Ecobee Thermostat

[cdepaola]

Received my Ecobee Smart Thermostat yesterday from on on-line supplier and immediately got to work on getting it installed. Now Ecobee generally believes that their thermostat should be installed by a professional HVAC contractor and they do not themselves sell direct to consumers, though there are several online sources for purchasing. I would generally agree that for most people this should be done by a professional.

The box contains two items, the thermostat and the equipment interface module. I mounted the equipment interface module on the wall with my other automation equipment, it can also be mounted to the cold air return, and after shutting off the power to the furnace made the appropriate connections. I wanted this t-stat in a new location so I had to run new wire from the equipment interface to the new location, if your not relocating you can utilize the original wires. After verifying and confirming properly hook up all wires I restored power to the furnace and viola the ecobee powered up, thankfully as it was possibly the worst day to decide to shut down the hvac seeing it was 110.

Installation took maybe 30 minutes and set-up was super easy thanks to the wizard, within 5 minutes the thermostat was on-line, fully functioning, and programmed.

This is a nice looking thermostat, not as sexy as the Nest but much nicer looking then a standard one. It has a ton of features, works with nearly every imaginable hvac system, is expandable to include more sensors, controls humidifiers and dehumidifiers, on and on... Take a look at their website for a full accounting of features.

Here is the best thing.... I found out today that they are indeed currently working on an API and if all goes as planned they will be releasing it this fall. I've got my fingers crossed and I'm glad I decided on Ecobee over nest or the Aprilaire units.

[dgbrown]

No reason to wait until fall. You could start on it now: https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2011/08/30/an_ecobee_automation_hack/

[cdepaola]

Holy cow! The SiriProxy is awesome, I may actually look into getting this working on my phone.

His idea of using his phone as a way for the system to know if he is home is also genius and considerably better then nests idea of a motion sensor.

Thanks for the link, going to work on trying to get these working.

[me23]

So if they release an API for this, you think someone will write a control4 driver for it?

[cdepaola]

I would think so

[LSDave]

I think that a simple driver that would let control4 know when a cell phone was on a network(that person being home) and storing it in a variable could make programming events way more customizable.

[seth_j]

No reason to wait until fall. You could start on it now: https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2011/08/30/an_ecobee_automation_hack/

Yeah.. because that worked out so well for the last guys who tried it. No thanks. Wait for a public API.

[dgbrown]

^ lol - was waiting for someone to pick up on that. Although I would think its pretty straight forward for the guys who wrote the nest driver to sub in the calls to the ecobee service.

[seth_j]

That is almost never the case. Otherwise every driver would already be written. Protocols are different. Responses are different. Each device behaves differently and has its own quirks.