I walk by my Ecobee thermostat all the time and its screen changes. I don’t know if Ecobee can relay this information as an entity, or not, but it would be very useful to be able to pull it into an automation as a trigger.
Ecobee Thermostats with presence sensors should have an occupancy entity available when using the Ecobee integration in home assistant. I have an original Ecobee 3 rather than an Ecobee 3 Lite, so I can’t confirm your exact model will do show this entity. But my Ecobee 3 has an occupancy entity in home assistant.
That being said, the one thing to note with Ecobee is that the API only updates state changes every few minutes. So the presence sensors on the thermostat and remote sensors won’t do real-time triggers. But there may be some use cases where the Ecobee presence sensors would be usable in automations.
To my knowledge, if your ecobee 3 lite has one or more of those “motion + temp” remote sensor accessories, you would get those occupancy thing.
However, the motion sensor on the bottom left corner of the ecobee unit itself are not available in HA.
I believe @bjpetit is talking about the former, and OP @AngryPixies is talking about the latter.
So could anyone confirm OP’s request?
Not sure if this being a configuration thing, or it is not available in API to being with, or just not available via HA integration.
Edit: adding pics
I do have two of those room sensors, but they do not update very often and they are in kid’s bedrooms to make sure they don’t get too cold when occupied with our currently single zone boiler.
I would imagine that the sensor on the thermostat itself would be quite responsive due to the fact that it doesn’t need to conserve a battery, and that the screen immediately changes when walking past it. If Ecobee has it available to read in their API, that would be excellent to have in HA. If they don’t, I wonder if that is something they could address in a future firmware update.
It would be very useful to grab this sensor for intruder detection when the home isn’t occupied, and to trigger automations.
Long before I had HA, I asked Ecobee if they could at least let their thermostats read each other as temperature sensors.(I have another one upstairs to control the central air, which is an entirely different system from my boiler) Ecobee responded that the thermostats would never be able to read each other as room sensors do. I intend to work around this in Home Assistant via automations or Node-Red.
The api documentation isn’t really clear on what the thermostat occupancy value specifically indicates. But from looking at the history of my ecobee sensors, the thermostat occupancy entity state appears to be independent of the remote sensors occupancy state.
Here’s an occupancy history across my ecobee sensors. The top is the thermostat, and the rest are remote sensors.
One other note. This also give you an idea as to how infrequently the ecobee occupancy state changes. This 24 hours of data, collected while the whole family is home and moving through the house.
That’s interesting, @bjpetit .
What is your ecobee model - 3, 3 lite, 4, SmartThermostat (aka 5th Gen)? And roughly when did you get your ecobee?
It’s an Ecobee3 from 2016.
I was curious as to what exactly this data looks like from the Ecobee API. Running the API directly to get sensor information, shows that in addition to the remote sensor info, the thermostat info is returned…
{
"id": "ei:0",
"name": "Thermostat",
"type": "thermostat",
"inUse": false,
"capability": [
{
"id": "1",
"type": "temperature",
"value": "684"
},
{
"id": "2",
"type": "humidity",
"value": "47"
},
{
"id": "3",
"type": "occupancy",
"value": "true"
}
]
}
Hmmm… So maybe it is a ecobee3 lite thing, where the occupancy sensor on thermostat is not available (via API)…?
I found this remark back from 2017.