My thoughts were the same-- it doesn't read those thermostats constantly, so it might not have triggered from there because of this. I never did really give it "tons" of time to check for motion but i still question if that works. For example right now I reached out to Elgato about their Eve Door/Window sensor. It is Bluetooth, and won't trigger any lights. Even though you can select such within the Home app, it won't work that way. Why? Eve devices aren't set to "push" right now-- but with their next firmware update, they can become push/trigger devices. So that is nice, but right now, isn't the case. Perhaps that, coupled with the "slow/infrequent updates" are the cause of the issue with the Ecobee3.
Your idea of lights being off/etc would be smart. Though at that point, why not just use your geofence? You could set your lights to go off and your thermostat to go away at same time. OR do you have same issues as me, spouse at home? I've just come to decide that with the two of us we can't use certain features with geofencing. I just use "arrive home" and that way it turns on lights even if she is home. And then I have all Lutron Caseta switches, so when I leave the house it "warns" me (Apple Watch and/or iPhone) that stuff was left on, giving me a quick button to turn it all off-- and usually i know if that is okay, or if she is home still, so it works nicely for us.
PS: My cats (x2) kept setting off the auto-home feature during the day. I setup a link between Ecobee3 and IFTTT so that it would notify me when the schedule gets overwritten (this is good but polling there is again not instant, could be 10+ minutes before you know)-- still it gave me visibility to see what was happening. And from there I was able to use my Nest Cam to see-- sure enough cats were tripping the sensor. I emailed Ecobee about that, too-- the problem is ALL sensors (motion) work for auto-home/away features, and the cats only ever tripped just one-- but no way to exclude it sadly. Even if excluded from "away" mode, the motion sensors are ALL always part of "auto home" sensing, boo-hiss!!!
Exactomondo, my girlfriend works from home, so I want to make sure the lights don't turn off when I leave. Your idea with the lutron switches is an interesting idea. All I would need is one to achieve this connected to a light we use frequently. Curious, the button you push, does it set a scene in general or just turn off those switches?
I did a little digging. I've concluded you can't choose which sensor to use for your set temp. I created three test scenes, each using the home, away and sleep modes. Home I have set only to the ecobee sensor, away the ecobee sensor and sleep the remote sensor. I then looked at each of the scenes in the Home app and at all the variables and what did I notice? They all were the same. So I think this means the Home app is not giving us access to sensor information, that is to use a specific sensor to heat/cool a home by.
This is crummy cause I'd like to be able to duplicate my exact schedule in the Home app since the home app, regardless of someone or something changes the scene or temp at the ecobee will still run its schedule, since it's not subject to the rules set forth in the ecobee app, not permanently holding. I could easily mimick what my comfort settings are in the Home app (Create a scene, choose a temp and then create a trigger for a specific time) except I wouldn't be able to choose which sensor to base the temp off of.
I have a feeling though we'll get much faster results by contacting the Home app developers since they may be able to simply change their app to show more HomeKit database info, or maybe they're already working on it.
I wonder if there is a way to use the motion sensors with IF to put the ecobee into away mode automatically. I've noticed it takes the ecobee a long time to put itself into away mode (I'm really curious what their variables are for auto away) but maybe we could get the ecobee to tell IF that if both motion sensors are unoccupied and kick in the away mode. The problem with this is the sensors are in only two spots, for me if someone is watching tv in the living room, the ecobee is in the dining room doesn't detect motion in there. So more sensors are needed. But the ecobee sensors aren't cheap and you'd rather have a lot of them to get much more accurate results, one in the kitchen, offices, etc (and either it's the sensors that are slow or the ecobee itself in updating the occupancy status, hence a true motion sensor would be more ideal). I'm gonna see what is out there in this regard. The motion sensor might not even need to be HomeKit, since it would simply connect to IF when it detects no motion then IF would send ecobee the command to go autoaway.
Another approach could be I utilize cameras for motion sensors (in addition to having them for security). I actually have a Mac mini setup in my living room for all sorts of purposes (FaceTime, entertainment, it's also my desktop if I need to work in the living room and when I need a more desk type setup, I ran Ethernet to another room and have a thunderbolt adapter to hdmi which plugs into a hdmi to Ethernet adapter which mirrors my Mac into a second display, so I can use my Mac at a desk and in my living room, htpc and desktop for the price of one).
But I had a camera laying around so I figured I'd play with that for security purposes and I've only played with two software so far but one, sighthound has IF integration. The problem I have with that software is I can't have it tell IF if there is no motion for 30 min, set ecobee to auto away, since it only will send an event to IF when something happens. But IP cameras aren't super expensive and serve more purpose than simply detecting motion, so a little premium price might be justifiable (and I simply would run Ethernet to the areas I want to use them).
Lots of options to say the least.
