lol...never knew why I liked her, but I guess this was it. 
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If people feel strongly that I should create a new topic about this, please let me know, but there is some continuity here. Basically, my big question now is what thermostat will provide me the least amount of pain to move to? Here are sort of my requirements and I really wish I could get them without the cloud being involved, but I don't think I'm going to get away from it.
- Not Ecobee
- Money is no object. There is no thermostat in existence that will cost anywhere near what my A/C company is going to charge to do the re-wiring to get away from the Ecobee Gen 1 product (good riddance ). The cost of the thermostat itself is immaterial.
- Programmable to change temps throughout the day (pretty much every thermostat does this nowadays, right?)
- Can be controlled via a computer.
- Can be controlled via iPhone.
- Can be controlled via Alexa.
- Provides historical data in some way.
I'm probably forced to use some company's cloud services to get all this....don't you think? The Honeywell 9000 seems like it might be an option.
As I said, Honeywell T6 Pro. Once attached to Hubitat can do all that and in a more customizable way than with a single app dedicated to the thermostat.,
Currently mine is running on Homekit as well as Hubitat dashboard. If I want I could connect it to alexa or google (don't want to as I hate talking to my house)
All local... (Honestly this goes for any zigbee or z-wave thermostat but I favor the Honeywell and Sinope)
@rlithgow1 is correct. I think the most challenging piece of your request is probably going to be the last one (historical data) depending on your comfort level with adding on the pieces you will need (webcore, influxdb, grafana, etc) and then making sense of the data in the way that some of these vendors do... albeit, with cloud assistance.
I think the only one I'd stay away from is the Google Nest products if you want to integrate into Hubitat because it requires some serious hoop jumping.
TBH, I would recommend Ecobee 
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I literally laughed out loud. It isn't so bad, only when they talk back.
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I agree with Rick that you can use basically any thermostat that connects directly to Hubitat (e.g. Zigbee, Z-wave or WiFi/matter over LAN), since Hubitat can take care of all those others needs, including interfacing with Alexa.
But the reporting of historical data can get tricky. Hubitat has no built-in graphing capability for sensor data, but there are community developed solutions that can accomplish this.
Do not use the Honeywell T6 Pro. It does a terrible job at controlling multi-stage HVAC equipment. I would also not recommend the Zen zigbee thermostat for the same reason.
If you like how ecobee thermostats controlled your 2-stage system, then get a zwave or zigbee thermostat that permits staging control based on a delta T as well as run time. The majority of zwave and zigbee offerings control staging via cycles per hour (CPH), which does a bad job both from the perspective of comfort and using energy efficiently.
Honeywell has more expensive cloud-connected thermostats that do permit staging control in the same way as the ecobee.
I didn’t use ecobee thermostats from 2019 to 2023 and tested pretty much every zigbee and zwave thermostat I could lay my hands on. The one that came closest to the ecobee vis-a-vis indoor comfort and maximizing energy efficiency was the GoControl. This was with a 4H/2C heat pump.
In the house I moved to last year, I returned to ecobee thermostats, albeit also with a local integration via Home Assistant.
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I think @neonturbo has this thermostat. I’m pretty sure that it does staging like the ecobee. So I’m guessing that it will provide you with the same performance as the ecobee.
Thank you. It is going to give me an aneurism, but the path of least resistance is starting to make it clear that I might need to go back with Ecobee. I just don't want to do a bunch of coding for historical data. I'm just in disbelief I'm going to have to pay my A/C company probably many hundreds of dollars to replace my perfectly good Ecobee with another Ecobee. Congratulations universe, you win.
The Honeywell 9000 looks like it will also work well.
For me the driving force to return to ecobee was that I didn’t want to maintain an elaborate database to record historical data in my new (to me) house. In addition, I had written elaborate automations to approximate the HVAC equipment control built into ecobee. And I didn’t want my comfort to be reliant on my programming - what happens if I die scenario ….
Finally, I love the analytics provided by beestat.io, which only works with ecobee thermostats.
Call ecobee support, they’ll offer you a decent discount on a new thermostat.
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Check your power utilities website. Duke Energy provides my power and had rebates for smart thermostats which may help make your decision.
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You are going to be really honked off when Amazon starts charging you a subscription to use Alexa. It's not a matter of if at this point. They have said it's coming; they just haven't announced when or how much.
As for Ecobee, while I do not necessarily disagree with you, it does however make sense that when their products have changed and evolved to a point that it is no longer justifiable from a business standpoint to maintain a free service that requires a separate API, servers etc., to be maintained, that the product would take a hit. They could have gone the route of so many others and completely bricked those early thermostats rather than just dumbing them down. Sure, you are probably correct assuming that for the most part, most customers would just buy a newer model. You are also probably correct that they may sell a few hundred or maybe even thousand devices, but I tend to agree with others that the number of new devices they sell as a result probably won't even move the needle on their bottom line, not to mention the bad will it is certain to garner with a percentage of their customer base (like yourself).
It seems at this point you have a choice to make, local control, or voice control and the cloud requirement that comes along with that. That cloud requirement brings with it the risk that one day your devices may again be made inoperable in the manner which you would like to use them.
In the past we were heavily invested in Alexa and used voice control a lot. But after they introduced the highly flawed, horrible Idea of Hunches, we took them all out. My wife was mad, but she was madder at hunches. I finally got her voice control back with HomeKit, and she doesn't even use it. My point here being getting your family away from the Alexa voice control may not be as big a task as you think it might be.
This discussion has made me start to debate if I want to continue to use my Ecobee (even though it is newer, and I really don't NEED the cloud services behind it (since I can make it local through home kit). It's more of a principal question. Maybe a Z-wave T6 is in my future.
I'm not affected by this. I think I had a gen 3 lite to start (after Nest decided to heat my house to over 80 one day), and I'm on some newer variety now. I've been thinking about replacing it with something like a T6 pro Z-Wave or other "local only" thermostat when I learned that Generac purchased ecobee and probably not so incidentally, they stopped issuing API keys. So, I'm looking at alternatives. In the meantime, I disconnected it from my Apple Home system and connected directly to Home Assistant via the HomeKit. But I'm thinking about other solutions that are local only, and cannot be remotely changed/updated/changed for the worse. Right now my ecobee is working well enough, and I hope I'm not in any danger of ecobee doing something to screw my setup. So no rush for my setup...yet. But that's the danger of cloud connected systems (and to an extent, any web connected device that updates itself, even if all control is local).
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Choose wisely. There are lots of zigbee/z-wave thermostats, but very few that can be configured well to run multi-stage heat or multi-stage cool. The vast majority use cycles per hour (CPH) to determine how long HVAC equipment runs in stage 1 or stage 2. This caused me no end of problems.
There are a few z-wave thermostats that do support staging control like the ecobee does (i.e. magnitude of delta T and run time). The GoControl is not an exciting looking thermostat, but it does a great job at staging control and can even be tweaked using an app to support reverse staging. The 2Gig 700-series thermostat also supports staging control using a similar mechanism to the ecobee.
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They are already charging for some Alexa services like Guard now. I think you are thinking of the future version of Alexa that uses generative AI.
I doubt they’re going to completely drop the less chatty version of Alexa once they offer the new one to the public though.
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FWIW, I got their email announcements and I don't own any of the affected products.
You might want to see how your account is subscribed to their messages since you missed them.
But they aren't turning them off. They will continue to work as programmable tstats. Only the cloud service is discontinued.
And it's definitely alright for you to be annoyed at them. I really hated depending upon their cloud service and I'm happy I don't need to anymore.
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Yes, that is what I was thinking of.
That remains to be seen. in recent years they don't seem to rule out any way to raise revenue, especially with as much as they complain about how Alexa is a black hole loss leader for them. They expected it to drive more shopping, and it hasn't lived up to those expectations.
Look at prime, where the price goes up every year but the benefit to having it is whittled away every year to the point that even prime video is no longer ad free, but you can certainly pay for it. Maybe the less chatty version will continue to be free, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it all but essentially useless at that tier either, that is the way most subscription-based programs work. With the way AI is growing, and evolving any "basic" non-AI version (of almost anything that has an AI version) will likely be in a similar situation.
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The conspiracy theorist in me thinks amazon will dumb down Alexa to make the paid/AI version more appealing. They won't drop current functionality completely, but they'll do something to make it less appealing than something you pay for. They need to do something if the service loses as much money as it does.
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I would find this easier to swallow than what Ecobee has done here. Probably the biggest reason being the difference in cost. I WISH Ecobee would have asked me for a subscription service to keep the services running on my gen 1 Ecobee, but they didn't. Any subscription fee to use with Alexa is going to pale in comparison to the cost I'll have to spend to not only get a new thermostat, but then to have my A/C company come in and do the rewiring. I'm anticipating that the thermostat and rewiring is probably going to end up costing me around $600 and it could be more. I just don't know yet.
Come to think of it, you know what would have been nice for Ecobee to do? They should have created another box that would allow you to put it in the place of the current one. It is just wires in and wires out...right? I wouldn't even think a complex circuit board would be needed for anything like that. The box would then allow for gen 1 Ecobee users to leverage another Ecobee or any thermostat they might want. If the instructions were simple, this is probably I could have done on my own, but I'm not going to risk it otherwise I know I'm dreaming here, but it would have softened the blow.
I really appreciate all your input here on multi-stage systems since I have one and this issue never even dawned on me. It is a hard pill to swallow, but I feel inclined to go back with Ecobee just so I'm exchanging "like for like" and it will probably give me the greatest chance of no issues. I don't need sensors or anything like that so I suspect it will be the Ecobee 3 Lite.
Additionally, I like what people have said about its use with Homekit. I'm a complete newbie with Homekit, but from what I'm gathering is, this Ecobee can be used locally with Homekit without the need for cloud services. I might not use it at first, but to have that sitting there in case they do something like this again will give me some comfort.
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