Last night was our little guy’s first night in his own room, and while I set Ecobee to use the Ecobee sensor in his room and maintain 68F, we were woken up to cries in the middle of the night, most likely due to the temp in his room climbing up to 74F.
The Ecobee app was showing 67-68 and the heater was still pumping hot air. His room his small so you can imagine how quickly it heated up.
I think the problem is the sensor doesn’t report back to Ecobee often enough. So my question is can you recommend an alternative solution? Perhaps using a z-wave thermostat that reports back every minute — I realize the affect on battery but it’s a necessary trade off.
Is this a new ecobee? By that I mean has it worked ok elsewhere?
Ecobee app was showing 67-68 and the heater was still pumping hot air.
Could you see the device display? Did it agree with the app or was it different? I've never used the app for control. The ecobee site is too unreliable.
I would consider turning off the app and setting the thermostat display to 68 before you but the little one to bed.
Yup I verified on the display. The problem is that when the room cools below 68 and triggers the Ecobee to turn the heater on, the room heats up very quickly. It’s not a very large room and the door is closed. If the remote sensor would report back every minute or two, that would be fine. But it seems like it takes five minutes or so, and in that time the room can heat up 5+ degrees.
I’ve had the Ecobee for two years and it generally works fine. I just never noticed that the remote sensor doesn’t update on short enough intervals because it was placed in a much larger room. Now that I’m using it in the nursery, I may have to find a different solution or no one is getting any sleep
One issue is; no mater how fast the electronics sends the temperature to them main tstat, there will be a lag while the internal temp of the remote sensor gets to the room temp.
The Homeseer Flex Sensor (FS-100 as I recall) can be set to report temps every minute when running on USB (AC power). I have several and they seem to be very accurate and reliable.
I don't know what type of heating you have, but many HVAC systems run for a few minutes after they receive the signal from the thermostat that tells them to turn off (temperature has been reached). They do this to "shed the heat", and it's not normally a problem. But in a small room, it can be a real issue.
I always found Ecobee stats and their remote sensors to be good for "overall" temperature control if you're trying to average things out, but not great for more precise control. I used a remote sensor in a small office for exactly the reasons you note (could get too warm or cold quickly) and while it helped (the office didn't go up to 80 or down to 60 anymore), the temperature would still swing more than the rest of the rooms if the door was closed, simply because the room was small.
Here's a solution I use for a very small (think tiny house - only 6x8) external office I built as a workspace during the pandemic, where I have a daytime desired temp of 68 when I'm in there working and 62 when the room is not occupied: The temperature is monitored by one of the HS Flex sensors noted above, reporting every 1 minute. The office is heated by one of those oil-filled radiator space heaters plugged into a Leviton z-wave appliance module. The heater is set to "medium" in terms of power (draws about 1200 watts as I recall) and with the rotary heat dial set so that it would normally get the room to the mid-70s as long as power is available to the heater. However, when the temp sensor gets to 68, Hubitat turns the appliance module off. The heater continues to put out heat, but that fades quickly. Then, when the temperature falls back below 68, Hubitat turns the appliance module back on. It takes a few minutes to heat back up, but is producing heat within 5 minutes or so. The result is that the room stays within a range of about 67-70 across a wide variation in external temps, which works perfectly for me (humans don't normally notice a 2-degree difference in temps). The heat rarely cycles on/off more than about once per hour.
I just built this over the summer so I haven't tried it during truly extreme temps, but I live in Maine and remember, this is a tiny office that sits on its own, built on a small utility trailer frame. We've had temps as low as about 10 thus far, but if my calculations are correct I should be fine down to about -10 or more. All external surfaces are insulated, but it also has about 1/3 of the external wall space as windows, so it's probably experiencing about the same amount of heat loss as the average home built in the past 20 years, although it might be more.
Anyway, that's the solution I found for temperature control in my own small space.
Very nice. Thank you for the detailed response. I think a powered sensor is the way to go.
By the way, maybe you already know the answer but I have a support ticket with Homeseer to see if the HS-FS-100 works as a Z-Wave repeater when powered by USB.
I have a baby just under a year old as well and I can almost guarantee the reason he woke up in the night wasn't that change in temperature, but the fact that babies do that all the time.
Unfortunately that's a hardcoded issue which we can't fix in this community
