How are you all handling controlling your Ecobee? Are you using Ecobee schedules and then making any necessary changes inside HA, setting Ecobee Comfort settings VIA Home Assistant Automations?
I do set Home & Away via HA automations and I will occasionally make Ecobee changes on my HA thermostat card.
Most of the time the scheduling in Ecobee works for me but there are times I need to make manually adjustments so I can do that within my Thermostat card in HA but since I have my Ecobee setting to “Hold Until Next Scheduled Activity” so if a scheduled changing is coming up the Ecobee starts to adjust to get to the comfort settings.
I have a 2-story condo and my 2nd floor office has new duct work so the heat runs REALLY well here, and it can get pretty toasty in the office to get the rest of the house to a comfortable setting.
So during the day I have a “Work” comfort setting so the office is the only room that needs to be set to 70. In the winter the 1st floor will be about 66 when that happens. However around 3 PM the office starts to get toasty since I have it set to use the “Home” comfort setting which includes the sensors in my Kitchen & Living Room.
I know that I could use “Hold until you change it” in Ecobee but I would worry I may forget to change it back to the schedule so lets say I set my heat to be a bit warmer (as my finished basement Is a bit more cold) but than I eat dinner, shower and go to bed I may forget to change it back. And I’ll wake up and my 2nd floor bedroom is HOT!
Both situations are rare enough but I figure some of you wizards on here have a better solution,.
Are you setting Hold until you change it vs. Hold Until Next Scheduled Activity from the thermostat or through Home Assistant. If through Home Assistant, how do you do that?
I too am looking for examples of using Home Assistant to setup up Comfort Settings (aka Climate) and Schedules. It is very akward to update/revert the schedule directly on the Ecobee.
ZONE 2 User heating scenario:
Normal: on the cool side, maximum economy.
Guest: more pleasant temperatures, overnight guests don’t complain about threat to their health
I’d like to do this with “one click” on Home Assistant to switch from Normal to Guest vs the 10 clicks required using the Ecobee thermostat interface.
I’ve kept the schedule in Ecobee since my weekday and weekend schedule is pretty standard but I don’t manage the geo-fening within Ecobee (Or August)
But on my Arrive Home I have home assistant “Resume Schedule” as one of the actions.
Leaving Home I have an automation toggle Ecobee to “Away”
I built scripts to change my Ecobee comfort setting and I can toggle them from a Lovelace card but I don’t do that much. usually, If I need to change the comfort setting I just change it in Ecobee. I have “Hold until I change it”
After a few different approaches, I’ve landed on configuring the comfort settings in Ecobee, but not using the Ecobee scheduling at all. Instead, I have an automation that sets the current comfort setting based on the schedule I’ve programmed into HA, combined with some presence checking. This sacrifices the feature where Ecobee starts heating before the schedule in order to hit the target temp at the scheduled time, but that’s okay for me.
The reason for using the Ecobee comfort settings at all is so that I can use the sensor participation as I haven’t found an API for that. I tried to also set the target temperature from HA, but overriding the temperature from the comfort setting will set the thermostat in “Hold” mode, which uses the sensor participation from the Home comfort setting (according to the their docs).
This seems like the best way to go about it. How did you remove all of the scheduling from Ecobee? It seems like you have to keep at least one programed event.
I deleted all but one from the schedules, so the only one is “Away”. Then I copied this one to all other days. The ecobee will/might still try to set it to “Away” every day right after midnight, so I have an automation to counter that.
