Nest Learning Thermostat (4th-gen) review: worth the wait

There are only a handful of smart home gadgets I unequivocally recommend to everyone, and a smart thermostat is one of them. They’re incredibly useful, combining the three C’s of the smart home: convenience, comfort, and cost savings.

The Nest Learning Thermostat, which debuted in 2011, was one of the original smart thermostats. But it hasn’t seen an update in almost a decade. Today, there are dozens of cheaper connected thermostats, including Amazon’s excellent budget thermostat and Google’s own stripped-down Nest Thermostat. So, why should you consider spending $280 on the new fourth-generation Nest Learning Thermostat?

For two reasons. First, it’s the smartest smart thermostat. The learning Nest is the only thermostat with an algorithm that automatically adjusts your heating and cooling schedule based on how you use it, and the fourth-gen is smarter than ever. Second, it looks gorgeous. If your thermostat is in a prominent spot like mine, looks matter, and no other thermostat looks this good.

I loved the third-gen Nest, with its sleek style and tactile dial, and the fourth-gen Nest takes that iconic design to the next level. Adding a larger screen, thinner body, and more integrated dial, the fourth-gen Nest also has a smaller base, making it look like it’s floating on the wall. The all-gold color I tested is stunning, and the crystal LCD screen reflects light beautifully. As my colleague Victoria Song put it, “The Nest is so pretty, it makes the rest of my house look drab in comparison.”

The bigger screen makes it easier to control and navigate settings, and the Farsight dynamic display has new options that take advantage of the space. Farsight uses the device’s Soli radar sensor to switch the Nest’s display based on how close you are to the thermostat.

From a distance, it shows a simplified view with just the time, weather, or temperature settings; up close, it transitions to show more detailed information, including a new row of three customizable “complications.” These can display various data, such as temperature, humidity, time, date, and even an outdoor air quality index score. (There’s no indoor air quality monitoring, which is something Ecobee, Nest’s main competitor at this price point, does offer.)

I chose to use the weather face on my upstairs unit, which shows animations of the weather over the current outdoor temperature and the day’s forecast. I added complications for the feels-like temp, date, and time, which have been helpful when I’m dashing between my kids’ bedrooms in the morning. For the downstairs unit, I went with the modern analog clock that looks super stylish on my entryway wall and is useful to glance at from the living room. 

I am also thrilled to finally be able to control the Nest natively in Apple Home — my family’s preferred method of smart home control. The fourth-gen Nest is the first Learning model from Google with Matter support. This means it can work with any smart home platform that supports Matter. (There’s a Nest thermostat with Matter support, but no learning algorithm.)

However, you can’t set it up with Matter initially, as there is no Matter code on the thermostat itself; only once it’s set up using the Google Home app can you generate a code and share the thermostat with another Matter platform. (Note: this model doesn’t work with the Nest app at all.)

I connected the thermostat to Apple Home and Amazon Alexa via Matter, and the process was surprisingly smooth. Response times have been instantaneous on all platforms, whether using voice or app control; with Matter, the commands are routed locally.

Sadly, Google has ditched Thread here. Thread is one of Matter’s main wireless protocols, but it was originally developed for the Nest Learning Thermostat. A version of Thread has been on every previous Learning model, so its exclusion here, on the first Learning thermostat with Matter support, is baffling.

The Nest Learning Thermostat (4th-gen) is Nest’s most powerful thermostat to date. It works with more systems than the third-gen, including up to three heating and two cooling stages. Plus, it’s compatible with humidifier, dehumidifier, and ventilation equipment. It also has more software features designed to reduce energy use while keeping you comfortable. At $280, it will take a while to offset the thermostat’s cost with energy savings, but you might be eligible for a decent rebate from your energy provider.

I’ve installed dozens of smart thermostats over the years, and the Nest is still one of the simplest to install, thanks to clear steps, good guidance from the app, and click-in connectors. (Pro tip: insert the wires before you screw the backplate to the wall.)

It’s also one of the only smart thermostats that doesn’t require a C wire, but I recommend installing one if you can — or using the Nest Power Connector. Without dedicated power, the Nest Learning Thermostat uses a power-sharing trick to trickle charge its internal battery, but that may not always work consistently. When my C wire went bad on my old system, the non-learning Nest Thermostat I was testing kept disconnecting from Wi-Fi and eventually stopped working when its AA batteries died.

This time around, however, I had a new HVAC system. My old single-stage system had given out after 12 years of sweating through South Carolina summers, and we’d decided to install a more energy-efficient Trane heat pump system with a multistage high-efficiency compressor and a TEM6 variable-stage air handler. 

Connecting the Nest required me to contact Google. According to their techs, the fourth-gen Nest is compatible with my system since it can run the air handler in two stages, allowing the unit to decide what percentage to use at each stage. However, my HVAC installer told me I had to use Trane’s own thermostats to get the compressor’s full efficiency.

This isn’t unique to Nest; variable-speed systems nearly always work best with the manufacturer’s thermostats. But this makes me sad because the Trane XL824 thermostats that came with my system look like mini Windows computers on my wall and not like lovely pieces of jewelry. They are also fiddly to program, and the app is indecipherable. 

Even without access to the full range of compressor settings, I was still able to test the Nest Learning Thermostat, including its signature function: Smart Schedules. This feature is why I’ve always liked and recommended Nest thermostats — it’s a much more hands-off experience than most smart thermostats. 

Smart Schedules uses three modes: eco, sleep, and comfort. During setup, you choose preset heating and cooling temperatures for each mode. The thermostat is programmed with a starter schedule that sets your home to comfort mode at 6:15AM and sleep mode at 10PM. From there, I just needed to adjust the temperature (in the app, with voice control, or on the device) for a week or so, and the thermostat automatically adapted the schedule to my preferences. 

I’ve been testing the Nest for two months now, and in that time, it has continuously tweaked the time and temperature of the schedule as my household’s habits and the seasons have changed, with little to no input from me. The house has consistently felt comfortable despite the wild temperature swings of the South Carolina fall and winter. 

On earlier models of the Nest Learning Thermostat, I’ve run into issues with smart scheduling, especially during seasonal changes. Thankfully, Google has largely addressed these with the fourth-gen model by making the device’s decision-making more transparent. It now sends notifications in the app when it adjusts your schedule and tells you what it’s doing on the thermostat. This lets you fix any erroneous changes before you feel them and is a welcome change from the sometimes inscrutable actions of the earlier versions. (You can tell it not to make adjustments without your approval if you are really concerned about losing control.)

Along with Smart Schedules, you can add the thermostat to Google Home’s home and away routines. These use presence sensing to know when no one is home and put the system into eco mode to help save energy. You can also tie other smart home actions into these routines, such as having your lights turn off when you leave and turn back on when you arrive home. 

The away mode was impressively accurate in my testing, switching on as soon as I got in the car in my driveway. This is more efficient than the two hours it can take the Ecobee to decide if the house is empty. Google uses several signals here, including the Soli radar sensor in the thermostat, motion sensors in any wired Nest Protect smoke alarms you have, interactions with any Nest speakers, plus your phone’s location, if you enable that setting in the Google Home app. While you’ll want to have family members download the Google Home app so it can include them, the other signals should help prevent anyone left at home without a registered phone from getting frozen out.

On the third-gen thermostat, away mode often let the temperature drop too much, struggling to return to a comfortable level when I got home. A new adaptive eco mode on the fourth-gen addresses this, taking into account the weather and staying close enough to the comfort temperature so that it can get back to it within an hour. Last week, it was in the high 20s here in South Carolina, and instead of dropping all the way down to 62 degrees Fahrenheit (my heating threshold in eco mode) when I left the house, it only went down to 66F and was back to a comfortable 68F within a few minutes of my return.

Another new feature on the fourth-gen is natural heating and cooling. This similarly leverages its knowledge of outside temps and will pause the system if Mother Nature can naturally heat or cool your home. I haven’t seen this happen yet, but in theory, if it’s a sunny, warm day, the thermostat can pause heating and use passive heat to finish heating your house. There’s also an option to get an alert telling you to open the windows to help with this. Google also added a smart ventilation feature that automatically activates your ventilation system to bring in fresh air if outdoor air quality is good and temperatures are compatible. I couldn’t test this because I don’t have a ventilation system.

The Nest’s remote temperature sensors have a new design to match the thermostat, and one now comes in the box (which helps offset the price bump from the third-gen). These let your thermostat target the temperature in the rooms you’re actually in, and not just where the thermostat is. With the fourth-gen thermostat, you can now select multiple sensors and aim for an average temperature across them, which is more efficient than targeting just one room. This is a feature competitors like Ecobee and Honeywell Home have had for years, so Nest is playing catch-up here, but it’s still a good improvement. 

I have a two-zone system, and I placed the sensor for the upstairs thermostat in my office and the one for the downstairs thermostat in the kitchen. I tied the daytime comfort schedule to the office sensor to keep me cozy when I’m working and the evening comfort schedule to the kitchen sensor so I stay comfortable when cooking. This is more intuitive than the third-gen model, which has you create separate fixed schedules for the sensors.

However, Nest still hasn’t added occupancy detection to the sensors (again, something Ecobee’s and Honeywell Home’s remote sensors offer). This would let the thermostat adjust to the room I am actually in rather than where the schedule says. For example, the comfort schedule that assumes I’m working in my office during the day will still run upstairs, even if I decide to work on my dining room table downstairs. I have to manually adjust the Nests if I move rooms, whereas the Ecobee could adjust automatically based on my presence. In lieu of presence detection in the sensors, it would be nice if the devices Google Home uses for home and away detection also worked for occupancy sensing for the Nest’s heating and cooling modes.

Also, the temperature sensors disappointingly use Bluetooth, not Thread, and therefore don’t work in Matter. This means they’re only accessible in the Google Home app, so you can’t use them to run temperature-based automations on other platforms. As mentioned earlier, Google ditched Thread from the thermostat with this version, and while the thermostat itself may not have seen a lot of benefit from Thread (other than helping form a stronger network in my smart home), the battery-powered room sensors would certainly see some benefit from the protocol. 

If you like the idea of your heating and cooling adjusting to you as you move around the house, then the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium will be a better fit. Its newest design will look very nice on your wall (although it’s more techy-looking than the Nest), and at $250 with a room sensor, it’s a little more affordable. Compatibility is comparable to the Nest, although the Nest offers three stages of heating, while the Ecobee Premium is optimized for up to two. 

I’ve used both Ecobee and Nest thermostats for many years, and the simplicity of the Nest makes it the better choice for me. Plus, it’s easier to integrate into my smart home now that the Nest works natively with Apple Home (something Ecobee has done for years). Overall, the Ecobee is more complicated to set up and use but has more features and capabilities. This includes being a smart speaker, a video doorbell intercom, a home security system, and monitoring your generator. However, most of these capabilities are proprietary, and Ecobee doesn’t support Matter (yet).

In contrast, the Nest has just one job and it does it well. It’s easy to set up and easy to use, and easier to understand, now that it tells you what it’s doing when its smarts kick in. It takes most of the work out of your hands and requires less tinkering than the Ecobee to keep you comfortable. I like and recommend both products, but if you want something simple, stylish, and really smart, go with the Nest.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge