As a new home owner, I’ve found the perfect use for the Pixel 10 Pro’s thermometer

About a year ago, my husband and I moved into our new home in the Parisian suburbs, a 2019 build with many large French doors across every room and floor. Those big windows-slash-doors bring a level of luminosity we’d never experienced in our previous rental, especially during the gloomy winter months, but we soon discovered that they also had a potential disadvantage: insulation.

Even though all of these are double-glazed and seem well-insulated, they’re still glass, which will always be less efficient than a properly insulated wall. These French doors seemed like the weakest link in our new home’s thermal isolation and the biggest culprit in our high energy bills last January and February. But I couldn’t really prove it. As winter time rolls around again, I’ve been wanting to get to the bottom of this. So I started making complicated plans with infrared thermometers, thermal cameras, and/or Zigbee sensors, until I came across a Reddit thread where people were explaining how they were using the Pixel Pro’s built-in temperature sensor to check their home’s insulation, and it was my aha moment. Of course, I have a thermometer with me at all times, so why not use it?

The first thing I did after reading those comments was pick up my Pixel 10 Pro XL, open the neglected Thermometer app, and choose Walls and windows. Then, I rolled my desk chair over to my office’s window and checked out the temperature readings:

• 19.8°C (67.6°F) directly on the glass (image at the top of the article)
• 21.1°C (70°F) on the beige fabric roller blind covering the window
• 19.2°C (66.5°F) in the central part between the two aluminum stiles, where the two French doors split and open.

This was already more useful than I ever expected it to be. I moved my Pixel 10 Pro XL across several spots on the glass, aluminum, and roller blind, and the readings were consistent enough that I started trusting them a bit. My colleague Dhruv had tested the thermometer on the Pixel 8 Pro when it first launched and found it to be too inaccurate and capricious compared to a proper infrared thermometer. But maybe things have improved since then, especially since Google had to make the sensor more reliable to get it FDA-approved for body temperature readings?

Anyway, this sent me on a mission throughout my home to see if I could spot a trend. And sure enough, although there were minor differences between floors, the pattern was the same. The roller blinds were basically the same temperature as my indoor thermostats, the glass was around 1-1.5°C colder, and the aluminum stiles, especially in the juncture area, were the coldest, but not by much.

Look, like any human being, I can touch all those surfaces and say which one is warmer or colder. But I’m not a precise thermometer. Of course, I suspected that the curtain was warmer than the glass, which is warmer than the metal, but seeing is believing, as they say.

What the Pixel’s thermometer allowed me to do is put an actual number on the differences and see if they’re normal or not. After reading a bit about it, I realized that a 0.5-1°C difference between the double-pane glass and the aluminum stile is perfectly normal. Also, after walking my Pixel around all the French doors and not noticing any difference higher than 2°C between all readings, I can say with more certainty that there doesn’t seem to be any air draft coming in from the outside. Whew. Plus, my glass’s insulation performance seems adequate for a double-glaze setup, though the jury is still out on what happens when the outdoor temperature drops to near freezing. It’ll be intriguing to check the differences then.

I know it’s obvious, but as much as I love the luminosity of my big French doors, I’m now sure that dropping the roller blinds provides an extra layer of insulation. I don’t know if this will make me keep the blinds down all winter, but maybe during the coldest weeks, I’ll make that concession. And I’ll accept the potentially higher gas bill that comes from keeping them open or semi-open the rest of the time.

The Pixel is letting me easily test different scenarios

Since last winter, I’ve had one question gnawing at me: Should I roll down the external aluminum roller shutters as well as the internal fabric roller blinds when it’s cold out, or should I keep the shutters up to let some sun in? To answer this, I had planned on getting some Zigbee temperature sensors, sticking them on a few windows, and checking their graphs in Home Assistant across different scenarios. It would’ve been a complicated endeavor, but it would’ve finally answered my question.

After seeing how helpful the Pixel 10 Pro’s thermometer was, though, I decided to use it to see if I could get a preliminary answer. I have two separate pairs of French doors (two doors – small wall – two doors) in my living room that share the same indoor temperature, same sun exposure, same curtain fabric — same everything, basically. They’re the perfect test subjects for the roller shutter experiment. Over a few days, I kept the shutters down on one of the French doors and open on the other. And every hour or so, I took my Pixel 10 Pro XL and measured the temperature differences.

I noticed that during the day, the state of the roller shutter didn’t make much of a difference. The temperatures were basically the same across both French doors. But when the sun went down and the outdoor temperature dropped, there was indeed a noticeable difference, especially in the stile and curtain temperature. Having the roller shutters down seems to add a layer of insulation that keeps everything a little warmer and causes less loss of heat during the colder hours.

Given how slow our floor heating is at adapting to temperature changes and how expensive gas is in France, keeping things more controlled with the roller shades down when the outdoor temperature drops seems like the smart, economical idea. But I plan to test this out more with colder temperatures to see if there’s a bigger difference then, or maybe no difference at all.

Between glass and stile, fabric roller blinds and aluminum roller shutters, there are too many variables in my home that can influence the efficiency of my heating. Add the fact that there are two different flooring materials, three levels each with a different sun exposure, and smart thermostats that adapt each floor to our work-life-sleep schedules, and this becomes a very complex, potentially multi-year experiment to find the right balance between the personal comfort of luminosity and warmth versus energy consumption.

I’m just happy to have a quick tool in my pocket at all times to test my wildest theories and scenarios, and see what helps or what doesn’t help. Plus, at least now I know that there doesn’t seem to be any big insulation problems in the house, which is already a win. It’s funny how I always forgot the thermometer even existed on my Pixel 8 Pro and 9 Pro, thinking it was a gimmicky addition, and here I am, finding it an extremely convenient tool just because I found a real-world use case for it.

If you have a Pixel 10 Pro or an older Pixel 9 Pro or 8 Pro, and you have questions around your home’s insulation, be it from the freezing winters or the scorching summers, I recommend you start by using the thermometer app. You might find more answers than you expected.