A few months back, my AC died. Through a series of unfortunate events, I realized my once comfortable house had become a bonafide sauna. I noticed my PG&E bill had increased dramatically and my Nest report stated my hours of use was triple than it was in previous months, without much cause.
I realized today how valuable it would be if I had my own local server to cache the internal AC temperature, outside AC temperature, inside humidity, outside humidity, etc. I have local web servers I run to monitor nearly everything else technical in my house, but it never occurred to me to configure one for my thermostat. However, had I of had one in place, I could look back at the logs and pinpoint the date and time when the AC unit began to fail.
I immediately thought I couldn’t be the only one who found this functionality useful, and sure enough, I wasn’t! There are about 3 or 4 GitHub projects that create web-based statistic databases for the Nest Thermostat so I set out to configure each one.
My favorite one so far is Nest Bootstrap Control Panel because of the kind of data it captures by default. It also was the easiest to configure. Though, with that said, admittedly it was also the last one I configured and I kind of became a pro at creating the various databases for each web app to store the data. I have included my version of the instructions for this project here.
My second favorite is Nestgraph because of its simplicity, but it’s really barebones. I have included my version of the instructions for this project here. [To be updated]
My least favorite is Nest-Extended because of the lack of instructions included. I understand there is an expectation for the user to have a bit of knowledge on setting up Linux websites in Apache / PHP / and MySQL, but I felt like I should have been able to configure it with my intermediate knowledge base. I’m not including my version of the instructions for this project just yet because I honestly have yet to finish setting this up. I will update this section if / when I do.
If you’ve used one of these projects and want to comment, do so below! Alternatively, if you know of another project and would like to contribute to this post, post below!
