Ok, searching was not helpful so I wanted to ask directly and get a clear answer…
With the current Ecobee Cloud situation, am I still good to purchase an Ecobee 3 Lite as long as I use HomeKit?
I saw a thread where maybe an API key was still needed…
I am in the process of waiting for Ecobee to authorize the return of Ecobee 3 Lite. The good news is that I was able to get it to connect via Home Assistant directly and to an Apple TV as a homekit device. The bad news is that it supports 2.4GHz Wifi only and is pretty picky about the signal. It was disconnecting from the WiFi 4-6 times per day.
My house is covered by 2 unifi access points. Unfortunately the neighbors are close and 2.4GHz is pretty noisy. There isn’t much I can do about that. The thermostat was about 12ft from the nearest access point. I have the AP’s set to automatically select the best channel and power level. I tried all three non-overlapping channels manually, manually setting the power level to high, and using a long ethernet cable to temporarily move the ap closer to the thermostat. All of these changes lowered the signal quality shown in the menu on the thermostat.
This morning I hooked up a smart thermostat enhanced. It connected immediately via 5 GHz (direct to Home Assistant) and has (so far) been connected without any issues. I added an automation to notify me if one of the sensors became ‘unavailable’. In addition to the dual band wifi the enhanced model has a motion detector and presence sensor both of which show up as sensors in home assistant. It is also upgraded in some other more subtle ways. The mounting bracket is nicer, the app guides you through the install rather than a paper book, etc. Unless you are sure about the quality of your wifi and really don’t want to spend the extra money I would recommend taking a look at the enhanced.
I have been running it for less than a day so time will tell but the lite model was a definite no-go in my environment.
If you don’t already have an API key, you’re unlikely to get one since ecobee stopped taking new sign-ups. (Or so I read in the threads. I already had mine, and it still works.)
But that only matters to use the HA ecobee integration. You can integrate to HA via HomeKit (very easy). The good news is that the HomeKit integration is completely local (the ecobee cloud integration can have significant lag). The bad news is that it doesn’t provide all of the information provided by the ecobee integration (but for most/many people it will be enough).