Smart thermostats the new lawsuit battleground as Honeywell hits Nest with infringement suit

Anyone who didn’t see this coming is probably still living in their nest because you don’t get into Honeywell’s territory like Nest Labs has with their connected thermostat system without knowing that Honeywell will fight back tooth and nail.

So when Nest Labs, one of the newest Silicon Valley darlings, showed off their next generation (and very Apple inspired) home heating thermostat system the count down to Honeywell reacting was started.

Honeywell, one of the largest companies in the world when it comes to home and industrial heating, cooling, and other “total connected home systems”, which is an ever increasing part of their business. However when they did consumer testing with their connected thermostats they pulled back on deploy due to weak consumer response.

When it comes to the lawsuit Honeywell is hitting Nest with the following infringements:

• HVAC Controller
• Natural Language Installer Set Up for Controller
• Thermostat with Mechanical User Interface
• Controller Interface with Dynamic Schedule Display
• Thermostat with Offset Drive
• Power Stealing Control Devices
• Profile Based Method for Deriving a Temperature Setpoint Using a ‘Delta’ Based On Cross-Indexing a Received Price-Point Level Signal

Beth Wozniak, President of Honeywell Environmental and Combustion Controls, had this to say about the lawsuit

“Competition is good and we welcome it, but we will not stand by while competitors, large or small, offer products that infringe on our intellectual property.”

via GigaOM

I’m not the least surprised that the lawsuit has been initiated, just surprised it took so long.