I have a vacation rental house that is setup with ST and an ecobee3 thermostat. I would like to be able to have the thermostat or ST change modes from Away to Home or whatever based upon calendar events from a specific calendar or keyword search. Ive looked at IFTTT and it will only control certain devices via calendar, not a thermostat. Also, it is set up only to trigger when the event starts but, for this to be effective, the end of the calendar event would need to switch the mode back from Home to Away.
Anyone have any ideas? Did I miss a post on here for the same sort of thing?
Hi, why not using the vacation mode already available within ecobee? You just need to use the calendar already available at the ecobee portal and indicate your vacation schedules.
What is nice about the ecobee integration with Smartthings (when it’s correctly done), it’s the fact that you don’t need to rely on external platforms for scheduling. Contrary to all other ST connected thermostats (even the Nest), you can access the ecobee schedules from SmartThings, and use them for your HA scenarios.
You should then rely on the ecobee’s scheduling as much as possible and just use SmartThings for managing exceptions to your usual scheduling (i.e. Away when supposed to be Home or vice versa).
The ecobee scheduling is much more reliable than the SmartThings’ own scheduling…Just do a search on the ST scheduling fail threads in the ST community forum…
Using external platforms such as IFTTT or even Gcal add unnecessary delays and points of failure for your use case.
For more details on MyEcobee device, refer to
There is also a Smartapp that can manage your ecobee’s vacation schedules (called ecobeeManageVacation) at my github: