ecobee Smart Thermostat 4 Heat-2 Cool with Full Color Touch Screen

I really wanted to like this thermostat. It's not as sexy as the Nest, but had the reputation for being more reliable. Unfortunately, I've been frustrated by its wildly variable temperature sensor, strange humidity settings, and apparent firmware quirks. After 3 weeks, it's going back. Most likely, the issues with this thermostat were exacerbated by the extremely cold weather we have had since its installation and the fact that our furnace could barely keep up. This caused me to fixate even more on the detailed statistics captured by Ecobee. I might have been largely satisfied otherwise.Pros:Others have complained about the installation complexity. Actually, it is relatively easy, except that you have an interface box to mount near the furnace. The big advantage to this system is that it takes only four wires between the thermostat itself and the interface box -- something that virtually every modern furnace installation will have in place already. Most other WiFi thermostats require a minimum of 5 wires and then don't control the humidifier. Even a very complex system with multiple systems and accessories only need 4 wires to the thermostat. Ecobee's customer support for the installation was excellent, with convenient hours, and no long waits. However, they could have saved the call by providing an outline for how to power the interface using the 12VAC output from the furnace controller. In that regard, the instructions were insufficient, in my opinion.Humidity control - Has a built-in humidistat in the thermostat. If you have a whole house humidifier, this will control it and will automatically adjust the humidity level based upon the outdoor temperature.Flexible scheduler - Supports building custom period types beyond the standard "Sleep", "Home", and "Away".Statistics - Lots of stats available and downloadable.Cons:Touch Screen - As others have remarked, this is outdated technology. It's like my GPS from 2009. It can be maddeningly difficult to use. Some have complained about the slider mechanism for adjusting the temperature. This can be made much more tolerable by setting a more limited heating and cooling range so that the slider becomes less sensitive to small movements.Humidity Settings - I have two issues with how this unit manages humidity. First, according to customer support and my experience, the thermostat doesn't use forecasted temperatures to affect its humidity settings. As a result, if you have a 30F drop in lows from one day to the next, which is pretty common here in Chicago, you're pretty much guaranteed to have condensation on your windows, if not frost. The humidity takes a lot longer to go down than the temperature, so anticipating the change is important to avoid condensation. Customer Service explained that they can't use the forecasted temperature because weather reports are often inaccurate. What a bunch of baloney! Weather reports are actually very reliable with regard to temperatures over a 48 to 72 hour timeframe. The thermostat already displays the extended forecast temps, so it's not that the information isn't available.The second issue I have is with the absurd settings they provide for automatic humidity adjustment. Essentially, you have three settings available which describe how energy efficient your windows are -- low, medium, or high. The higher the efficiency of the window, the higher the relative indoor humidity can be before condensation forms. Sounds great, huh? Well, I live in a circa 2002 custom-built home with fairly efficient (for that time) wood-frame thermopane casement windows. They're definitely not low-efficiency windows. Logically, I would set the humidity for medium-efficiency windows. The problem is, though, that as you make these adjustments, the thermostat displays how each of the settings would affect the relative indoor humidity. So, for example, it shows that if the outdoor temperature is 12F and the indoor temperature is 72F, the thermostat would adjust the indoor humidity targets as follows: High-48%, Medium-40%, Low- 21%. I don't argue with the High or Low settings, but why in the world would Medium be 40% instead of say, 34%? Medium actually works for us, if the temperature doesn't vary too much from day to day, but as soon as the temperature drops too fast, boom!, wet windows and wet woodwork. Maybe the problem is really just the failure to use the temperature forecast. The bottom line? We keep it set to "low" and regularly have more static and dry skin than when we were controlling the humidity with our simple manual dial humidistat.Temperature sensor - the temperature sensor on my unit can very by three degrees within a 5-minute span. Given that it's on an interior wall of a room at the very center of the first floor of a 3100 SF 2-story house with a basement, this should not be. When I spoke to Customer Service about this, they asked if there was a hole in the wall behind the thermostat. I explained that yes, of course, there was a hole where the wires came through the wall and that, per the installation instructions, I had stuffed some insulation into that space. In addition, I mostly covered the hole with aluminum tape used for sealing ductwork, but since there were wires coming through the wall, I had to leave a small gap. So, I had gone a step BEYOND what was specified in the installation instructions, but the Customer Service rep was STILL blaming the temperature sensor swings on that minuscule air gap. It sounded like he was making excuses for not replacing the unit. Either that, or the installation instructions are inaccurate. By the way, I wondered if the backlight might somehow be affecting the temperature sensor, so I pulled out my infrared temperature sensor and found that the right side of the thermostat was several degrees warmer than the left. I wonder how they account for that?Firmware - During this extreme cold, our furnace could barely keep up. This is our first winter in this house and I'm just now learning that a 120K 95% furnace isn't really big enough for a 3100 SF 2-story house with an additional 2000 SF of finished basement. When it was -20F, it was only able to raise the temperature by about 1.5 degrees per hour, so setting the thermostat back 7 degrees overnight was a bad idea. I really dove into the excellent statistics that were provided by the thermostat and found that it acts strangely at time, shutting off far below the set temperature. There were times that the thermostat SHOULD have been requesting heat when it didn't. For example, there was a period on 1/23/2014 starting between 4:10 and 4:15 AM Central when the thermostat was set to be at 66F until 6 AM. It was -2.9F outside with 22 mph winds. At the start of the 4:10 period, the heat was on, but it had turned off before 4:15 and at that time, the temperature was only 63F. Now the thermostat learns how much to anticipate the temperature will continue to rise after turning off the heat, so it's not necessarily wrong that it turns off before reaching the set temperature. But, this was 3 full degrees shy of 66F and it had just spent 35 minutes heating continuously to raise the temperature from 62.2 to 62.7F. There's no way it would coast to 66F. It then stayed off until shortly after 4:30 when it sensed that the temperature was dropping and hadn't reached 66F. The highest it ever reached, supposedly, was 63.9. Over a period of two weeks, I found 130 5-minute periods where the temperature was more than 1 degree below the set temperature and no heat was requested. This suggests a logic error to me, given that I have the temperature differential threshold set to only .5F. Further analysis revealed that once the furnace was turned off before reaching the set point, it would stay off until it sensed that the temperature had stopped rising and had started to fall. That part is okay, but it seems that the thermostat had expected a far larger rise in temperature than was actually achieved. So here's the end result... the heat stops early and stays off while the temperature in the house rises. But once the temperature starts to drop and the furnace turns back on, it immediately drops the temperature to essentially where it was at the time the furnace was turned off, so for about 20 minutes, the furnace was off, leaving the house 3 degrees below the set point. Is 3 degrees going to kill me? Of course not. But I expect that a "smart" $250 thermostat won't do something that dumb.

Well, I've had this unit for a while now, but i can't shake the feeling that I should have chosen a different one.Pros:- I love that the unit will allow running of the fan only for set periods (and you can customize how much of each hour it will run). I find this helps even out the temperature in the house, without having to heat/cool. This is a great feature and it really helps in my house.- Free Android app which is quite easy to use. Programming on the website was easy.- No hiccups in operation over the last several months.- Once I spent the time to install the unit into my hvac system (see below in negatives), the installation wasn't horrible. Being able to use the existing wiring to the thermostat is great. I only had to purchase a short length of 7-conductor hookup wire to complete the install.Cons:- The thermostat is actually quite small; a lot smaller than I was expecting. It was smaller than the cheaper unit that I was replacing. Personally, I find the unit to be too small and I have to actually stoop in order to view the unit correctly.- Responsiveness of the unit seems poor. When I want to change the temperature, I attempt to click and drag the icon to a new setting, but often times I find that the cursor jumps around, as if it can't register my touch. I find this to happen often enough that I actually no longer rely on the unit, I use the Android application to change the temperature.- You cannot directly access the unit over your local network, it has to go through the Internet. Personally I find this to be a huge issue and practically a deal breaker if I had known it going in. First off, in the unlikely event that Ecobee goes out of service, your unit will likely become a brick. Secondly, I find that the Android app shows you the current status of the unit and temperature to be 'within the last few minutes'. So, you want to check your app to see if the Heat is on or if it's just the fan running? Or what's the current temperature at this very minute? Too bad, the app isn't likely to give you the latest information.- You cannot program the unit from the android app. You can change the temperature and a few settings, but if you cannot change temperature points.- I often like to run the fan instead of turning on the heat/cool cycle. Although I mentioned in the Pros that this unit can cycle the fan, and I like this, they could have made it easier to simply turn on the fan from the thermostat. Instead of having the fan toggle on the top-level of the user-interface, it takes several clicks into menus to toggle it. A minor complaint, but one nonetheless.- There are only 4 time periods (Wake, Away, Home, Sleep) for programming. I know most people will only use 4, but I really would like the ability to have more fine-grained control over the temperature in my house. In this respect, this unit isn't any better than other units that cost considerably less.- Difficult installation for those unfamiliar with furnace equipment. I'm a computer guy, and I've wired my entire basement before, but I don't work on HVAC systems... I found it took me an entire day of research followed by about 2 hours to install the unit properly into my furnace. At first I tried asking my HVAC installer if he could do it, but he had never even heard of the company or the unit. He spent a few minutes looking at the manuals that Ecobee provided, but I guess they aren't even in the format that installers expect - he quoted me a high price to install. For those hoping for an easy installation, guess again.- Occasionally, when I've overridden the temperature for a bit and want to reset it, I try to use the android app and it fails to register the resume command. I mash the resume button a few times, but it doesn't seem to occur. If I go to the thermostat unit and resume from there, it works fine. Not a big deal, but it is an annoyance - I don't what to blame, local wi-fi, android app? Who knows.Other:If I had to do it over again, would I buy this Ecobee unit? I'm afraid my answer is no. I probably would choose the Honeywell wi-fi units that you can even buy at big box home improvement stores. In the end, I wanted a bigger LCD, local programming (direct access to the unit from my network), and an easier setup. I feel like this is three strikes and out for this unit. I suggest you do careful research on the negatives before selecting this unit.

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