How do you like ecobee ? What security monitoring do you use with Hubitat?

Continuing the discussion from Anyone having OAuth Ecobee issues?:

I currently have front point security and like them but looking for something I can intergrate with HE and have a monitoring station monitor the sensors and call the police or fire department if needed

Supposedly alarm.com has the patients on the smash and grab concept on your front point hub since front point underlining system is alarm.com

See link

https://www.alarm.com/blog/crash-smash-protection
I was thinking of doing echobee and intergrating with HE

One of my main use cases connecting thermostat to front point security

If there is a fire , it will turn odd my A/C units and call the fire department

What's everyone else doing and or feed back on above

123... Go ! ...lol

Sorry, I don't have any ecobee recommendations, but I am intrigued by your alarm.com and wondering what you mean by it. Reason being, I have an alarm.com system.

Sorry I think I was in mid thought before I feel asleep , I edit the post and added more , see if that helps

I love my Ecobee thermostat, but their servers are down constantly. I would never trust them to run my home security. They build great hardware, but they need to hire better software developers.

Personally I have a very traditional Honeywell alarm system with the metal box in my basement. It is an Ademco Vista 20p. That is pretty much the #1 alarm device in the world. But it's not "smart," it's very traditional where when there is an alarm it uses a phone line (mine is cell phone) to call the alarm company. I prefer this. Hubitat is great, I really love it, but alarm systems are held to a higher standard. UL has specific requirements for alarm systems that Hubitat doesn't have to follow. If my house were burning down I want to be very sure that the fire department gets called so the traditional alarm makes me feel safer.

But I want the best of both worlds. I want it in HE too! So I use this device, http://www.alarmdecoder.com/ it basically connects that traditional alarm system to a Raspberry Pi that I can tie into Hubitat. I have virtual devices for each of my sensors (door, window, fire, carbon monoxide, glass break, motion) that I can monitor in Hubitat. There's a slight delay because it is going from RF to alarm wiring to a raspberry pi to LAN, to Hubitat... but a delay of maybe 3-4 seconds which I can tolerate. So I get a traditional alarm system that doesn't depend on Hubitat, but I can also control and monitor it from Hubitat.

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Yup - 100% this.

And invest in their cloud infrastructure.

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I have a wired Honeywell Ademco alarm system and added a Konnected alarm panel 2 and their interface module which allows the best of both worlds. It allows you to keep your existing alarm system and keypads AND connect to Hubitat so you can monitor your wired sensors from away. You still have full access to your wired alarm or utilize Hubitat's HSM. I've had no issues at all and with the interface module you'll be up an running in under an hour just by attaching the module to your existing zones in your wired alarm panel.

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An important note that people miss about Konnected sometimes, it will NOT monitor Zone 1 on a Vista panel.

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Thats 100% correct! Sorry I forgot to mention that. I believe it has something to do with a designated zone for smoke alarms.

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  1. ecobee: I love the look. The only reason I purchased the ecobee is the ability to use their remote temperature sensor. With it the thermostat can average the built in temp sensor with the remote sensor in real time. My issue was wild fluctuations in the temperature of one bedroom. The ecobee seemed to help a lot.
    I don't like it being connected to the internet. I don't like not having a local API. I've written the them multiple times requesting such an API. My next message will include the two Honeywell T6 Pro Zwave thermostats that would have been ecobee if they had a local API. While this might be fighting windmills it makes me feel better.

  2. The Hubitat is not directly involved with my security system. In my mind that is not what Hubitat is for. Mine can monitor the alarm state using a simple circuit, a NodeMCU board and @ogiewon 's Hubduino software. As setup, it is impossible for Hubitat to send a command to the alarm system or control it in anyway. Also I can obfuscate the security messages to be not recognizable. i.e. "grandma is ready for bed"

Note on my alarm philosophy:
While we have some nice things, we are not a target for anyone with the ability to hack into our systems to disable them and do some nefarious actions. Our system is simply to give my wife and I a warning of someone breaking in or of a fire. So most of my approach is driven by watching too much TV :slight_smile:

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Ditto. While we have been happy with the Ecobee 4 and remote sensors, I think I could now do a better job of temperature management with HE and a small array of temp-humidity sensors & zigbee thermostat. That said, there is a whole lot more to comfort control than just temp & humidity. Mostly, Ecobee has an app and UI that my wife likes tolerates and so she manages the hvac settings. IF I were to move this to, say, HE and zigbee tstats, then the UI, the support, and any discomfort would be in my domain --so I'll keep sitting on my hands and not mess with Ecobee.

Like others upstream, I wouldn't trust Ecobee (or any cloud service) for anything else, but we seem to get by OK with their tstats.

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I discounted the Hubitat route because:

The internal thermostat sensor and the directly connected (wired or wireless) temperature sensor are used to control the proportional algorithm. This helps with the overshoot that was my problem. If you use a remote temperature sensor and Hubitat you are simply changing the temperature setting. Not the same.

Since I purchased the ecobee I found the Honeywell T6 Pro Z-Wave will accept a remote temperature sensor and use both the internal and external to control the temperature, however their remote sensor is wired.

John

I'm currently a Nest Thermostat users, and heavily debating what I should do moving forward, as I'd like my "Eco" mode to be tied closer to my HE away and vacation status. It seems I could do that with Ecobee and the Ecobee suite, I'm just not sure if the thermostat is a good as nest or not?

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I learned too much about thermostats and how the actually controlled temperature. It turns out the best thermostat from a control standpoint is the old round Honeywell mercury thermostat (if the anticipator is set correctly).

Having said that, I think the ecobee does a pretty good job of controlling temperature. The only bad thing I can say (besides the lack of local API) is where ever they get my outside temperature it's not even close. This may be a setup mistake on my part...don't know.

John

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