We recently bought a house which came with two Ecobee thermostats. I’ve got ecobee recogized in HAOS (i.e., there is an icon in Settings > Devices > Ecobee), I have the Ecobee app, I have the thermostats registered and showing in the Ecobee app. I can add them to Home (default app on Iphone). When I click the Ecobee icon in HA, it tells me to get an API key from ecobee.com.
There is no place to do such on Ecobee’s main website that I can find. It appears that you need to use their developer site. I logged into that site and got: “Sorry, we are not currently accepting new developer registrations at this time.”
Is there any way around this issue from the HAOS side of things?
Ecobee stopped providing development accounts on March 28, 2024 (ecobee - Home Assistant). For other reasons and prior to that date, I switched my thermostat over to the “HomeKit Device” integration. Doing so improved response time for the scene’s where the thermostat is used.
If you’re at all concerned, Homekit support seems to be pretty good for the Ecobee. From what I’ve noticed, there’s only some slight discrepancy between detecting fan/idle status, and having the preset mode integrated in with the thermostat as an attribute vs Homekit that exposes it as a separate control.
This is what the two methods look like side by side (fan is running):
Thanks for that - it worked! For those who follow in my footsteps:
It was a bit hairy as I am really confused because I thought HomeKit and Apple Home were the same? They use the same icon? And the code is used for both, I think. Anyway, I removed it from Apple Home in the APP, which cleared the “paired with HomeKit” on the Ecobee thermostat screen — which was already there — hence my confusion. I then clicked pair (to re-pair it), and the code plus a QR popped up. I used the code, not the QR.
I don’t have any Apple stuff, but HA can also act as a HomeKit bridge, which I believe exposes HA devices (not sure if it’s only HomeKit devices or anything you want) to Apple Home.
So, if you want to use Ecobee via Apple Home as well as HA, look at setting up HomeKit bridge in HA.
The only thing you may want to check though, is if you can have multiple bridges in Apple Home. I’m not sure about that, and if you’ve already got a bridge, this may be an issue (in which case, maybe you can connect HA to your existing bridge to expose the Ecobee).
