Capability Request - Ecobee Integration

I'd like to be able to set the Ecobee Comfort Setting from within Rule Machine. Currently, you can set to Away (with setAway), but I'd like additional functionality to change to any Comfort Setting - including custom ones.

(I can use Ecobee Suite for this, but when I installed the app, I noticed it used a lot more resources than the next app).

Are these commands revealed by the 'device'? If so you can control them with Custom Action.

I don't see it under Custom Action for the device, so I suppose it is not revealed.

Show a screenshot of the device page.

Only those commands shown as tiles there are available within the hub.

This has always been a major deficit of the built in ecobee driver. The ecobee interface is designed around “comfort settings” or modes such as day, away, sleep, vacation, etc. The user can create as many different modes as they want and each mode specifies a preset number of settings (temp, fan, sensors, humidity, etc).

Hubitat is able to set to away mode, and a “resume” mode to resume to the schedule that is set on the ecobee, but otherwise interaction is pretty limited.

I, for one, would love for the built in driver to support comfort settings. I want to be able to switch to a comfort setting at a certain time or based off of various triggers in my rules.

2 Likes

The built-in Ecobee Integration was done years ago, and is nothing to write home about, for sure. None of us are fans of Ecobee. You might find better integrations by searching here, for ones that users have done.

@jrau272
Here's a user created one that a number of people use although I don't have so never tried it:

[BETA COMPLETE] Universal Ecobee Suite for Hubitat & SmartThings (Free) - Developers / Code Share - Hubitat

I was using Ecobee Suite in ST, but when I installed it here I noticed it used a lot of resources. Much more than any other app. Frankly it offers a lot of functionality that I just don't need. I’ll take a deeper look to see if there is another app that simply opens the attributes to the thermostats (I think that’s all that’s necessary for access to the Comfort Settings).

ecobee suite is the only one i’m aware of, and it is a monster. It has a zillion features that I don’t use, but it does allow me access to the comfort settings. I have 4 hubitat hubs and one of them is essentially dedicated to running ecobee suite. It’s also the only one where the system gets taxed enough to send me alerts.

There is another app by Yves Racine. He claims that it uses less resources than other Ecobee apps since the idea of his app is to let the thermostat do the work and have the app handle exceptions (makes sense). But then, he is asking for $30 due to the work he put into it including the 7000+ lines of code for the device driver itself. So, I am reluctant to purchase as I think it might also hog resources.

Your dedicated hub makes sense too - maybe I'll resurrect my ST Hub for Ecobee (and other stuff).

If all you're looking to do is change to the other comfort settings, you can use Hubitat's built in IFTTT integration. In my case, I have the Hubitat mode changing to sleep set as the trigger in IFTTT which tells Ecobee to change to the sleep comfort mode. You can use virtual switches too if needed.

I was using Ecobee Suite previously but I've switched to Hubitat's built-in integration to simplify things and lighten the load on my hub. Ecobee Suite is amazing but I was only using it to for that one missing feature.

1 Like

I looked at IFTTT, While you can change the Ecobee Comfort Settings, IFTTT does not have the option of indefinite hold. (Only until next transition or X hours - with a max of 24 hours).

Assuming that you're using schedules, I can see where that would be a problem. I don't use schedules on the Ecobee at all though. I control the comfort setting using Hubitat modes which are primarily controlled by presence sensors (combined method Life360, HE App, wifi etc.). If no one is home, Ecobee sets to "away" indefinitely regardless of hold type because there's no schedule to revert it back. Once someone arrives, "resume program" runs. When I say no schedule, there is "1" technically, it's just set as always home 24/7. Sleep mode is triggered by either a button press or Alexa.

I've kept the WAF up with it this way.

1 Like

FWIW, the entire Ecobee Suite consumes less than 2% of the available CPU on a C-5 managing 3 thermostats and 12 remote sensors polling every 60 seconds. Memory-wise, ES Manager needs about 40Kb, each thermostat about 37KB, and each sensor about 4Kb. So all-told, we're talking 40+(337)+(114) = about 195Kb, which is far less than 1% of the RAM in a C-5 (or a C-7).

The memory footprint significantly reduces the CPU overhead of the Suite, by minimizing the amount of data requested from the Ecobee Cloud servers, AND by (significantly) reducing the amount of events and event data sent to each ES device.

Adding ES to an existing C4 is probably too much, but on C5/C7, you will likely not even notice the overhead once its running steady-state. Yeah, it will appear at the top of the list, but SOMETHING has to be first, and that isn't necessarily bad when ALL of the CPU overhead on your hub totals out to less than 10% of wall-clock time.

There are over 300 attributes related to a single Ecobee thermostat, not counting sensor data. Not all change all the time, but making changes to schedules and climates is quite complicated and requires a lot of data points to be exchanged between the Ecobee Cloud and my Ecobee Suite. I doubt you will find any implementation on ANY platform to be more efficient, whether you pay for it or not. I encourage you to try it for yourself. It's free, and there are no strings attached - uninstall it if you don't like it...

1 Like

I noticed that percent of busy and state size for Ecobee Suite were significantly more than any other app so I removed it (without actually testing if there were performance issues). Z-Wave Polling prior to ES installation was 40%, but dropped to less than 10% with ES (with ES at about 50%). As you stated, it could be that percent of busy was high but still only 2% of the CPU. I didn't check that (don't know if I could),

I ended up installing ES on my old ST hub (got the idea from @jrau272) and installed Hubconnect which seems to use very little processing power. All my Ecobee automations (the few I use) are quick. I like the idea of Hubconnect as I can also move some (Hubitat) problem devices to ST as well.

Second the request to modify the existing Ecobee Integration app so that its driver permits setting of "Comfort Programs" (e.g. "Day", "Sleep", etc.) beyond simply "Away".

For a large part of my day, because Hubitat cannot "see" or "set" these (as reported via the Ecobee API), I've been forced to leave it either in "Away" or "Resume Program" (which varies by time, but sometimes I want to force "Sleep" earlier than the thermostat would normally roll over into that mode).

Been over a year since I made the leap to Hubitat, and miss this intrinsic function that we took for granted back on the Vera platform. The trouble there was nobody "officlally" maintained the Ecobee integration app, so it fell on various users and volunteer devs (like @toggledbits ) to maintain.