I love my Ecobee. Don’t have the Ecobee3, but have no regrets. (I use the Ecobee Smart Thermostat)
Never liked Nest. And you listed 2 out of 3 of the reasons. That “constantly needing to adjust the temp” was a known issue when they were first released, and is “working as designed”.
I installed a Nest Gen 1 at my parents house in 2011. I lived there until late 2015. During this time we had to RMA their nest twice. Now being on their 3rd unit. Granted, they have replaced the units without issue, but not having heat for 1 business day is always a hassle. Usually we would end up going and buying a cheap On/Off/temp thermostat and using that thermostat until our nest came in.
When I bought my house and installed a HVAC system, I installed an ecobee3 unit. I haven’t had any issues with it and love the more detailed usage statistics online. There were some growing pains with EcoBee, where the end user was seing a few 15 min gaps in data a day, but these seem to have been fixed in recent firmware and back end updates. There was also an issue of the thermostat heating up and causing incorrect temp readings. I resolved this by just setting my thermostat to ignore temp reading from anything other then the remote temp sensors.
I personally don’t have smartthings reacting on anything from my ecobee, and that’s because of ST, not ecobee. I just added the free / opensource code on the form for the unit and may use it for something - maybe.
I recommend ecobee to all my friends. Especially now having homekit support.
I was having a lot of trouble with two nests trying to connect to the same wifi access point. The same loosing connections, etc. I bought a wifi range extender that plugs into an outlet (kind of looks like a carbon monoxide detector with a couple of antennas on it). I connect the nest to that (about 7 feet away) and the connection issues went away completely. It also gives me a stronger wifi signal on that side of the house/yard - a plus.
I wonder if one nest and 2 smoke detectors gives the same problem.
One quick question about the ecobee3 - can I configure it without a mobile device?
I have a Windows 10 Mobile device, and there is no Universal Windows App just yet. I’d like to get one but worry that without a fully featured web interface, I’ll be left hanging.
Love my Ecobee Si (especially when it was free from the power company for signing up) and you can control it from its own app, from ST, from their web site. Ecobee 3 is supposed to be even better than the Si version.
I’m a big fan of the Ecobee 3. It’s made my house much more comfortable, and it’s been rock-solid and invisible, as home “automation” devices should be. You can control it from the front panel, from a phone app, or from their web site.
The only issue I’ve ever seen was when they were losing some online data six months ago, only relevant to their online stats.