I have a hot water circulation pump that I want to control with my ecobee remote sensors. eg. When there is motion(presence), keep the circulator running.
I wrote RM code to see how they work and it seems the sensors trigger randomly, I think when the HVAC kicks on and off. In RM I am using Motion (values are active, inactive, and changed) with current values of active and inactive.
Does anyone have any insight into exactly how these sensors behave and whether they can be used for the above purpose?
I think you might want "occupied". The motion is pretty quick to inactivate. The "Occupied" is triggered on motion and inactivates after 30 minutes of no motion.
Thanks for the quick reply. I don't have an "Occupied" or "Presence" in either the sensor or the actual thermostat. I'm asking here to see if someone has some trick on hack idea.
For the sensor, the only values I have for motion are: active, inactive, and changed.
Except they are not local. AND the Ecobee mothershio is offline often enough that I would not use them to control local devices. I do like Ecobee but I let Ecobee control itself because it is local to itself. I have Hubitat control home and away and toggle the furnace fan on and off to control post shower humidity but if those things occasionally fail is a very minor inconvenience and goes mostly without notice.
I have one of the sensors and I was going to say the same as others it is very slow to deactivate. This also got me thinking I had never changed the battery in the sensor. I just looked and I bought the Ecobee thermostat in Jul of 2019, so 5 1/2 years now. Probably time although it still seems to be working just fine, It's a CR2477 which I don't have any. Guess I should order one.
I second this. I have real time motion/occupancy now with a small instance of Home Assistant to connect locally to the Ecobee thermostat and then Home Assistant Device Bridge to bring the sensors and thermostat states across. Other than some initial hiccups when I first set it up it has been working flawlessly.
Well depending on what you have available. I used a spare raspberry Pi, then docker on my Synology, and now a Virtual Machine in Proxmox as my home lab evolved. All of these are options. You can even buy an appliance from their web site:
Once I had it working it stopped doing OS and other updates because why break something that works with an update. My goal was Thread devices to Hubitat and only that.
I also have completely local access to my Ecobee sensors via HA (you connect them via HA's HomeKit emulation), and then HADB (to bring devices from HA to Hubitat).
I use an Raspberry Pi 3b, power supply, a small case, and a 32G MicroSD card. (about US$40 total). Just follow the instructions at Raspberry Pi - Home Assistant. I used the HAOS install, which is effectively controls everything and updates it all (just like their appliance).
edit. while writing this, I see JoeNY comment about API keys. Uggg.
Great feedback, everyone. I think adding HA to my setup gives me more options in the future. I know my neighbor got a Raspberry for a similar purpose and I like the idea of local. Also, shoutout to the community here!! One day and a solution.
AFAIK the local integration doesn’t require use of their API. It’s purely local via HA’s HomeKit integration. I set it up last week and it works great.