Living in Florida with two HVAC units in my house, I’m super paranoid about proactively detecting issues before they become big problems. I’ve had SmartThings automations in place for 2+ years now to alert me if an HVAC unit has been cooling or heating for longer than 30/45/60 minutes at a time, and last week I swapped out my Nest learning thermostats for Ecobee Premiums. The automations worked great with Nest and always accurately detected when cooling/heating cycles started and finished. Ecobee…not so much.
As a test, I set up some simple automations to notify me when any thermostat starts or finishes a cooling cycle. With Ecobee integration, I’m getting start notifications but the thermostat isn’t running (and doesn’t need to, because the temp matches my target) and I’m getting stop notifications when the system wasn’t running to begin with or missing stop notifications when the system was running and shut off (e.g. SmartThings shows it’s in the cooling state but it’s really not)
I’m not sure if this is on the SmartThings side (polling Ecobee API and interpreting the run state incorrectly?) or the Ecobee side (API not reporting the current run state correctly?).
Two questions:
Has anyone else with Ecobee thermostats noticed this?
Where do I look besides SmartThings history to troubleshoot?
I have a similar problem with my Honeywell T5 Thermostat. It only updates in ST a few times a day. My solution is to run a refresh command every 5 min. using SharpTools. You could probably also use the Rules API do do this. You can’t do it with ST Routines.
To test if this is your problem open the Ecobee tile in ST and pull down on it to manually refresh the status. If that works the solution listed above should work for you.
My understanding is that Ecobee (I have three, so I don’t know about premiums), only provide updates like once every 15 minutes. Works for slow moving things (i use the Temp for my blind control), but not good for occupancy, or apparently your application. One other thing that is really annoying is that when Ecobee updates, it may show and send out false temps. This doesn’t happen much, but I’ve defiantly seen false triggers due to this.
Our “winter place” is a condo in Florida, so I share your concern! (My family thinks I’m paranoid anyway, so I’ll leave that analysis alone! ) We’re only there 5-6 months and away during the summer.
One of the things I have are a couple of temperature/humidity sensors that alert me when either becomes higher than some setpoint. (Humidity above 60% is a particular concern, due to potential mold formation issues.) The thermostat we currently are using to control the (one) HVAC unit is a Nest, which also can tell me what it thinks are the current temperature & humidity readings.
Last summer, I received a humidity warning via SmartThings. I checked both sensors, then the Nest as a backup. Noting the run time of the system (from the Nest app) I gave it until the next morning to “see what happens.” What happened is the humidity didn’t go down and the system seemed to be running.
So, I called for service.
It was the starter capacitor on the outdoor compressor–a simple fix–and the tech (luckily, under service contract) was out of there in less than an hour.
In no time, the monitored humidity & temperature returned to “normal” ranges.
So, regardless of the actual thermostat, I’ve found it useful to have independent humidity & temperature sensors. YMMV, of course…
) We’re only there 5-6 months and away during the summer.