If you want to take full advantage of the ecobee APIs and have a reliable solution for something as critical as heating/cooling your home, then you need My Ecobee device.
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Sure, there is other options, but when you pay more than $200 for a smart thermostat, don’t you want to take full advantage of its HA capabilities? You’ve already paid for a “smarter” thermostat than a z-wave or a zigbee thermostat, don’t you want to have more HA capabilities and more reliability than a “dumb” thermostat when connected to a platform such as ST?
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Don’t you want also to have a reliable solution for a smarter “smart away” and use all your ST connected sensors to achieve a better “follow me” features?
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Don’t you want to avoid reconnecting your thermostat to ST several times a month? My Ecobee device has this unique design that avoids state variables as much as possible for more reliability in critical times. As an example, you don’t want to wake up in the middle of a winter night without heat… Most of my smartapps have been designed to use the ecobee scheduling as much as possible to work around any ST scheduling failures.
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When you have smart vents combined with a smart thermostat, don’t you want also to create physical zones at different times of the day according to your requirements? My Ecobee device will work out of the box with my zoned heating/cooling solutions. My zoned heating/cooling solutions have been designed to be reliable under all ST conditions.
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Your time is money, don’t you want to stop thinkering with IFTTT and other artifacts to trigger the home/away methods? By doing so, you’re complexifying your architecture by increasing the chain of command and you end up with much more risks of failure (IFTTT–>ST–>ecobee instead of just ST–>ecobee)…
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Don’t you want also to get comfort tips according to your own indoor/outdoor conditions? My Ecobee device is capable of detecting and showing you the trends (with a graph) in terms of runtime stats vs. your setpoints and the outdoor temp.
My Ecobee device is the smartest thermostat under ST. It took hundreds of hours of coding and testing to achieve this level of features and reliability.
In brief, it is the most comprehensive and evolutive solution for ecobee for a few bucks.
If you’re not willing to contribute a few bucks, then, yes, there are other solutions for LESS reliability and much less features.
Here is the ecosystem of smartapps available that will work with MyEcobee device out of the box:
My Ecobee device is available for download at my store:
http://www.ecomatiqhomes/store
For more details, and user feedback about My Ecobee device, refer to this thread:
Regards.