Ecobee or Homekit Integration for local control

Configuration
1

I have two of the newest model of Ecobee thermostats. I’ve been using the HA Ecobee integration, and not having a problem.

But I read about people using the Homekit integration and the Homekit bridge. So I added the Homekit bridge integration, I paired my two thermostats with Homekit so now I have both integrations and multiple devices in the system. It’s not a problem, everything seems to be working. The climate card is still showing things properly using the Ecobee integration.

My confusion is why do I need a separate Ecobee integration when I can simply use homekit. I don’t have any Homekit hubs but if I understand it correctly the homekit bridge integration takes the place of the hub.

Is Homekit completely local where the Ecobee integration uses the Ecobee cloud?

I know this other homekit devices where I’m not using the home kit integration, for instance 3 LG TVs and the power view Hunter Douglas blinds. Same question. Pros and cons of going either way.

2

@harryfine

I used the EcoBee integration for a couple of years without problems. Once I added a script to shut off the AC when a window or door was opened, I found the integration was often slow to or failed to respond. As you mentioned, the thermostat also paired with HomeKit. I found by using that rather than the EcoBee integration, my script never failed.

Hoe that helps a little.

3

Answering my own question here after some playing. The Homekit integration does not seem to permit changing modes from home to away programmatically. The Ecobee integration does. For me that’s a deal-breaker for the Homekit Ecobee integration at least for now. When I set my alarm with Alarmo, I toggle a boolean from home to away, which in turn sets the Ecobee from home to away (plus some other things). Doesn’t work with Homekit.

If anyone has had success with this using the Homekit integration, I would really appreciate sharing. I would far prefer a local integration.

4

The Homekit integration for ecobee did lack the ability to set preset modes for a long time as this was the reason I went with the ecobee integration myself. You should see a dropdown to change preset modes for the ecobee via homekit integration now though, “Current Mode” on right in below screenshot. You should be able to manipulate that to adjust preset modes.

image

I still use the ecobee integration but I do use the state of this dropdown in a template to detect eco+ mode.

5

Thank you for pointing that out

6

This seems to be working for me - I can successfully programmatically change the Home/Sleep/Away mode on my Ecobee Thermostat Premium connected via HomeKit. The only gotcha is that the Home Assistant UX is unreliable at showing the current mode (e.g. right now HA is showing it as Sleep, but it’s actually Home).

Like you, I have automations that are arming/disarming Alarmo, so I basically added on Ecobee home/away/sleep to those as well and it’s been working great (and is much more responsive than Ecobee’s built-in smart home/away, which I believe takes at least 2 hours to go into Away mode).

Here’s an example of an automation that automatically arms my Alarmo (Away) and Ecobee (Away) when everyone leaves the house:

alias: Everybody leaves
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id:
      - zone.home
    below: 1
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 5
      seconds: 0
condition: []
action:
  - service: alarmo.arm
    metadata: {}
    data:
      mode: away
      skip_delay: true
      force: true
      entity_id: alarm_control_panel.alarmo
  - service: select.select_option
    metadata: {}
    data:
      option: away
    target:
      entity_id: select.thermostat_current_mode
mode: single