Nest or ecobee 3

I am in dilemma here. I am new into home automation. I ordered my smartthings starter kit through amazon yesterday for my new home. I am confused regarding what to pick for thermostat. I have been reading the discussions on this forum. While I like the look of nest a lot, probably because it is colourful, I learnt that it is not (officially) compatible with smartthings. Ecobee 3 is a second option. I have a new house with three thermostats. The first floor has a dampener (two thermostat) and second floor has a separate unit. There is not much price difference between nest and ecobee 3. But with three thermostat, I am looking at 800 USD. Its a big investment and hence i want to pick the right one. There have been posts on this topic before but they date back to 2014. What has been your exerience with these two till now? Will I go wrong if I pick nest, which i find visually more appealing? ècobee has remote sensors, but not sure if they work well unless you put enough number of them through out the house. Any advice from those who have used them will be very useful

neither. Get either a Ct100/CT101 or a Honeywell Zwave if you are wanting to incorporate into ST. Nest and Ecobee are both Wifi and do not directly connect to ST and Nest is becoming less and less reliable from what I am reading in the Forum.

Save your money and go to lowes for under $100 you can get their Iris thermostat.

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I’m a bit biased, but I would have to say neither as well.
If you weren’t doing an HA system I would go with the Ecobee, but with HA, you only need a dumb thermostat.
Spend the extra money on sensors that you can use for other things as well as remote temperature readings.
If you’re looking for a more modern look, the Zen or a PEQ Perl, if you can still find one work very well.

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Can you tell us more about the house? Heating and Cooling type? Age of the house? How many SQFT, How many levels. If you have three thermostats I assume it is a big house. Depending on the location of each, you could just replace a high use area and see if you like the EcoBee or Zen or CT100 etc. I would personally go with the the simplest one that you can find. CT100 should be perfect for you

My house is 5100 sq feet and brand new construction. It has two carrier units installed - one in the basement for first floor, and one in the attic for second floor. While second floor is controlled by one thermostat, the first floor is split using a dampener and two thermostats. Right now the installed thermostat is from carrier. I am looking for something which integrates well with smartThings but is also aesthetically nice to look at. What is that nest and ecobee3 cant do using smartThing Hub which lets say a compatible and well validated thermostat like CT100 can do. What disadvantage do i have if I use one ecobee3 plus other dumb thermostats?

I forgot to add, I have heating plus airconditioning in the house. Havent put humidifier, but plan to put sometime later

They are all capable and fine thermostats, the nest and the ecobee integrations with st aren’t as strong or robust as the zigbee or zwave thermostats. The nest will likely never be officially supported by st, this is a nest issue. The ecobee 3 I think will be supported very soon, if it isn’t already. If you intent to run your thermostat from st, St has all the smarts and more that the smart stats do and you won’t be fighting the smart stat smarts when trying to automate the Stat from st.

I was just reading a post a bout a nest frying the $800 controller board in a carrier unit.

I had a nest before I went HA. It now is in a drawer. Like Mike said if you want the more modern look and want to spend the money go with the Zen. It would be about 600. You can order the Lowes Iris on Amazon for $78 each (Iris and CT100 are the same thermostat)

The zen isn’t 600, thought they were more like a buck fifty…

he has 3 thermostats so $200 each X 3

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I like the look of Zen. Its very pretty and 185 USD per piece on amazon (70 USD cheapar then ecobee 3). Has anyone used zen before and happy with it. Does it show present room temp in addition to programmed room temp (nest doesnt show both for example). Can I pair a temp sensor from smartthings with zen to make it function like ecobee 3 with remote sensors? I could only find 13 customer reviews on amazon for zen.

The only issue to be aware of with the zen is that it does not have a built in scheduler.

I have a zen, and a perl, used to have 2 ecobee SI yes, the zen shows current temp and set point, but not at the same time.
The display is not color, it’s a dot matrix affair. But you won’t be spending much time messing with it, this is home automation after all…

just bought an Ecobee 3, had a zen, pulled it off due to lack of a reliable scheduler in SmartThings, had a Nest and had the Control4 thermostat (with a control4 system) and a dumb honeywell tstat.

The ecobee3 is by far, the best thermostat of them all that I have had. It can and does integrate well into SmartThings, but really don’t need to unless you want to trigger off of its many sensors, etc.

For the extra few bucks for the ecobee3 compared to the zen or equal to nest, go ecobee3. Just my opinion. YMMV.

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Wouldn’t you need a scheduler to program the day night whole week? Sorry I am new to home automation and dont know if this works differently than traditional way of using thermostat.

Can you please explain further, what you mean by this. Do you suggest not integrating smartthings with ecobee3 sensor as it may intefere with its working?

Loving my ecobee3, had it for three weeks. House is 60 years old, forced air furnace, humidifier, air conditioner. I just have one thermostat and one remote sensor, though.

If you have a furnace, a damper, and another furnace, you might be better going the cheaper route.

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No. SmartThings won’t interfere with ecobee3. But a zen relies on SmartThings to work on a schedule. Where ecobee3 has a built in scheduler and many advanced features that make it one of the best thermostats out their, IMO.

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I was looking at the same thing albeit a smaller house with 2 heat/cool thermostats, I am new to smartthings as well.

There are several apps that perform very similar functions to the ecobee from within the SmartThings system. The Ecobee sensors/etc are proprietary radio, there is an app that allows you to access that data, however it is not a direct call to the sensor, it is a call to the ecobee API. It only updates every 10 min (don’t recall the exact period). So I believe what the recommendation was is to buy the $100 thermostats and add your own sensor array through SmartThings and let ST control it.

Think it comes down to how much you want to fiddle with it to get it setup. Or if you have an issue with 'Wife Acceptance Factor" where a commercial ready to go but control-able through ST is better for your needs.