I have an EcoBee 3 Lite and when I set my home to Away mode i have it set the thermostat to away mode using setAway() in the custom commands and works great! Problem is that the EcoBee holds that setting till i change it. I would like it to change to Away mode till the next normal schedule change and follow the schedule again. I could not figure out why the house was so cold on the weekend and i found out the EcoBee had "Away and holding" on it from when I ran the command the day before when I left the house.
I believe this is a limitation with Ecobee itself. setAway() is a hold setting, the only way to override that is manually at the thermostat, or by sending another command via HE.
Set a rule to run after some event (time of day, mode changes to home, etc.) with a custom action of resumeProgram - this will hand control back over to the thermostat's schedule. I prefer this because under normal circumstances, I prefer to use Ecobee's smart features. But as you're probably aware, the Ecobee can take 1-2 hours to respond to the house being empty when it would normally be occupied -- so I have the same rule that you describe.
Yeah that is exactly why because on the weekends if i leave the house i want to put it in away as a leave and put the house in away mode. I double tap down on the outside light switch to do this easily and it turns off all the lights and turns thermostat to away mode. I wonder if it is just better to rip the schedule out of the EcoBee and put it in the Hubitat that way it would force it into the modes.. Ill email EcoBee to see if there is a way to get a command to do a tempAway() or something so that it follows the scheduled routine. Next to that ill have to use a motion sensor to take it out of away mode and resume the schedule
I do get the feeling there's a trend of using HE for thermostat scheduling, but I prefer to defer to Ecobee because control through HE simply isn't dependable enough IMO and you lose out on pretty decent smart tstat functions. Between the occasional failings of HE itself, plus the Ecobee cloud going down all the time, I'm not sure it's a great idea.
I have a rule to run the HVAC fan for one hour (then returning to auto fan) if the temperature is too high from building a fire in the fire place. I also have thermostat scheduler set to control my Rheem wifi water heater. Both fail sporadically - at least once every week I have to manually fix the problem.
Long story short, I personally went the route of letting Ecobee run the show - with HE controlling some non-critical parts.
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