I'm glad I didn't pick up the 2 thermostats I wanted yet. Hopefully the 3 prices come down even more than the current sales out there.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Ecobee4 Thermostat to Come With Built-In Alexa Voice Assistant
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
agree the sensors need humidity sensing as well as the outside temp coming from a sensor placed outside that could be assigned as such. problems i have had with the sensors are that they start triggering activity when their battery starts getting low but not low enough to be flagged as a low battery and notified to replace. in fact i have had mine for a year and a half and have never received a low battery notification even though all 5 of my sensors has caused this false activity issue.
in general i like ecobee alot but agree they need to improve their app interface to follow normal apple-esk design patterns. it is quite clunky as is. finally the biggest feature i think they need to add is for it to be able to advance to the home and sleep settings when you announce 'good morning/good night' to siri.
This is where a view into Apple's strategy would be so fascinating. Does hardware level Alexa integration signal a potential acquisition by Amazon? Where does that leave Apple's user base? Google took Nest out of the equation, Ecobee is getting into bed with Amazon, there go the two 'best' thermostat options. Does Apple develop it's own? Does it look for the next Nest/Ecobee and acquire them? I think Apple's going in view was, "we'll develop a standard protocol that lets everything talk to everything else, but we won't get mired in the design and production of the actual devices", but that's not necessarily working out as well as they had planned.
I'm still not sold on the whole always-listening virtual assistant thing, but it really seems like Amazon is winning this battle. Even if Apple manages to come out with the best Siri update which makes it leaps and bounds better than Alexa, the fact that Amazon has shoved so many Echos and Dots and built-in Alexa into so many homes already will be tough to overcome.
I find Siri to be so much more limiting in functionality, so I hope they improve the technology so it would be more useful in that endeavor.
Maybe you know already but they include an adapter in the box that removes the need for a C wire to the thermostat. You connect the adapter inside your furnace and use the 4 wires to the stat you already have. Assuming you have a 4 wire system today. Batteries would be fine but really what good is the thermostat when the power is out?
Hey man, if it's not good enough, then it's not good enough. If we stick with the status quo then no progress will ever be made. If I see room for improvement, then I'll tell them. It just doesn't feel as finished as the Nest. It requires more fiddling to get things just right. I bought it over the Nest for my new house because Google, so I'm irritated that a new version that I may have purchased down the road is going to feature Alexa crap that I don't need. So if they make improvements for the crappy sensor reception then I won't be able to upgrade without buying into crap I don't want in my home. Hopefully they offer a cheaper version without the Alexa nonsense. I'd be surprised if Apple allows Homekit chips to be used alongside something that easily hackable.
Yea, I hear ya here. On the Nest, I don't want their thermostat but I have 9 of the Protect 2's here and bought them knowing they would never be HomeKit. I did that because I really believe they are the best on the market at the moment. I can't see a reason to have them on my HomeKit screen anyhow but when it comes to safety I will forego the HomeKit needs.
So salty! Content owners have enormous influence over Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc. to require them to actively enforce region locking to the best of their ability. Content owners have little to no influence over Alexa.
Yes that's true and Homekit requires product be functional without the need to access cloud services across a WAN. Even if you lose internet access Homekit devices still work
[doublepost=1492543046][/doublepost]
Honeywell Lyric T5. It supports Homekit, Alexa and Google Home. It's about $119. Why would someone spend more? It's a thermostat....it turns your heat up...or down.
Ecobee putting Alexa into their thermostat is basically a small company telling the world they have nothing with regard to new ideas within the space. A lot of people buy the Nest Thermostat primarily because it look and feels fantastic. The Ecobee thermostats are plasticky and color less and now they've upped the annoyance factor by adding Alexa.
Apple overcome the issue by locking your account to a geographic region, rather than base it on where you're connecting from.
[doublepost=1492545129][/doublepost]
I'm looking at the First Alert Onelink units for our new home. I think they might allow you to have one smart detector as part of a conventional hardwired system and give you notifications if the alarm sounds, without the expense of putting multiple $100 detectors through your home...
I do like the way the Protects expand the functionality of the thermostats by providing additional sensors.
[doublepost=1492545263][/doublepost]
The only downside is that HomeKit has hardware implications, which makes it very difficult to add HomeKit functionality. I'm waiting for Haiku to announce HomeKit support for their fans and light products...
I did look at those and I thought about it for a while before I passed. I have wired interconnect in my house and thought I should at all costs use it. In some states you have no option but to use it. In the end, I felt like there were too many negative reports overall compared to the Nest Protect 2's. Yea, there is the cost of $100 each but I took my pill and know that I'm covered for 10 years by a detector that is top rated. Some things I will save money on, some I will even do without but for an item that is meant to save the family I just can't cut the corners. First Alert is made by a reputable company and by all accounts should do just fine. Read the fine print if you already have some of their detectors around the house that you plan to keep using for a while, they do not necessarily work with some of the older models.
One thing I never liked about my old regular First Alerts, the battery died at 2AM without fail. I replaced them during time change some years but all of the batteries tested fine so it felt like a waste. With the protects I have a battery status in the app and it will send me a notification when they are getting low and it does it during the day, its made not to tell you in the middle of the night. The Protects use AA as well, easy to find and buy. Not that 9V is hard but what else do you use a 9V for?
The other thing that came to mind is notification when away from the house of fire. With First Alert, the only way you will be notified is if the main unit detects the smoke/fire. If one of the remotes detects it, the interconnect will sound all alarms but you will not get a notice. With Protects, you will be notified by the one that detects the smoke. Also, it will call out the location the smoke is detected. One catch is you have to use default names for rooms but the list is long enough to find a good match. The Protect will say"Livingroom" plus all the other things it says but you know where in the house the issue is.
That is all I can think of at the moment. Keep in mind I am not a Google products guy, not an Alexa guy nor a Nest Thermostat user and don't plan to be but one thing I am is a Nest Protect user and have no issues telling people. I just would not have them if I didn't think they were the best for my family. Also, and this is trivial, they light up at night as you walk though the house. I thought this would be a gimmick but I really do use this every night. Funny how things like that grow on you.
Thanks for the info. On the subject of code compliance I reached out to my town's building inspector on that subject and his read of the code, in NH at least, is the wireless interconnect would be acceptable.
The First Alert units actually have a 10 year sealed battery, so you never have to worry about dying batteries, and they also include the night light feature, although I'm not sure if that's motion activated or not?
The Protects do not have a 10 year battery. They use lithium batteries from Energizer.
What's to stop a Canadian user from creating a U.S. account?
I guess the real question is whether it's more challenging to select "United States" from a drop-down menu and use a PayPal account to lie about what geographic region you're in, or to find a U.S. VPN that isn't blacklisted by Netflix/Hulu/etc.
Agreed the Protects 2's are very good and have 5 of them. Expensive but worth it.
Luckily for you that isn't how Alexa works. It doesn't send every word to their servers. It listens for the wakeup command, and only subsequent commands are sent to their servers to be processed.
I can't fathom why anyone thinks it's a good idea to connect your thermostat to the Internet. Then, lets go ahead and add a spying device that in no way associated to the functions of a thermostat to the mix. What could possibly go wrong?
Just wait until the first Idiot of Things (IoT) thermostat hack physically destroys thousands of HVAC units in peoples houses in a few hours (if you say this is not possible then you are naive -- remember stuxnet). When (not if) something like that happens the blame can be evenly divided between the company that manufactured the IoT device with substandard security, and the thousands of people that were too stupid to consider that the physical systems of their houses have no place being connected in any way to the Internet.
Just wait until the first Idiot of Things (IoT) thermostat hack physically destroys thousands of HVAC units in peoples houses in a few hours (if you say this is not possible then you are naive -- remember stuxnet). When (not if) something like that happens the blame can be evenly divided between the company that manufactured the IoT device with substandard security, and the thousands of people that were too stupid to consider that the physical systems of their houses have no place being connected in any way to the Internet.