You'd figure it shouldn't be THIS hard to get an ecobee wired up

(Amauri Viguera) #1

I’m on my third support guy at this point, and the general consensus seems to be that they’re scratching their heads. I figured I’m sure someone somewhere here has one of these things wired up in a similar fashion (hopefully) and they can give me some pointers where the vendor has miserably failed… :slight_smile:

So I’m going to boil this down to avoid confusion…

  • I have an oil furnace for heat
  • I have central air, with an air handler for the downstairs and another for upstairs (large house)
  • I have a Taco 503 zone controller, with 3 zones… zone 1 has priority for a water heater. zone 2 is the second floor thermostats (which work fine) and zone 3 is the downstairs thermostat – where I want to install the ecobee.
  • I have 6 wires available, so getting a C wire to power the thing is not an issue.

Because it’s a dual transformer system, ecobee says I have to run the C wire to the air handler common. No problem.

They also said…

  • Rc at the thermostat goes to R at the air handler
  • W1 at the thermostat goes to W at the air handler
  • G at the thermostat goes to G at the air handler

And here is where they’re apparently stumped for some reason. Y1 should go to Y (?)… but there’s no Y. The zone controller lists Y also as C. And with this configuration there would be no wiring going to the zone controller to call for heat.

So that’s basically where I’ve been… through many, many support emails and apparently nobody on their end can figure out this magical setup, which I’m sure is not that difficult, to get the ecobee connected and working properly.

Any ideas?

#2

Do you have an oil boiler for heat or does each air handler on each floor handle both the heat/AC?

(Amauri Viguera) #3

I have a boiler for heat in the basement.

And there’s an air handler in the basement for the first floor and another in the attic for the second floor. And two AC units outside.

It’s a big house :grinning:

#4

I have the same setup actually. The R/Rc is for your heat, you need this line from your boiler. The Y/Y2 is for your AC, which will come from the air handler. You need to connect the 24V common from the air handler to your Ecobee.

The Y2 would be for second stage AC, which is what I have you may only have Y.

Oh yes I forgot the W would also come from your air handler, this is for the fan in the air handler.

(Amauri Viguera) #5

Hmm… So R at the air handler goes unused?

Because I have 8 wires coming out to the unit. Two purple going to “boiler” which run off somewhere. Two orange labeled “24v valve” which are capped.

And then W, R, G and C/W which is brown and is supposedly Common.

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#6

Well tell me this do you have 2 separate bundles of wires, one coming from your boiler and the other from the air handler going directly to the T-stat? Or is it wired so that the boiler is terminated at the air handler and then a single bundle of wires is ran to the T-stat from the air handler.

(Amauri Viguera) #7

As far as I can tell everything terminates at the air handler, but there’s also the zone controller… That has to come into play somehow :grinning:

I think the way everything was wired the old thermostat was going to the air handler and the zone controller.

#8

I would trace the wires to be sure, but the 2 purples should be your R & RC for the boiler in this case. Then just match up the rest W, Y, G and C(brown/common) to the Ecobee’s terminals.

(Amauri Viguera) #9

Yeah I tried that but it doesn’t work quite right. The ecobee turns on and everything appears to be fine, but if I connect W to W1 it immediately starts calling for heat.

And this is even without any wiring at all going to the zone board, which is doubly strange.

I figured everything could be rewired and it would be relatively simple, but it’s looking for and more like there has to be some kind of professional intervention in here :slight_smile:

#10

Yeah your setup is more complicated then what I had. I actually have separate wire bundles for my boiler and air handlers, and no zone controller. So at each T-stat for each floor I have 2 separate bundles, one from boiler and one from 1 of the 2 air handlers. So basically my boiler is completely separate from both AC systems.

That third zone for the water heater could have been wired in some how if your water is heated from the boiler.

Probably best to call in an expert at this point.