SmartThings with Ecobee modes

I know there is a lot of information out there about Ecobee and SmartThings and I have started messing with the custom Smart Apps and Device Handlers.

I am not really sure if I am going down the right path though.

Let me put my use case out and maybe somebody can give me some tips for the best way to accomplish my goal.

I sleep at my house every other week for the most part. So I want both SmartThings and Ecobee to be smart enough to know that when I am away, I want the Ecobee mode to stay in away. I don’t want Ecobee schedules to take over and put it into sleep mode.

When I am home, I use SmartThings presence sensors to change SmartThings to home when i am present, I want the Ecobee to run as Home. Then at night, 8 PM, I want the Ecobee to switch to Sleep, but only if I am present. Then at 5 AM I want the Ecobee to switch to Home, but only if I am present.

I have some stuff cobbled together between the Ecobee scheduler and using Yonomi to adjust the modes based on its presence sensor, but I don’t like using multiple apps and systems and schedulers. I really want Smart Things to do all the heavy lifting if possible. I also see that I can accomplish some or most of this with IFTTT as well, but again that is one more app, one more thing to integrate.

So my question, is there a way to accomplish my goal with SmartThings only? If so, how do I do it? After I have installed the updated device handlers, the SmartThings automation is still not able to set the mode of the Ecobee. If I am understanding right, a Ecobee SmartApp can synchronize the mode to away/home setting of SmartThings, but I am not sure if that will accomplish changing to sleep and back to home at 8 PM and 5 AM. I am thinking I might have to create a “Sleep” mode in SmartThings to synchronize sleep with the Ecobee SmartApp?

Thank you,
Kevin

This should be straightforward using EcoBee Suite. First you need to get ST modes doing what you want.
It sounds like you have home / away modes set up on the ST hub and switching automatically based on presence. Do you need to distinguish between sleep (I’m home) and night (I’m away)? For instance, if you want certain things to happen at night if you’re away but not if you’re home, you might want to create separate modes - I’ll call them Night(Home) and Night(Away). If nothing’s happening when you’re not there then you can just let Away run all night and you don’t need a separate mode.

So your automations in ST, roughly, are:
-When Kevin is present and time is 5am-8pm, change mode to Home.
-When Kevin is present and time is 8pm-5am, change mode to Night(Home).
-When Kevin is not present and time is 5am-8pm, change mode to Away.
-When Kevin is not present and time is 8pm-5am, change mode to Night(Away).

Then you need to install Ecobee Suite Manager - see instructions in the link - and create some Mode/Routine/Switches/Program helpers:

For each helper, the trigger is Location Mode Change (you can pick multiple mode, so Away and Night(Away) can be handled by the same helper. Set them to switch to the appropriate mode, and, most importantly, “Select Hold Type” to be “Until I Change”. That way the Ecobee schedule is overridden and ST is in complete control of the thermostat mode.

This is the primary feature I use in the suite but there are lots of other useful things it can do. Turning off the AC if I open the windows is another nice one.

So for anyone else that comes across this and it may help them. I ended up creating a virtual switch called “Virtual Switch Home” and a new mode called “Sleep”. I toggle the virtual switch on when my presence is detected via a automation routine and I toggle it off when my presence leaves via a automation routine.

I then have an automation routine that checks if it is between 8 PM and 5 AM and my “Virtual Switch Home” is on, i then change the mode to Sleep.

In Ecobee Suite Manager using the routines Smart App, I have it change the Ecobee mode to “Sleep” when Smart Things mode changes to “Sleep” and the same for Home and Away.

After messing around with this I went into Yonami as I used to use that to set Ecobee modes because it just worked out of the box and started disabling what I had setup there. I then realized Yonami now has cloud routines. Before it only worked if the app was installed and your phone was on. I am guessing most of the stuff I did in SmartThings could be done in Yonami now as well. But Smart Things is a bit more configurable although it takes more work to install SmartApps, etc. And Yonami, at the moment has more limited support for Phillips Hue colors and for my Smart Locks.

Back to Smart Things, I also have a bunch of Phillips Hue lights and I had previously setup the Smart Lighting app to do my lights as it has more options than automation routines. This is starting to get messy now because some of my automation schedules are in Automation routines and some of it is in the Smart Lighting. I really love and hate that there are many ways to configure and manage SmartThings.

I really want all my automation in one spot, so I think I am going to have to somehow pull all my Smart Lighting routines and use more virtual switches or other triggers to start the Smart Lighting routines instead of doing my automation in Smart Lighting. IDK…

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This drives me a little nuts (especially with the limited capability in the new app to track down what automations are associated with a device). I have a crapload of SmartLighting routines as well as 10-12 automations and just trying to find the right entry to modify in the SL list is a chore, much less going back and forth between the two lists.

Upon further testing it appears eco+ mode overrides Ecobee Suite Manager. I had to disable eco+ to get Ecobee Suite Manager to change modes.

Is that correct? If it is correct is there a way to utilize both eco+ and Ecobe Suite Manager?

Thank you again,
Kevin

so I’m coming across this now, it appears that the solutions from 2020 are all deprecated. is there anybody working on a solution that works these days?