google Nest Thermostat G4CVZ
Notable Features
App-based programming. Easily program everything on your smartphone in the Google Home app. (That’s a big upgrade from the confusing, tedious button combinations required by conventional programmable thermostats.)
Presence sensing. The Google Nest Thermostat uses its built-in motion sensor and touch controls, as well as your smartphone’s location data, to determine when you leave and return home—so it’s OK if your plans for the day deviate from your programmed schedule.
Voice control. In addition to app-based controls, the thermostat also works with Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant for voice control, allowing you to adjust the temperature with a simple voice command.
Matter ready. The Google Nest Thermostat is one of the first smart thermostats that will support the new Matter smart home interoperability standard, launching this fall. Once it’s updated to support Matter, the thermostat will work with any Matter-compliant smart home system, including Apple HomeKit and Siri.
How Well Does the Google Nest Thermostat Work?
We ran the Google Nest Thermostat through CR’s lab tests and used it in real-world situations at home. Here’s what we found:
The Google Nest Thermostat is very easy to manually operate and control, but it doesn’t offer a ton of smart features compared with other smart thermostats and it lacks the ability to “learn” your behaviors and routines. That explains its low ranking in CR’s tests: It performs poorly in our automation test, which looks at how well the thermostat makes changes on its own.
But at home, we didn’t mind that so much. We installed it fairly easily in a renovated 1950s house with a forced-air HVAC system. The Google Home app’s step-by-step guidance made it easy, and the thermostat even worked without a C-wire, or common wire, a typical requirement for other smart thermostats to provide a continuous supply of power.
Programming was easy, too, though the app lacked a way to copy a day’s schedule from one day to another. But once the cumbersome task of recreating the schedule for each day of the week is done, the thermostat is quite easy to adjust and tweak from the Google Home app.
The thermostat’s presence-sensing feature also worked as advertised, but it took up to an hour for the thermostat to realize we were no longer home, which seemed a bit too long. We also happened to evaluate the thermostat in a home with Google Nest Protect smoke/CO detectors and discovered that the thermostat uses not only its own motion sensor, but also the motion sensors in other Nest products to more accurately determine whether someone was home.
Who Is the Google Nest Thermostat For?
The Google Nest Thermostat is a great option if you want the convenience of a WiFi-enabled thermostat without a high price tag. It’s also better suited to those who want “light” automation features, such as sensing when you leave and return home, as opposed to trying to learn and anticipate your behavior (some feel “learning” thermostats tend to get it wrong, requiring more manual adjusting on the part of the user).
How Consumer Reports Tests Smart Thermostats
Each smart thermostat that enters Consumer Reports’ labs undergoes stringent tests to determine how easy it to use and how well it automates your heating and cooling. Our engineers factor in smart features like alerts, app control, and geofencing (where the thermostat tracks your phone’s location to know whether you’re home). We also account for machine learning and automation features, which allow smart thermostats to adjust temperatures as they learn your habits and routines; as well as voice control with Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit/Siri, and Google Home/Assistant, if those integrations are available. These criteria factor into our unique Smart IQ and automation scores for smart thermostats. Finally, we favor models that are easy to set up wirelessly and simple to operate manually. All these test results are then folded into our comprehensive smart thermostat ratings.
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