I took the plunge and replaced my old Honeywell thermostat with the Nest Programmable thermostat.

My main questions going into this were:

1. Do I need another nest device to work as a matter hub?
2. Does the thermostat support matter over thread or matter over wifi?

I can confirm that you do not need another Nest device to work as a matter hub. A lot tech site’s were saying you needed a nest hub or nest wifi but this is not the case.

As far as I can tell the device does not support matter over thread so you don’t need a thread border router. Thread would have been nice from a network traffic perspective butI can confirm things are working nicely over wifi. I am using a first gen HomePod as my HomeKit controller. Siri requests for the nest happen reliably and within seconds.

(I thought I heard something about nest and Google building thread routers into their products. Let me know if this is true or not. The spec sheets don’t mention anything about thread so I could be wrong 😑)

Installation was a breeze. I live in Florida. No furnaces or heat pumps to account for.

Connecting the device to my network and updating the nest software with the matter update was also quick. Had I not done my research on r/HomeKit I would not have known that I needed to generate a QR code on the thermostat to connect to HomeKit.

There is only one fly in the ointment. For some reason the thermostat is not sending humidity info to home kit. Other than that I am very happy with the nest.

If anyone has any questions let me know and I’ll try to answer them