For my birthday this year, Megan surprised me with a new Google Nest Thermostat! We’ve considered getting a smart thermostat since we moved in, but had always decided it was better to spend the money on something else. Fortunately for me, Megan found the stainless steel Google Nest Learning Thermostat Gen 3 on a half-off sale (with a FREE Google Home Mini), so she pounced on it! First thing on Saturday, I got rolling on the install!
Now, I’ll preface this writeup by saying that I’d already installed our existing thermostat – the old thermostat that came with the house started acting up within about six months of our moving in, so we swapped it out for an inexpensive Honeywell model. I went into this little mini project with high confidence, though I’ll admit that the fanciness of the Nest was a bit intimidating.
Fortunately, Nest makes it super easy to DIY. After downloading the Nest app, you can select a device to add, and the app walks you through the install step by step! After starting up the app, I took a minute to unbox everything.
The thermostat itself is surprisingly weighty, in a good way. And can I just say here that smart home devices have THE NICEST PACKAGING. So many layers to this box, everything fit together perfectly, and it even came with its own little dual-bit screwdriver! With everything laid out, time to pull the old thermostat.
The Honeywell faceplate popped right off of the mounting plate to reveal the wires underneath (along with some messed up paint, extra screwholes… I digress). The Nest Thermostat came with a set of stickers to label the wires, to make sure that they install in the right spots in the new mounting plate. After turning off the power, I popped the wires out of the existing mounting plate and labeled them one-by-one with the sticker labels.
With everything labeled, I bunched the wires together and unscrewed the Honeywell mounting plate from the wall.
Next up was replacing the previous mounting plate with the new Nest mounting plate. Now, the Nest, being a small circle, wouldn’t cover the missing paint and messed up section of wall around the thermostat wires. Fortunately, Nest had me covered! While you CAN mount the Nest directly to the wall for a very clean look, it also comes with a wider cover plate, probably for just this situation. It snaps right onto the back of the wire mounting plate, and the whole assembly screws right into the wall.
I did have to add an additional drywall anchor here as the previous plate had three mounts in a triangular pattern, while this had only two. Easy enough, though, and the Nest’s mounting plate has a built-in level that made aligning the whole thing a matter of minutes.
With the plate on the wall, I matched the stickers on the wires to their appropriate tab and plugged everything in.
And that was it! The Nest snapped right into the wire mounting plate and with the power back on, the only setup left was plugging in WiFi credentials and setting some preferences!
In total, the install took less than an hour and the step-by-step instructions in the app took all of the guesswork out of the equation!
The Google Nest Learning Thermostat really does learn how your house warms up and cools down and will adjust itself accordingly. The thermostat also responds to voice controls through Google Assistant. Its eco settings save energy and, in turn, save you money. As we get into some insulation projects around the house, we’re interested to see how our energy efficiency trends upward (fingers crossed!).
*By the way, this post is not sponsored. We just think it’s a great product!*