Don’t really need the remote sensor as their is a community member here @yvesracine who has an awesome suite of apps that work with the ecobee. You could use whatever remote sensors you like if you stay within his app for reporting as the ecoebee site will not show statistical data for non-ecobee remote sensors.
I can tell you that the remote sensors made every bit of a difference when I was working on adjusting all of my vents and trying to get the temperature right in every room. However, in hindsight…I could have done it without them.
I got a Nest Gen 3 from my electric company. Only catch was to have a 2 year contract. It’s a good smart thermostat and has saved me a lot of money. The Nest E has the same functionality with the exception of the farsight feature. That just shows the time or outside temp as you walk past it instead of just the set temp. Alexa is compatible with Nest.
If you look in the ST marketplace, ecobee3 and honeywell Lyric are listed there. For the Nest to work with ST, you will need NST Manager app.
The room sensors track presence and temperature by room to approach home heating and cooling more intelligently. However, it takes about 30 minutes for the sensors to update presence (motion). Essentially, they add temperature and motion sensors to other rooms and averages the temperatures for the overall temperature in the house.
Now the cool part is, say you are in the living room and all no one else is in any other room. Ecobee has a feature called follow me which basically, according to your settings, will only monitor the temperature in the room(s) that are occupied.
Another feature is, if the Ecobee has a set schedule and you have auto away/home enabled, it will over-ride the schedule based on actually presence that the sensors are reporting.
All of this can be done outside of the Ecobee hardware with various SmartApps available here on the community and you can even cook up your own recipes with webCoRE.
So you could essentially use the Ecobee therm only and add your own remote sensors which will work much better with motion given you instant updates on which rooms are occupied or empty.
However, if you don’t want to fool with all of that, adding the remote sensors allows the Ecobee software to do all of the work for you and give you access to all of your room temperatures in it’s own applet.
I’m sold on the Ecobee and the remote sensors - so much so that if I wasn’t getting this free (which I still think there is a catch for ) I’d actually go out and buy one myself !
I even tried to sign up on the ecobee site and have a look/play but need a number from the actual thermostat.
I’ll just have to wait for it to be installed in the next couple of months. Patience, patience…
Solid choice. I have 2 with 8 remote sensors. Before, my temps were all over the place. Some rooms would be 15 degrees temperature difference. Now, everything is pretty much well tuned to 1 or 2 degrees.
Curious how you got all the rooms at the same temp when before there was a 15 degree difference? Do you have automated vents? Or how else does this work? Say the basement is always 15 degree colder, then the furnace would bring it up to say 70 degrees but then that would make the upstairs also 15 degrees warmer, making it 85 degrees. Am I misunderstanding how the system works?
good question and beat me to it ! My basement is always colder than the rest of the house, which I can handle as there is a gas fire, but more importantly is one of my sons bedrooms is colder and a real pain in winter.
Balancing the registers was the key for me. It took a while but looking at the temp logs for each room, I was able to get a better understanding of where the heat/air was going. Certain rooms are insulated better than others so those rooms did not need the registers opened as much. Others were not needed to be opened at all. Therefore, I was able to direct the air flow to all rooms appropriately leading to a much more balanced house (3,200 sq.ft.).
This was not all just by balancing the registers but also installing the appropriate window treatments which also helped big time. I went with thermal cellular shades and black out curtains in the some rooms where there were multiple windows.
I also purchased a Digital Laser Infrared Thermometer Temperature Gun which I used to locate where I was loosing thermal energy and took off some of the window trim, insulated with great stuff and caulked appropriately.
I did plan on buying the Keen Vents but considering I made the progress that I did, the payback would not have justified the purchase.
Another thing was to get a handle on the humidity in the house. This was accomplished by a humidifier/dehumidifier and 4 house exhaust fans that are on GE Switches. House now stays around 48-52% humidity.
It was alot of work but I got tired of my $500+ utility bill which now is around $150 average. Which is about $350 saving a month!! Which TOTALLY justifies the purchase of my 2 Ecobees and 8 Remote sensors!
