Can anyone recommend a wifi based thermostat that you setup recently, one that had a simple setup and thats been solid for you?
I would of gone with nest but it seems that config has been sketchy lately.
Any input is appreciated…
Read through the end of this post. Some Honeywells work, some models, kinda sometimes work. From my personal experience I wouldn’t recommend a t9. Nest, I have no insight for you.
Thanks for the link!
Last few years Honeywell has been horrendous in terms of stability of their cloud infra - it would go down morning EU time, then again morning USA time, if it is/was even remotely cold. I’m using an Evohome system, but it seems to be the same infrastructure for most (all?) of their connected products.
I got to the point of about 20 outages in less than a month, when I gave up counting. Their support basically apologises, then ignores you…that’s if they acknowledge the outages at all. Their stance seems to be to ignore it, wait until it gets warmer, then their infra can cope.
I’ve recently started playing with the below, with nanoCUL, so that it can be controlled directly without Honeywell cloud. It’s getting pretty good, almost at the point where I can ditch the internet gateway/connectivity completely.
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My experience is with the Honeywell RTH6580WF thermostat in the US.
I have three of them in my house. In over three years, they’ve been rock-solid. I can count the number of cloud outages on one hand, and those have been brief. Besides, the thermostat continues to work even if the cloud connection is down. Any schedules you’ve defined are handled locally. It’s just the remote function you lose. The HA integration has worked flawlessly.
I generally prefer a totally local solution. It’s just one more point of failure, one more interface to maintain, and if you’re worried about that sort of thing, one more privacy and security vulnerability.
But I’ve come around to appreciating the redundancy of using the Honeywell app as a back-up in case HA fails. The ability to monitor my thermostats when I’m away has the potential to alert me before a heating system failure gets to the point of bursting pipes.
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Thanks all for the feedback all good information.
Ecobee all the way. Dead simple easy to use, configure, and automate, and fully compatible with Home Assistant.
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What Model are you using?
I have Ecobee 3, before HomeKit was added and Ecobee 4 came out. They’ve been pretty much perfect. The fact their phone apps almost 100% resemble their thermostat GUI makes them VERY easy to manage.
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Are you running the latest version of HA? I was looking at ecobee as the thermostat itself has a nice modern look
I have 2 ecobees (I think they’re the ecobee 4, but they’re called Smart Thermostat with Voice). They’re… OK. Honestly if you want to automate your HVAC, don’t get an ecobee. wiring and initial config was simple. the post config and tweaking is frustrating. I’ve had them installed for a little over a year and I’m still tweaking and fighting with it. First what you should know about the ecobee is the sensors are not real-time. ecobee connects to your developer account linked to your thermostats, but the data (temperature, humidity, etc) lags by anywhere from 5-30 minutes. I’ve seen HA report the ecobee is heating, yet my furnace shutoff 15 minutes ago and even the actual thermostat says it’s idle. Also if you plan to use the eco+ functionality (specifically the “feels like” or whatever it’s called feature) you will see some wild jumps in reported temperature.
oh and another problem I have encountered is setting a setpoint from anything but the thermostat or their app enables a permanent hold that ignores the “until next schedule event” setting. and if you want to permanently hold the fan and a temperature setpoint… it permanently holds both, again overriding the schedule indefinitely. A simple $5 thermostat can turn the fan on and still follow a schedule… but this $200-$300 thermostat can’t?
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Have you considered using the HomeKit_Controller integration with it? It provides immediate, local control and status reports.
I’ve thought about it but haven’t done anything about it. Right now my ecobees are connected directly to HomeKit, then I use the ecobee integration to pull them into HA. I’d have to reshuffle things around and use the homekit component of HA to put it back into homekit if I want. While that may solve the issue of data lag and instantaneous updates, the rest of my issues are with the ecobee itself. Going back and forth with their “support”, I’ve determined it’s not exactly an automation friendly device unless you exclusively use their app and system. The fan issue I was kind of able to work around by using my comfort profiles to run the fan indefinitely instead of using the Auto/On setting, but I still run into some issues of the schedule being overridden indefinitely when I did not intend for it to be.
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Yes, that’s what I’ve done with other Homekit accessories. The accessory is paired to Home Assistant via the homekit_controller integration and then made available (to iOS devices) via the Homekit integration.
The result is that motion sensors report their status instantly to Home Assistant which relays it (just as quickly) to an iPhone or iPad. The motion sensor is one of several sensors in an ecobee Switch+. Unlike the ecobee Smart Thermostat, there’s no device-specific integration for it so the only way to integrate it is via homekit_controller.
The main advantage of integrating the Smart Thermostat via homekit_controller is that all communications are local and the ecobee cloud service plays no part. The disadvantage is that the thermostat’s feature-set is limited to Apple’s standard definition of a thermostat.
that’s good to know the updates Ecobee -> HomeKit_Controller -> HA -> HomeKit -> iOS device are still fairly instantaneous despite the many hops. That’s interesting that only the motion/occupancy sensors of the thermostat register through the default Ecobee integration. I don’t have any other Ecobee devices so I didn’t know these were the only ones that did. I do like the all local data/control aspect. I did that with my Lutron Caseta Pro Hub. Maybe this weekend I’ll try out the HomeKit_Controller. I need to reconfigure my HomeKit bridge(s) anyway due to the changes how TVs and cameras are handled.
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I been messing around a lot with Home Kit as well. It works really well. SO far anyway
Does the the ecobee via HomeKit setup enable the ecobee to read temperature from other sensors?
I like their thermostat, but not their sensors.