Big sale on the manufacturer’s site on the ecobee Smart Sensor, $49.99 for two pack with free shipping. This is regularly $79.99
You must have an ecobee thermostat to act as the base station for these, and it must be within 60 feet of the sensor.
The sensor will be exposed for motion and temperature through the official smartthings integration. Be aware, though, that these are intended for thermostat control and I believe they only update every 15 minutes or so.
Each thermostat can work with up to 32 sensors if you already have some.
The following forum thread discusses the integration. The topic title is a clickable link.
For anyone who has been using these, how do the the batteries hold up? I was all excited to buy some until I saw they use CR2477, which looking on Amazon, are $5+ a battery. I have the first gen sensors and they use really cheap batteries (CR2032 I think), but if these new ones eat batteries, that would be an expensive habit. I find the first gen last a good while. Long enough I have never tracked, but I’d say at least a year or more. If these are at least as good as those then I’m probably good to get a couple.
I read in another home automation forum that these are better described as occupancy sensors and not motion sensors.
I have 3 of the new version and they’re great for the thermostat, but updates on occupancy are quite delayed. Honestly, I use them as temperature sensors in SmartThings and not much else. The motion part has been too slow for real use.
For “On” events I agree but for “Off” events they work pretty well. A timer is already built in so you can be assured that when they report no motion, that room is more than likely unoccupied.
For me, it’s been the opposite. I tried to use 1 of mine to turn on a light on motion and turn it off later when no motion was reported for 5 minutes.
Generally, it turned on my light at about the same speed as any other cloud connected motion sensor. Turn offs were occuring at about 30 minutes later instead of 5, or not at all. This was done as a test in Smart Lighting and also Automations.
They seem to stay as ‘open’ on motion for around 30 minutes. I imagine that’s normal, but hasn’t been useful for me outside the Ecobee app for explicit use with my thermostat.
Edit: I’ve not tested timing within the Ecobee app. This may just be something in how it reports to SmartThings.
From my experience, occupied motion events with these takes about 5 minutes. 20- 30 minutes seems about right for them to report unoccupied. Good for some “things” but for lights, I agree that they are pretty useless. I don’t use them anymore other than temps and core functionality within the Ecobee App. I have plenty of motions to cover almost every angle in my home.
