Ecobee3 Smart Thermostat Update Adds HomeKit Support for Remote Sensors

[liberte1776]

Yeah, Ecobee (alone) can't equal out the temperatures in a house. But at least it gives you some ability to control the temperature of occupied rooms without having to constantly run back and forth to the thermostat.

There are two startup companies making "smart" air registers. IIRC, one company has said they will work with Ecobee. That would actually help control which rooms get the air when the HVAC runs, which could help equal out the temperatures. But it'll be first-gen, so who knows.

Which brand is the one that works w/Ecobee?!

 

[aristobrat]

Which brand is the one that works w/Ecobee?!

Keen was the brand that said they were going to be working with Ecobee, but I haven't followed up with how that's going.

 

[groovyd]

I've had mine for 1 year now and while it has had a few bugs in general it is the best example of a homekit device I have and I have lots of other smart home devices. I have had to change 1 of 6 sensor batteries in that time and it happens to be the one furthest from the base. Imagine the further the sensor is the more power it needs to talk to the base. I have doubled up on room sensors so it provides a bit of redundancy in case one of the sensors fails.

Will be nice to have better homekit siri integration.

 

[tvguru]

I have two triggers for my thermostat (my ecobee3) Do you have that too?

Not sure why I have two triggers for my thermostat.

I have two on the thermostat as well. One is the thermostats sensor and the other is home occupancy sensor. I.e it will trigger when any of the sensors trigger.

I may use that one to lock my house if it's not triggered. That way if the Ecobee thinks the house is unoccupied then the door will lock.

Hard to tell which is which though.

 

[sirozha]

In my opinion, sensors were a weak link with ecobee. I installed my ecobee thermostats in December of 2015, and I started experiencing sensor disconnects immediately. Since then, I've had four out of six sensors replaced by ecobee. One of the sensors they replaced had to be replaced twice. However, since last summer, all sensors have been working fine. I just had two sensors disconnect the other day, but the battery replacement fixed that issue.

Hopefully, ecobee finally fixed the poor sensor quality issue that they had, and the sensors that they are shipping now are not defective.

The ingenuity of the ecobee thermostat is in remote sensors with occupancy detection. I don't know of any other smart thermostat that has remote sensors. Without remote sensors, ecobee is just another smart thermostat - nothing special.

Most of HomeKit issues (besides disconnecting from HomeKit) are the issues with HomeKit rather than with ecobee. The advanced features that ecobee has are not supported in HomeKit. In my opinion, HomeKit is a half-baked solution that is more of a toy than a smart home control center. The Apple Home app is a joke compared to the third-party Home app. Unfortunately, Apple still hasn't opened the smart kit geofencing API to third parties. Seems like HomeKit will follow the fate of the iTunes app and iCloud photos. Great idea but poorly implemented and never fixed.

 

[chukronos]

We have two ecobee's. They both work great. we only use 3 additional sensors. But, the additional sensor was the reason we bought ecobee over nest. Our son's room is way off from the sensor on the thermostat in the hall. Having the additional sensors has made the house much more comfortable. And, when he goes to sleep, it is so easy to switch the temp control to his room. That way, the HVAC unit on his side of the house will heat/cool to his room's temp, instead.

I never knew you could use the additional sensors for motion detection. I need to figure out how to get one of those to turn on certain lights in certain rooms when activated.
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Keen was the brand that said they were going to be working with Ecobee, but I haven't followed up with how that's going.

Would love to get these. I wonder if they will work well.

 

[satchmo]

Help me understand. I've never grasped the concept of how the sensors actually save you money.

I'm guessing most people have one furnace and multiple ducts. If one room requires additional heat (because the sensor in that room is set differently), doesn't the furnace come on heating the whole home? It's not as if each room is separately heated/cooled.

 

[vipergts2207]

Help me understand. I've never grasped the concept of how the sensors actually save you money.

I'm guessing most people have one furnace and multiple ducts. If one room requires additional heat (because the sensor in that room is set differently), doesn't the furnace come on heating the whole home? It's not as if each room is separately heated/cooled.

The sensors are mostly for comfort. The savings come from the thermostat being automatically being set back when you leave. There are different ways for that to happen though, one of them being using the sensors to detect occupancy.

 

[az431]

Yeah, Ecobee (alone) can't equal out the temperatures in a house. But at least it gives you some ability to control the temperature of occupied rooms without having to constantly run back and forth to the thermostat.

There are two startup companies making "smart" air registers. IIRC, one company has said they will work with Ecobee. That would actually help control which rooms get the air when the HVAC runs, which could help equal out the temperatures. But it'll be first-gen, so who knows.

The upstairs unit should start pulling its load during the summer when it bears the main brunt of A/C (and the downstairs gets somewhat of a break). 🙂

Smart air registers are a very bad idea. HVAC systems are designed to operate at a static pressure within the ductwork, and closing off registers increases the static pressure, which puts an additional load on the fan (more energy use) and could damage equipment.

http://www.achrnews.com/articles/129702-are-smart-vents-really-that-smart
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Help me understand. I've never grasped the concept of how the sensors actually save you money.

I'm guessing most people have one furnace and multiple ducts. If one room requires additional heat (because the sensor in that room is set differently), doesn't the furnace come on heating the whole home? It's not as if each room is separately heated/cooled.

The theory is the sensor knows which room you are in, and if there is tendency for the home to cool or heat unevenly, ecobee targets the one room you are in.

You could be in a room that cools easily to 74, while the thermostat is in a room that tends to stay warmer. Ecobee would ignore the room with the thermostat, theoretically saving money.

In the real world this doesn't work very well, especially in multilevel homes. If the upstairs tends to stay hot, but you make between upstairs rooms, it won't make a difference. When you go downstairs it takes 2 hours for the sensors to adapt to the new occupancy.

 

[aristobrat]

Smart air registers are a very bad idea. HVAC systems are designed to operate at a static pressure within the ductwork, and closing off registers increases the static pressure, which puts an additional load on the fan (more energy use) and could damage equipment.

IMO, the decades of people having manually adjusted their vents each season (and permanently closing off vents in unused rooms) .. with no idea about the static pressure .. seems like the bad idea.

At least Keen's smart vents sense the static pressure and will react (i.e. open) if it gets too high. I don't know what pressure they determine is "too high", but at least it's something, which the folks adjusting their vents manually don't have.

 

[hokiepokie07]

Would the sensors work like the Hue sensors? Meaning, if they detected motion then my Hue lights would cut on? I haven't figured out how to do it if so.

 

[patsfan83]

I've had a good experience with ecobee after a not so great one with Nest. Nest started out great but they kept pushing out updates and eventually they tweaked something which caused my boiler to run longer than normal per cycle which would cause my radiators to get too hot- and blow past the setpoint. The forced updates killed it for me.

With a 1 zone steam radiant system I'm a little limited with all of the features of ecobee. I have 3 remote sensors and I've tried using home/sleep settings but my system has trouble coming back from a 1+ degree setback (steam in general has this). I just keep it set at 71 and it averages 2 bedroom sensors and 2 first floor sensors to definitely keeps it more consistent (.5 degree swing). I doubt it saves me much money but the comfort is worth it.

I don't use the occupancy settings but looking at the sensors it doesn't sense my child in his crib so there's that...

Remote app works great, and the spreadsheet data reports are more than you'll ever need. It's hard to compare year of year data without normalizing for weather so take reports of monthly savings with a huge grain of salt...all I know is that energy rates in New England go up 20%+ every year.

 

[MrX8503]

Love my Ecobee, but there's a major bug and I can't tell if it's HomeKit or EcoBee. When your EcoBee loses connection with HomeKit you have to unpair it, but when you unpair it, it wipes out your entire HomeKit.

 

[hokiepokie07]

Has anyone else noticed Ecobee constantly saying their is occupancy? For instance, if I'm upstairs for a period of time, my downstairs still says their is occupancy and requires me to hit "resume schedule" so it's not cutting on and wasting heat and electricity.

 

[gsmornot]

Has anyone else noticed Ecobee constantly saying their is occupancy? For instance, if I'm upstairs for a period of time, my downstairs still says their is occupancy and requires me to hit "resume schedule" so it's not cutting on and wasting heat and electricity.

What do you have downstairs? Main stat or a remote sensor?

 

[BradWould]

I have two triggers for my thermostat (my ecobee3) Do you have that too?

Not sure why I have two triggers for my thermostat.

I have 2 triggers for my thermostat as well. After checking the "details" in the Home app i found out that one is an occupancy trigger and one is a motion trigger. This is for the thermostat itself. There is also a temperature trigger and a motion trigger for each remote sensor.
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Would the sensors work like the Hue sensors? Meaning, if they detected motion then my Hue lights would cut on? I haven't figured out how to do it if so.

I'm not 100% sure, but now that the remote sensors are recognized in homekit as separate entities it should be possible to set them up as a trigger. Definitely something I will be playing around with.

Edit: after a quick look it seems I am correct. All external sensors as well as the thermostat itself now show up under the automation tab in the Home app. They can be selected as a trigger.