One big feature of the Nest Thermostat is the ability to automatically adjust the temperature for you by learning your patterns over time. But if you’d rather have total manual control over the Nest, here’s how to add some quick and easy temperature presets to your phone’s home screen.
How to Install and Set Up the Nest Thermostat
How to Use Your Nest Thermostat as a Motion Detector
This is particularly useful if you’re always changing the thermostat to the same temperatures. Instead of opening the Nest app and managing it from there, you can change it one tap from a few custom shortcuts you create.
Since the Nest app doesn’t have this feature, we’re using an app called DO Button to do this, which was created by the same folks behind If This Then That. The DO Button is similar to what you’ll find with IFTTT, but instead of applying rules that work automatically in the background, the DO Button streamlines recipes into a single button press that can be mounted on the front page of the app, in your Notification Center on your iPhone, or right on the home screen on your Android device.
Let’s get started making the DO Button recipe for your Nest. If you haven’t used the DO Button app before, check out our guide to getting started for info on how to sign up for an account, connect apps, and create buttons. Then, come back here to create your custom Nest DO Buttons.
Start by opening up the DO Button app on your phone and tap on “Add a Recipe” in the bottom-right corner.
Tap on the “+” button.
Tap on the “Channels” tab on the right.
Scroll down and locate the “Nest Thermostat” channel.
Before you can continue, you may need to activate the Nest Thermostat channel, if it isn’t already, which allows the DO Button app to communicate with your Nest. This process is nothing more than allowing the DO Button app to access your Nest Thermostat with a single confirmation.
After that, you’ll be able to continue, so tap on “Create a New Recipe”.
Select “Set temperature”.
Give the recipe a title, which can be as simple as naming it “68” or whatever temperature the recipe will set your Nest Thermostat to.
Under “Which device?”, select your Nest Thermostat and then tap “Done”.
Under “Temperature”, enter in the temperature that you want to set your Nest Thermostat to, and then tap “Done”.
Under “Degrees in”, select either “Fahrenheit” or “Celsius”.
Tap on “Add” at the bottom to create your new DO Button. The button will now appear on the home page of the DO Button app, where you can tap on it to set your Nest Thermostat to that temperature.
After you create a DO Button for your Nest Thermostat, you can create more of them and set them to different temperatures. For instance, you can have a button for a slightly nicer temperature whenever you have guests over, and then another button for changing back your thermostat to your normal money-saving, sweater-wearing temperature. You can even have a button for turning down your thermostat a few degrees at night.
From there, you can add these buttons to your phone’s home screen on Android (or the Notification Center on your iPhone or iPad) for quicker access, just like you would any other DO button. To do this, hold down on the home screen of your Android device and select “Widgets”. From there, find the DO Button widget and drag it onto your home screen.
On the iPhone and iPad, you’ll tap on “Edit” at the bottom of the Notification Center and add the DO Button widget. From there, your DO Buttons will appear in the “Today” section of the Notification Center.
Check out our DO setup guide under the section “The Real Magic: DO Button Widgets” for more details.
The one problem with the iOS widget is that name of the DO Button will only appear for about a second at the beginning when you first open the Notification Center, so you’ll want to make sure which button is which and remember them for the future.