i got new forced-air heating systems in my house last year with new ecobee thermostats. at the time, i had the understanding that there was an ecobee integration for home-assistant, and assumed all would be well.
at some point in spring of 2024, ecobee apparently stopped letting people do the dev account signup that had previously been required to enable the integration. so the only way to get my systems connected to HA was to first connect them as homekit devices, then use homekit integration to bring them into HA.
that worked for me and i have basic functionality of viewing/controlling thermostats. however i canât see or control the details of the current state of the system in terms of whether it is stage-1-heat, stage-2-heat, or aux-heat. instead i can only see basically on vs. off information.
i can view this information (at least the current real-time state) by actually looking at the thermostat. i can also see this info (and some limited amount of history) via the ecobee cloud (website). so i know that it is âpossibleâ to see and extract this data. this data is important in terms of monitoring and understanding system performance. having both visibility and control of this info (and related parameter settings like threshold temps) can be an important way that people can control/manage how much electricity theyâre using. for my own needs, if i have an electrical outage and am running on generators, iâd like to be able to switch the system to use aux (gas) heat and not run the heat pumps, for example. i canât do this with the limited access i get through HA.
does anyone know whether there might be plans to restore the ecobee integration at some point? will ecobee start offering dev access again at some point (as they apparently did previously)? anyone know whether there are any plans to improve the homekit support and add additional details like ability to see and control aux-heat?
HAPâs Thermostat accessory doesnât support features like identifying and/or controlling heating/cooling stages, etc. Therefore Home Assistantâs Homekit Device integration cannot model the additional features of an Ecobee thermostat (or other manufacturer) via HAPâs Thermostat.
Perhaps it may be possible to model the additional features using other HAP accessories. For example, HAP has a Fan accessory which might be used to model the Ecobeeâs fan control. However, I am not sufficiently familiar with HAP to know what could be used to define/control heating/cooling stages. Plus I donât know if there are any âbest practicesâ that discourage modelling a physical device as multiple HAP accessories.
tl;dr
HAP only supports a basic set of thermostat features.
Although Ecobee thermostats do not support the Matter protocol, it serves as a useful comparison to HAP. This document describes version 1.2 of the Matter protocol and Matterâs Thermostat model appears to support more features than HAP. Perhaps if Ecobee ever supports Matter (pure speculation), it will become possible to expose more of its features via Home Assistantâs Matter integration.
I had a heat pump installed this year (almost to the month you did), with a gas furnace (like you). Also got the Ecobee Lite thermostat included in the install.
The hvac_action sensor the person made, does let you see the statistics of each mode it runs, though I don't know what modes will list, because it comes from the Ecobee (via Homekit).
That Run State for me does let me see when the cool and fan is on. The automation I have does heat, cool and fan recirculate, as well as day/night time values for temps, fan delay, fan runtime. I also plugged in a helper to make sure the air/heat from the pump is on the minimum time. That web site also shows you how to get statistics, but I want to go further and give the option to go back up to 6 days, so I can see what they were.
My only issue right now is, getting the right "way" to set things up through Homekit, seems if I do it "this way", it doesn't work, so not sure what methods go first since the documentation falls off a cliff of just showing you how to install and set it up and some of the entities and actions. In the dark for it. But I'll post another thread.
Check that link out, try the binary sensor and sensor section at the top (take the unique id's out and change the devices to what you have), the hvac_action should provide you with what is happening.
Yes, you can get most of the info needed from the Ecobee Homekit integration. It works well and reliably.
The limitation/frustration is that the "hvac_action" sensor provided via Homekit does not provide the full detail that the Ecobee knows internally. Yes, it will show you when it is "Cooling", which is good. But it does not tell you if the systems is at "Stage 1 Cool" or "Stage 2 Cool" like you can find in the Ecobee app. The same is true in the winter - you can see when it is Heating, but can't tell if its heating with the heat-pump (Stage 1), or has switched to gas (Aux Heat).
As Taras points out, this appears to be a limitation of the Homekit protocol, not with Ecobee per se.
