Today I finally installed my ecobee Smart Thermostat with Voice Control. Along with it I added 3 Smart Sensors in different rooms of my house. I’ve had a WiFi thermostat that had some ‘smarts’ before but the ecobee is another class of device.

There are a number of smart thermostats on the market. The one everyone normally thinks about is the Nest Thermostat. As far as I can tell by reading and looking at the Nest it is an awesome device and easy to use. The idea that my thermostat learns my schedules and automatically builds an energy efficient plan for me sounds neat. But the fact is, my daily schedule is pretty set. I work a normal schedule but my weekend schedule can vary so trying to learn that will only mean the schedule is constantly off. So I opted for the ecobee and setting my own schedule. But wait, couldn’t I have done that with just about any under $50 thermostat at the hardware store? Well yes, but schedules are not really why I wanted the smart thermostat. What I want is control and integration into my Home Assistant home automation platform.

I must admit that I didn’t have to get the latest model with voice control if my only desire was Home Assistant integration. In fact this ecobee has Alexa built in. So after setting it up and enabling Alexa I asked my thermostat to “play classic rock”. What is more cool (or you may say useless) than your thermostat playing music? This does add one more Alexa device to my home and expands where I can issue voice commands for any of the skills I have enabled.

The one thing that really pulled me into the ecobee camp were the Smart Sensors. These are different than Nest Temperature Sensors in that they not only monitor temperature but they also sense presence in a room. So if I vary from my normal schedule and am home during my normal Away time the schedule is automatically overridden. Another cool feature of the Smart Sensor is to define what parts of my daily schedule it is active in. So I set my bedroom sensor to be the only one active during the Sleep schedule. By doing this it keeps my bedroom at the correct Sleep temperature rather than the hallway where the ecobee thermostat is installed. Since I don’t have a zoned HVAC system this allows me to control my bedroom comfort without HVAC system modifications.

The Home Assistant Ecobee Integration was pretty straightforward through the ecobee Developer API. Within a matter of 2 minutes I had registered, exchanged the necessary keys and PINs and Home Assistant was connected to my ecobee and Smart Sensors. Beyond testing control of the thermostat and displaying humidity and room temperatures I’ve done nothing else in Home Assistant. But it does open up another level of control of HVAC and monitoring of humidity and temperature that I haven’t had before. So I see more spin off projects in the future!

Another interesting thing is energy company rebates for smart thermostats. My electric company is Entergy and my natural gas provider is Atmos. They both offer a $100 rebate for the ecobee. The Entergy rebate was applied at purchase at ecobee.com. I applied online for the Atmos rebate and received a check within 10 days. So with the Black Friday sale and rebates my smart thermostat and 3 sensors cost me $63.

So this is day one of ecobee. Hopefully it lives up to my expectations. Installation was easy and well documented. The first couple hours of configuration, integration and fiddling were simple and fun. Beyond tweaking schedules and temperatures over the next few days I’m not sure what I’ll do with it next. But for now I think I’ll go ask my thermostat to play some more music.