When asking if I should move from Home Assistant Device Bridge to Native Hubitat for the Ecobee thermostats and sensors both seemed to state that it would be better to stay on HADB because of reports of remote sensors not updating and random issues with control of the thermostat. Interesting conclusion.
Here is Anthropic's response:
If you migrate to Hubitat’s native HomeKit Controller, you risk losing visibility of external sensors, which would break your room-based automations unless you rebuild them with alternate logic.
Recommendation
Hold off on migrating Ecobee to Hubitat’s HomeKit Controller until sensor support is confirmed in a future update. You can:
• Stay with HA → HADB → Hub Mesh for now
• Monitor Hubitat release notes for expanded HomeKit accessory support
• Optionally test pairing on a spare hub or virtual rule to see what’s exposed
I put together my plan I was ready to pull the trigger this morning and I vetted my plan with Grok and then Anthropic to confirm. They stated it was a good plan but put up that warning. Glad that it's not true and this evening I will start the migration and let everyone know how it goes.
Ok am I missing something? I went into the Ecobee system menu and disconnected it from it's existing home kit integration with Home Assistant. Also in home assistant I disconnected it from there also. Both HA and the thermostat showed the connection was disconnected.
Then I went into the HomeKit app in the Hubitat C-8 and saw the name of my thermostat "Home" as a discovered device. On the Ecobee I went into the connect to Homekit and got the numeric code for connecting.
In the Hubitat I clicked on the pair button and it promoted for the code. I put in the code and it said pairing successful. At that time the Ecobee went back to it home screen and on the setting screen it said it was paired.
But no devices show up and this is displayed in the status of the pairing:
Any ideas? I have tried the un-pair and re-pair many times waiting as much as 30 minutes between actions.
And it seems to be a common problem. And the only breadcrumb to resolving is to factory reset the Ecobee? Strange that I can just reconnect to Home Assistant with no issues without resetting.
Factory resetting the ecobee can be bad if you had to do some custom configuration in the advanced settings for furnace compatibility. Also you lose any 3rd party registrations that may be out there and all custom schedules.
I am delaying this project as of now until something better that factory reset comes along.
That symbol says that the device is paired to something, but it isn’t your hub. Try unpairing it again, wait about 5 minutes and then try the pairing again.
Sorry to say but I waited 30 minutes after I unpaired the Ecobee, even power cycled it, shut down anything else that listens for Home Kit (Home Assistant) and the same results. After entering the paring code I get the Blue hands with the slash in it.
Based on what I read in that other thread is the "Nuclear Option" of factory resetting the Ecobee. I really don't want to do that because of the number of room sensors I have and some customization I did to the settings.
Towards the end of that thread you linked we found it seems to be related to the Add-on sensor.
I ended up resetting my Ecobee several times that day because of a few things. Found that as soon as i added one particular sensor it would stop adding properly. I believe it is the one that came with the thermostat.
When the factory reset is performed you need to add the thermostat back by itself with no add-on sensors linked. Then add them afterwords. They will show up in hubitat once the thermostat sees them after a while. I have one that won't show up in hubitat no matter what i do. I think it is what is creating the issue.
I do believe that @gopher.ny was able to reproduce the issue though and stated a fix may be on its way with 2.4.3 at some point. I haven't seen it yet though.
Thanks, I have 8 sensors. I don't even know which room I put the one from the box when I got my Ecobee 3. And ordered sensors over the years and they are all the original design with the little plastic stand.
I can afford to wait just need to get connected back to HADB to keep a couple of automations for occupancy going.
Going to see if I can add a "force pairing" button just for this scenario. If it pairs with other controller, it should be able to pair here as well, even if the device advertises itself as unavailable in Bonjour.
I tested the "forced" pairing but it doesn't complete the paring in Hubitat. From what I can see is:
In Ecobee system menu enable the Homekit and copy pariing code
Go into Hubitat and add homekit device though Homekit App and select the green Pair button and enter paring code
Within a few seconds the Ecobee will dismiss the pairing code screen
The Hubitat will spin a few seconds more and then state "Pairing has completed successfully" but the icon is the Blue hands icon stating the device is already paired.
Clicking on the blue icon a dialog box comes up with:
If you select "Yes" Hubitat will prompt for pairing code again? Well the Ecobee thinks it paired successfully with the Hubitat, the Hubitat says it's already paired with another device. The only way to get a pairing code again is in the Ecobee settings and removing the HomeKit paring. And do another start paring again on the Ecobee which generates a new code and that code doesn't work when enter into the Hubitat. And the process has to start all over again.
There is still work that needs to be done with this condition. I hope the folks at Hubitat can invest a bit more time into this since native local control is much better that polling a cloud API.
I have actually reverted back to the Ecobee Suites Integration. After all the headache i had getting it to work it went offline and i couldn't get it to reconnect for anything.
There is something happening that is causing the Ecobee to fail with homekit on the Hubitat.
Recommendation
