Definitely but Iāll add there was some tinkering, some damper adjustments, and the mileage may vary depending on the house. Currently our house is set to 71-degrees and with Keenect Lite paired with the default integrated ecobee and ecobee sensors, every room (aside from my basement which Iāve set cooler) is within a 1-degree difference.
Part of our first floor has cathedral ceilings and all of the upstairs has them which really meant that heat gets trapped in unusable areas. I installed ceiling fans which circulate in reverse for the winter at slow speeds and set the heating system to also use its fan for 30 minutes/hour to recirculate the temps more evenly.
In the evening, the ecobee built-in sleep schedule (independent of HE) only looks at our Master Bedroom and Nursery Room Ecobee sensors and adjusts only for the average between the two. This way weāre not wasting energy and and a significant chunk of money heating the rest of the house. My house is around 1,600 sq. Ft. and if I had to guess, itās probably saved $100/month in both heat and AC and has paid for itself in the first year alone. More importantly, my wife isnāt driving me crazy about it being too hot or too cold and constantly futzing with the temps. If she ever does, I just say, āAlexa, whatās the temperature in the Master Bedroom?ā Game over... canāt put a price tag on that!
All you need 3 instances of Ecobee Suite Smart Mode, Programs & Setpoints Helper, one for each condition.
If you walk through the configuration of each using the rules you described, it should be fairly straight-forward. Just don't try to do everything in a single instance, and only set the one temperature (60Ā°) - as the "below" temp for the first one, and as the "above" temp for the other two. You can select the Thermostat Mode and Program that you want, and you can set the Location Mode condition to be whatever you need...
@storageanarchy Thank you Barry for all of your amazing hard work and contributions. I can see youāve spent a significant amount of time working on this for both ST and HE. Your work is (and will continue to) save a lot of people money and also help the environment.
I have a few questions about performance/advantages of your integration, but first my own setup/situation for some insight:
I work from home. Iāve basically turned off Ecobee away because I rarely leave and if so, itās usually not for long. Plus we have pets.
Iām new to HE (mostly because Wink is going downhill fast) but I managed to get the default Ecobee Integration working with Keenect Lite as a starting point. The default Ecobee integration is merely a means to obtain readings and sensors in order to control Keen Vents, but I really donāt control the Ecobee from either the Eco App nor HE. Sleep, Home, and Away are all set and scheduled directly at the Eco Thermostat and we typically donāt mess with it.
We often use the Ecobee Skill with Amazon Echos and hence voice commands to raise/lower the temps temporarily, or to check temperatures on various Ecobee room sensors since our room temps jumped around in the past.
I was very interested in moving as many devices as possible off of cloud (via Wink and Apps over to HE) reliance mostly due to reliability issues, speed, and to a lesser degree greater privacy/security. I discovered that our Keen Vents/Bridges via the Keen App were frequently going down at night and with a newborn/infant, his room could either overheat or plunge in temps. The vents wouldnāt reconnect once disconnected and the Keen App would require reauthorization with Ecobee servers. At first I blamed Keen and requested a means to notify us when the disconnects occurred (aside from suddenly shivering) but waited over a year and still no implementation on their end in sight. They pointed out that the disconnects were happening with Ecobee servers going down. I previously signed up for Ecobee server alerts (which were recently discontinued by Ecobee) and suddenly my devices lit up like pinball machines. This setup was so unreliable that I had trouble sleeping at night worried about my kidās room.
After switching over to HE and integrating Ecobee/Keen:
Using default Ecobee integration and Keenect Lite.
Using RM to define a few Smart Vents/rooms to completely close at night in rooms we donāt use when sleeping. Saves heating/cooling costs and environmental impact.
So far, everything has been more stable and comfortable. I havenāt dealt with Keen Vent disconnects from Ecobee as I donāt think thereās much (if any) cloud reliance by using Keenect Lite. Temps in previously unstable rooms also appear to be more precise and responsive.
In general, I donāt really have any complaints. āIf it aināt broke, donāt fix itā may apply. But I have to wonder what Iām potentially missing by using the default HE Ecobee Integration and Keenect Lite with RM and this is why Iām writing this.
Questions about your UES integration (I tried reading all of your documentation btw.) Iām interested in possibly switching over, but I spent a lot of time just getting my current setup working:
What do you think are the biggest advantages of your integration vs. the default He integration? I understand you can control it directly with more options, less cloud reliance (localized and hence more stable), and possibly improved performance and savings?
If I remove the default integration and use yours, should I also remove Keenect Lite and also RM to control some vents? Does your Smart Vents portion of UES duplicate many of these KL functions?
I was somewhat confused about your Github documentation regarding localized HE performance being slower vs. ST utilizing their cloud servers. How is it that possible due to Internet/server latency? What exactly is getting processed on the cloud? I only thought Ecobee cloud connectivity was merely for weather forecasts and auto smart adjustments (time to temp for example) and to control the thermostat remotely from an app.
Does UES free users from having to use Ecobee sensors?
I saw that you developed a thermal custom comfort setting that takes into consideration humidity, clothing, etc. I currently have a whole house humidifier hooked up to the blower which is controlled by Ecobee. Unfortunately, Ecobee only looks at the main thermostat and not other sensors to determine Humidity values within a home. I see this as a a major shortcoming of Ecobee since itās not averaging out the entire home. Does your integration also read humidity sensors and can keep the humidifier (or a dehumidifier) running?
Can your UES make predictions such as Nestās Time to Temp?
Can UES analyze/learn individual room thermal efficiency based on temp sensor readings and provide info on how long it takes to either cool, heat, as well as lose temps in relations to other rooms with sensors? Iād be very interested in looking at thermal efficiency in various parts of my home graphically (prior owners did a cheap/incorrect job with insulation and roof/decking construction in certain areas of this home.) This could also aid in predicting features such as Time to Temp/preheating/pre-cooling and averaging (if this feature is available.)
Can UES average multiple humidity/temp sensors in individual rooms to provide more comfort balance?
Would we even need the Ecobee Echo/Alexa skill enabled if we use UES with HE or would/could voice commands such as, āAlexa, ask Ecobee whatās the temperature in the Nurseryā (referencing an Ecobee Sensor in the Nursery) be automatically replaced/overwritten/duplicated by the HE Alexa Skill?
First, understand that you don't have to remove or disable ANYTHING to test my Ecobee Suite - it will happily run alongside everything you currently use until you decide that the ES solution is better and you choose to remove/disable the other stuff.
That said, here's a go at answering your Q's:
The biggest advantages are
ES can poll Ecobee more efficiently and more frequently (once a minute, if you want), giving you closer to real time updates than the stock Hubitat support (minimum 1 poll every 5 minutes).
ES understands and fully supports Ecobee Climates (nee programs/schedule: Home, Away, Sleep, and unlimited custom Climates), hold types (permanent/until next scheduled change) and Thermostat Modes
You don't have to remove anything. Unfortunately, I don't know what features KL uses, so I can't answer the second part of your question.
It is possible because ES on SmartThings runs in the cloud, as does Ecobee and KL - every ES single action and query about your Eobee thermostats requires communication from the cloud (Ecobee have only released their "local" API to Apple, for HomeKit). And all three run on processors with far more memory, MUCH faster processors, and Gigabit (or faster) interconnects between them. The slowest part of ES on ST is updating your client - but all of the real work is done cloud-to-cloud-to-cloud over links that are undoubtedly faster than your link to/from the cloud.
Many of us developers of Applications and Drivers for the HE platform have come to the conclusion that HE's error handling is not as robust as SmartThings, and that quite likely there are memory leaks in one or more aspects of the HE code. Over the period of a few days, we experience signficant slowdowns of our custom code which can only be mitigated by rebooting the HE hub. In fairness, it may well be something specific that our code does that causes this on HE, but the very same code does not suffer such unexplained performance slowdowns on SmartThings. Hopefully one day the HE development team will find and fix the problem; in the meantime they will ALWAYS tell you to remove ALL 3rd-party apps when you complain about performance slowdowns. Hence, I keep SmartThings for my Ecobee thermostats (and RBoy locks), and use HubConnect to share the data with my Hubitat Hubs (I have 5).
No.
At least, not for the purpose of adjusting the thermostat setpoints. Many of the Helpers allow you to use any thermometer or hubidistat sensors that you want, but I intentionally have made no attempt at replacing the (perfectly good) remote sensing support that is built into the Ecobee thermostats.
Nope - while you could use RM to change the target Humidity level at the thermostat, based on the values from any/all the Humidistats in your house, ES does not (yet) offer such an option. Interesting idea, though - I may consider it for a future Smart Humidity Helper...
Nope.
Nope, but it can control vents to open/close given a target temperature for each room (either from the thermostat setpoints, or to a pre-set value).
Yes, the Smart Vents Help does support averaging multiple Ecobee and non-Ecobee sensors.
Yes. ES does not provide any direct/native integration with Alexa. However, I believe that the Hubitat Echo Skill does allow you to export a thermostat to Alexa, but I'm also pretty sure it operates within the limitations of the Hubitat-provided Ecobee support (ie., if you can't do it with HE's Ecobee support, you can't do it with the HE Echo Skill and my ES thermostat driver either).
So sorry about that. I figured if I have these questions, others might too and it might be helpful.
Does that have any major impact on Ecobee sensor battery life (or others) or do they operate independently?
Keenect Lite mostly runs independent of any physical thermostat. KL looks at physical room sensors (in my case Ecobee room sensors) or the main thermostat to read temp levels. You can set up fake/virtual thermostats for each room as temperature set points/goals so that the vents open and close accordingly. But KL itself canāt change the actual thermostat. I just wasnāt sure what your āsmart ventsā portion of ES does.
I was just thinking that itās not a whole heck of a lot of complex calculations that these hubs perform even with our devices or custom code so using something like AWS across tends of thousands of GPUs to process is overkill. Local memory on the other hand is a different story.
Ugh. So basically thereās a memory leak bug and the way 3rd party code interacts is probably related to this seeing that the HE devs recommend only running stock code when things go wrong. Sounds like it may be an issue surrounding 3rd party device logging hooks or the way the logging is stored and then released in memory.
There should be a way to poll when the memory isnāt properly released.
So, I should probably find a way to schedule frequent hub reboots in the off hours. Good to know...
I wasnāt completely sure if Ecobee sensors only polled in 5-minute increments making it less accurate.
Also, Ecobee sensors arenāt the cheapest or if could utilize other cheaper sensors, perhaps I could take the average readings of a room for greater accuracy (I think Cobra wrote a sensor averaging code.)
That would be amazing. Iām not sure why Ecobee never implemented this aside from their sensors not having a built-in humidistat (afaik.) Their ecobee humidifier control is also very short-sighted as my physical/main thermostat is closest to the air handler so it comes on, blasts my thermostat with humidity and then switches it off too quickly. So my main ecobee room might hit 42% RH, but other rooms are imbalanced (shut off too soon or too late.) As you know from your thermal comfort, humidity levels makes a HUGE difference in perceived temps. This is one thing that has always bugged me about their system.
Sounds like your smart vent function might duplicate Keenect Lite functions and pose a conflict if enabled but Iād rather keep things simple and better whenever possible. Does it also allow for partial opening of vents, vent opening minimums and maximums? One thing I noticed is that KL is smart (and more comfortable) about partial vent opening whereas default Keen software was just binary (only open or close.)
Awesome. I think thatās one thing KL doesnāt support directly.
Looks like Iāll do some testing by disabling the default Ecobee Alexa/Echo skill and seeing if any HE commands/queries are available for it and if itās reliable.
Thank you kind sir. It definitely does and itās much appreciated. I will have to experiment later this week with this when my time frees up.
Nope - nothing changes. Sensors send data to the thermostat when they detect a change; the thermostat then sends that data to the Ecobee Cloud, where ES can see it and reflect the new values to the ES Sensor devices.
That is pretty much what the ES Smart Vents Helper does, except that Smart Vents can average multiple sensors for the temperature.
We think it is more related to the "try/catch" error mechanism as implemented by Hubbitat development. It is likely that their drivers also experience/invoke the problem, because users with no 3rd party Apps or Devices have experienced the same issues as well. And the code written by 3rd parties uses pretty much exactly the same tools, calls & methods used by HE development.
This may not be necessary - many users have had no issues running ES on the HE hubs. But now you know what to do if you do experience slowdowns...
See above - the Ecobee sensors aren't polled, but the Hubitat-provided Ecobee support does only poll (for all updates from the Thermostat) every 5 minutes. ES can poll every 1,2,3,5,10,15,30,60 minutes (your choice, but most people use 1 minute for maximum timeliness of updates)
If I were you, I would increase the target humidity at the thermostat. But a Smart Humidity Helper would automate that. I'll have to figure out how to emulate the "Frost Control" setting first, though...wouldn't want the Helper to frost up your windows...
Yes, yes, and yes - in fact, maximum vent was just added last week, at another users' request. And, I'm pretty sure that the Keen's will still override the "closed" setting based on static pressure at the vent, so there's that.
Is there a way I can be notified of changes to your great apps using a notification of some sort? I don't frequently go to the community pages and there is so much information on them I sometimes miss updates.
The only thing I can think of is for you to mark this as 'Watching'. You can get an email for every post and it will display a count of missed posts when you login here. That may be more than you want but you will be able to track this without having to check the community.
At some point I will build in a notification of changes, as has been recently done for Echo Speaks...I'm working on a backlog of other projects at the moment, so tracking the updates as suggested above is the best I can do right now.
Omg. That was one of the most poorly documented/worded function in the Ecobee universe and I beat my head many times trying to figure that function out.
Thanks again. Iāll have to try to tinker with things this weekend.
Iām surprised that HE wasnāt programmed to display app/driver updates from 3rd parties in the same HE update notification area or at least next to the app/driver list itself.
There are two sides to the discussion on notifications of new code. One side is that once a system is running an stable many no longer update the drivers or apps to maintain stability. And then there is always update crowd. Myself I used to be in the always update crowd until I got into mission critical work with automation and now I moved to the "version that always works". That was one thing that upset me with SmartThings they would update without consent but at least they notified. This approach with independent developers could break their code and remember having to code around updates that Samsung put in place until the developer would resolve the issue.
I would like to see that there are updates, evaluate, and decide to deploy or hide that update like I can do in Windows and other operating systems. I have over 60 deployments of various home automation platforms and I find Hubitat lacking in some areas but the big win is local control for most and cloud where necessary. I tend to follow what my clients like but I still have my personal preferences. I have a client that has been running for over 4 years without a update to the base firmware and still is happy with their automation. I don't dare update to the latest version there
When I get A Round Tuit, I will be sure to implement a selector for users to decide if they want update notifications or not (default will be "no").
I will probably do something like presenting a link to the update notice, so that you can see what changed and decide from there if you want to install the update or not. At present, the code does not insist that everything be at the latest version, so you have some flexibility, but often an update will be dependent upon changes in other modules - I will strive to make that clear as well.
Same here. Iāve done enough beta testing over the past 20 years and have had so many things break in that amount of time, that I prefer not to be bleeding edge in most cases these days. The last straw was installing Win ME on my brotherās work computer... Just no time for it any more with family, work and renovations. For me itās simply not worth the hassle especially when it starts tinkering with water heaters and temperatures. I think updates should be responsibly labeled as ābug fixesā or āfeature updates.ā In some cases, I see some software versions labeled as āstable.ā But, itās hard if not impossible to get all coders using the same good practices.
Curious, which areas in particular? Localization is the dealbreaker for me. Iāve seen an incredible difference mainly moving my smart vents off of their cloud handshaking with Ecobee just to having the vents in house. This erased all doubts. Secondly, Iām fed up with devices that were supposed to work together but either no longer or are charging fees. Thereās so many things that just donāt need to phone home or rely on the cloud in order to work. Also with the cloud, thereās additional points of failure and lag which adds to troubleshooting.
Although I was tempted to install HA on my Qnap NAS and test it out, after reading Iāve decided upon HE.
I guess Iām insular as I didnāt realize people could be doing this for a living. Thatās pretty cool. Iām starting to wonder if Iām in the wrong business...
Hey, by any chance do you have a fan scheduler and if not, is that something possible to go beyond Ecobeeās settings?
Example of my use: I only use 2 rooms at night and my smart vents keep the rooms stable and bills low. The fan is set X minutes/hour for air circulation throughout the day, although Iād prefer it to be scheduled completely off at night. Currently with a fixed schedule, the fan pushes out warm air from the 2 rooms and the furnace needs to reheat cold replacement air more often (hence weāre spending more energy and money.)
The Smart Circulation Helper should do exactly what you need. Create more than one instance if you want different parameters at different times of the day or for different Location Modes...
