Slow status updates for ecobee - options for bridging via homekit?

[cjneil (John Neil)]

Hi from a new user. I appreciate the guidance. I’ve setup hass using the image on a spare raspberry pi i had laying around.

Right now I am using a wires, relays, and a hacked kasa outlet switch to control my gas logs. They can be activated by alexa voice command or by a thermostat call for aux heat. This gives my house a bump whenever heat pump is struggling, below the cutoff temp, and whenever there’s a defrost cycle.

This and a few other home integration chores pushed me over the ledge to look at serious home integration, rather than running more wires and being limited by native app features.

I’d like to do this in automation for a few reasons, but it looks like the status updates to hass from ecobee are prohibitively slow. I’ve successfully triggered a lamp on a kasa switch to do what I’m trying to do. Specifically, I’m looking to leverage equipment_running status containing auxHeat1 or auxHeat2. This is a known feature, highlighted in this thread:

Slow state updates from EcoBee

I was able to set up both the Ecobee integration as well as the Homekit Controller. I can confirm that the Homekit Controller does switch the state immediately for Heating/Cooling in the HVAC_Action state attribute, but it does not appear there is a fan attribute like there is in the Ecobee integration (as @matt7664 mentions above with 5 vs 91 supported features). This would be fine if you don’t have the fan run automatically… But alas.

Was there ever any resolution on this?

I did see options for bridging with homekit. I see the bridged thermostat status from hass in homekit, but not the other way around. Any suggestions on getting it to appear would be helpful. That said, I doubt it would give me the ability to differentiate between “heat” and “aux heat”.

Seems my alternative is to learn more via adding a handful of GPIO inputs as triggers, signifying various heat/cool/fan calls for the system. It’s a two stage heat pump with two stage aux heat, so that’s a total of six calls if I wanted/needed to monitor them all.

• id: ‘1643403794263’
  alias: Light On with Heat Pump
  description: ‘’
  trigger:
  • platform: state
    entity_id: climate.neil_s_thermostat
    attribute: equipment_running
    to: fan,heatPump,auxheat1
    condition:
    action:
  • type: turn_on
    device_id: 7e99351b5879c0a2e14303fa560073ed
    entity_id: switch.z85_christmas_tree
    domain: switch
    mode: single

[BlamBlaster]

Did you ever figure this out? I’m having a similar issue with the door/window sensors from Ecobee. They are great since they have occupancy and motion detection but the are just not updating at all for some reason.

I’m using the HomeKit integration as well.

[cjneil (John Neil)]

I added an ESP32 via ESPHome, to get me enough GPIO inputs to read the various thermostat calls and elucidate status of the unit.

For you, I’d think another door/window sensor and integrate directly with HASS is the ticket. Zwave, Zigbee, etc.