Did anyone else's ecobee thermostat stop heating after the 2.3.8.123 update on 3/4/2024?
I did the update at bedtime on 3/4 and later in the morning on 3/5 (2:30am) I heard the humidifier water running but no furnace.
I disabled the Amazon Alexa ecobee skill (which was the problem the last time it did this), the Home Assistant ecobee integration and the Hubitat ecobee integration.
That did not work until I set the ecobee mode off then to heat again.
Do they all have routines independently that manage your Ecobee.
Generally, when I have something like that it is because one of the helper apps missed something like a contact switch closing, and as such the furnace didn't get turned back on after a door was opened for too long.
Did you change it to off and then heat from the thermostat itself or from one of the integrated systems. If the thermostat was already set to heat and was on, I would think that would be issue in the thermostat itself, and not any of the external systems mentioned. Even in my example Hubitat turned the whole unit off because of a door being opened for 3 min.
It may help to dig into the various integrated systems to see if any of them changed the state of the thermostat to create the condition.
I just recently switched my Ecobee integration to be 100% local. Since I see that you already have both Home Assistant and Hubitat running, perhaps you might want to change to see if performance and reliability improves?
Here is my Architecture
Ecobee Thermostat <--HomeKit--> Home Assistant <--HADB--> Hubitat
There is no cloud dependency in the above architecture. It also reduces the load on the Hubitat hub significantly, as it no longer needs to poll the Ecobee cloud for updates.
Just did the same a short time ago and cannot state how much better things work with this.
I am testing this now. I dont have a homekit hub, but it appears you can hook homekit client devices directly to home Assistant. That is what i have working at the moment. Kind of cool.
I do this as well, but for monitoring only. Using HomeAssistant or Hubitat to actually control modes and setpoints essentially reduces the ecobee's functionality to that of a $30 zigbee thermostat. Part of the value I get from Ecobee is in the intelligence of the thermostat, climate settings, etc. I'm sure that these could all be replicated within Hubitat, but why do that when they're already so well done?
There is also some general "weirdness" in the way HomeKit/HomeAssistant handles thermostats compared to Hubitat... or at least there was in late 2021-early 2022 when I worked with the HADB devs to add thermostat support to that app. IIRC, the device's behavior varied depending on whether you're in dedicated heat (or cool) mode compared to auto mode, there was no way to turn the fan on, etc.
To clarify, I let the Ecobee run my HVAC with minimal or no intervention from me or Hubitat. On the rare occasion that I need to make a manual setpoint adjustment, I'll use the Ecobee app or the physical device. Hubitat's only control (via the Ecobee Suite app and the cloud) is to manually set a specific climate settings that are not part of my routine schedule. The local HomeKit/HA/HADB/Hubitat device is used for watching for the ecobee to start a heating or cooling cycle and then triggering related automations.
After getting the furnace to work again in the wee hours of yesterday morning, I later in the day reinstalled the Hubitat skill in Amazon Alexa. (like to use voice commands at times)
I also reinstalled the ecobee app in Hubitat.
The furnace worked fine all day.... Until... I got up this morning at 3am for a nature call and the humidifier was running without the furnace.
So I removed the Hubitat skill from Amazon and removed the ecobee app from Hubitat.
Then the furnace worked.
I don't think the Amazon Hubitat skill is the culprit and suspecting the Hubitat ecobee app.
I had no problems with the furnace for about year where I had both the Hubitat ecobee app installed and the HA ecobee integration installed... until this last Hubitat update, version: 2.3.8.123.
As of now I have reinstalled the HA ecobee integration.
I'll run without the Hubitat ecobee app for a while and see.
I agree 100%. Like you, I integrate my Ecobee thermostats primarily for only monitoring purposes and historical data collection.
Funny you mention that... I do have one automation in Hubitat that does send a command to one of my Ecobee thermostats. Any time one of the two upstairs bathroom exhaust fan is turned on (e.g. a shower is being taken), I have the Hubitat hub turn on the Ecobee HVAC Fan to circulate the air, and thus keep the bathroom humidity levels under control. I haven't had a fogged up mirror in the bathroom after taking a shower since adding this automation. Once the Bathroom exhaust fan turns off, Hubitat sets the Ecobee Fan mode back to AUTO. This works great, using HADB to control the Ecobee thermostat connected to Home Assistant via HomeKit.
Hi mavrrick,
I have had the Hubitat ecobee app and HA ecobee integration running together for about a year with no problems until now. I used both to control/change the temp and display temps.
I changed it to off and then to heat in the ecobee app.
I don't use any other automations to change the thermostat.
I only use the ecobee integrations to change the temp.
Thanks dylan.c,
I did install HADB yesterday to play with it and may try your idea later.
I use the HD+ dashboard and I find it easier to change temps from there then going to ecobee since HD+ is fast and I'm always looking at it.
In fact I have had the Hubitat ecobee app and the HA ecobee integration installed together for a year and had no problems until this last update, version: 2.3.8.123.
Not saying the update was the cause but it's the only thing I can see that changed.
I stand corrected...maybe that was one of the issues identified and fixed back then. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, much less debugging stuff from 2 years ago!
I have seen the ecobee stop working correctly today(3/6/2024). The temp in the house was 66 degrees. I set the temp to 70 for heat. The heat did not activate. I looked at my sensors (I use follow-me) and well after an hour, it said my master br was still occupied and no other sensor noted occupied. Nothing was running. I went to the thermostat and noted on the network setting it stated “Connecting to Ecobee.com”. I reset the WiFi settings and after it reconnected, everything started working again. I’ve had random issues with connectivity probably in the last 6-12 months. No changes to my WiFi network in that time.
It would be nice to know when the thermostat basically goes off line. Any ideas?
It is likely the server itself. You can subscribe to the status page for ecobee to get some insight. (https://status.ecobee.com ) However, they have more outages than are actually reported on their site. This is the MAIN reason I was so happy to find that HADB does local communications. Also, why I will probably replace with a Z Wave if I ever have a good excuse.
I only kind of agree with this. See the device has limited visability so there are times that conditions in HE make sense to adjust certain criteria on the thermostat. That said the situations i am talking about are generally things where i want it completely on or off, simply hold a mode since Hubitat has better visability to what is happening in my home then the thermostat does.
I use the Ecobee Suite app that Barry wrote with helpers to 1. Turn the unit on/off when windows are opened 2. Turn off the furnace when the fireplace is being used. Then i have a rule that says stay in a specific mode until the house is woken up. This is conditional on my wife and not on me so she can stay cool until she gets up.
They both have weirdness and frankly are missing features compared to Ecobee Suites. I tried the Hubitat Ecobee tool and was very unsatisfied with it's functionality. Atleast the Home Assitant integration does provide some level of mode awareness.
@user819 if the issue occurs again i would check the device event history and look to see if something changed it. That should tell you if it was a integration or app, ect.
There is no doubt that Ecobee has been having some issues with their servers. With Ecobee Suites it has a flag when it can't connect to Ecobee Servers and flips the device to offline. I was getting blown up on my phone noficiations for a few days recently because of failures.
which driver are you using? I am using the inbuilt one and there is a "DeviceWatch-DeviceStatus" attribute that I subscribe to in an app:
So I see in the device page that I can select DeviceWatch-DeviceStatus as a status attribute, but I cannot see how to select that attribute in the trigger events. It's what I'm looking to do, but can you step me through your selections in setting up the trigger event?
NVM. I just saw the selection for "custom attribute". Thanks for your input.
One more question....Being new to HE, what are and how do you set %device% and %value%? My notification is
"Notify iPad, iPhone: '%device% is %value%(null is 0)'
--> delayed: 0:01:00"
device is null and value is 0.
Those variables will get automatically filled in with the name of the "device" that triggered the rule, and with the value of the device that caused the trigger condition to be fulfilled.
If you run the actions manually with the Rule editor, they will be NULL and 0, since there was no real trigger.
Ah! That's a very good point and that is exactly what I did. Thanks.
Download the Hubitat app
