Controlling Ecobee thermostat in an automation

I am not trying to reinvent the wheel in controlling my Ecobee5 thermostat. Up until today, I have been happy with the IFTTT/Life360 solution for geofencing when multiple location devices (such as our phones) all leave and return. The solution would change the Comfort Setting to Away when all of us would leave the geofence perimeter, and change the Comfort Setting to Home when we would return.

Unfortunately, IFTTT is dropping support for Life360 on 12/2/2020 according to an announcement email I received today from IFTTT, so … applets such as these which use Life360 will no longer work. Since Ecobee has always depended on this IFTTT solution, they never developed native support for multiple location devices to be used in their geofence setting in the Ecobee app. To make things worse, they have no plan to make this an option. Their native solution works well as long as it is only important for the Ecobee operator to have one location device to trigger geofence events. I called them today and made a feature enhancement request for them to add this functionality.

The new SmartThings (ST) app does have direct support for the Ecobee thermostat, but there is no setting to change the Comfort Setting mode in the thermostat. So, if someone has an easy to use alternative to creating an automation and changing the Comfort Setting based on geolocation … I’m all ears. I am not interested in any other automations or controls of my Ecobee thermostat other than just changing these two settings based on geolocation.

If there is no easy way to accomplish what I am trying to do … please add your vote to mine and hopefully we can get the ST development team to update the DH to add the option to change the Comfort Settings in the Ecobee thermostat.

Check out:

I use this with ST presence changing my location mode. With the mode helper in ecobee suite smartapp you can change your ecobee mode based on ST location mode changes.