Still kind of new around here so hopefully this is the right place for this question
I moved my ecobee over from HomeKit to HomeKit Controller and I’m curious about the refresh rate or polling speed others have seen that have used HKC.
With HomeKit, the motion sensors immediately changed state on my phone but the ecobee integration obvious has a delay from the cloud. Unfortunately, homekit has been a little flakey in terms of automations and room assignments so I wanted to move it to Home Assistant via HKC so I could do more customization on the automations.
With HomeKit controller, I expected similar performance but it seems like the response rate is still several minutes at best.
Has anyone been able to get closer to real-time response to motion updates with HKC? In HomeKit I assume the rapid response is due to Bluetooth comms rather than via Wi-Fi. I’m guessing that’s not how HKC works behind the scenes?
On mine, I find that temperature sensors refresh at exactly 5 min intervals. However other states of thermostat seems to be much faster - such as for cooling, idle etc
Thanks for replying. I should have come back here and updated my situation.
I did some experimenting and found that response time was effectively zero under the vast majority of normal conditions. However, there are specific scenarios that aren’t uncommon where the response is minutes. Essentially all of these are going to be after the sensor has been triggered.
So if I walk by a motion sensor, it’s going to register as motion in well under a second. However, if I walk by again 30 seconds later, the sensor will not have sent a “clear” or “no motion” signal to HomeKit within this time. I believe the timing for this “Clear” signal was around the five minutes you mentioned.
So for the purposes of what I was looking for, this is acceptable. I want it to send that “Motion” signal to HKC so that I can turn on lights. I don’t really care about the five-minute wait because it’s pretty uncommon I’d want lights to be on and off within minutes like that. If so, I’d be looking towards a different sensor altogether. These were designed with motion/occupancy in mind and not true motion detection.
Bottom line, my “issue” wasn’t really an issue, just a misunderstanding of how the sensors worked and an adjustment of expectations.
Typically around three minutes, but it varies. Sometimes it’s every minute, others it’s closer to five minutes. But overall, three minutes appears to be average.
It appears to be approximately the same for both the HKC and the ecobee integration. There’s a very slight delay with the ecobee app, but it’s under a minute typically. This is to be expected since it’s API-based.
Actually, looking into the data further, it’s possible the HKC is updating at a higher frequency. The ecobee integration varies, but it’s definitely longer between updates. However, the plots are effectively the same. You can see the differences in density below (blue is HKC, orange is ecobee integration):
