ecobee Smart Thermostats

ecobee Smart Thermostats

My local gas company is offering these at $94 and $124 respectively with an instant rebate and free shipping. It would be worth checking with your local gas (or electric) company to see if they have a similar offer, or if they will apply a similar rebate to one purchased here.

1 Like

FPL for me, shocked they actually offer it.

It’s more expensive than Woot, which means I better decide today if I want Nest or not, and the compatibility:

https://www.ecobee.com/fpl/

If you’re considering Nest be sure and check out Google is Ending its Works with Nest Program: What That Means for You | Digital Trends

As for other discounts on the ecobee, Entergy offers a $100 rebate on the ecobee 3 or 4 in certain areas so if you’re in the southeast this can be a really good deal.

Yeah at $179.99 the 4 is not a deal. I am in Ohio and Columbia Gas is offering the same package for $124+tax which is about $139 when all said and done. Order has been placed and now I am considering picking up a two pack of additional sensors for it. Unfortunately Woot is falling short here!

In case people are wondering if it is worth it, I purchased the ecobee3 a couple years ago because the bedrooms over our garage were cold in winter and hot in summer. The room sensors have made all the difference in getting the bedrooms comfortable to sleep in. Even better, with the temperature scheduling we have saved a lot of $$$ in heating and cooling costs.

If you get the ecobee3 Lite, be sure to factor in the cost of a couple of those room sensors. Well worth the price of admission.

We just got a new house that has a few ecobee thermostats and coming from Nest I am finding the ecobee units over complicating and far more difficult to use. I’m a tech guy and I didn’t think I would be having such displeasure using it but I think that has more to do with my using a Nest for nearly 9 years and going to something else. I have heard that the ecobee provides much better user data but the Nest is certainly much easier to use.

I have the Ecobee 4 at my house with the external sensor. It is very useful for a 2 story house. The upstairs is usually 5-8 degrees warmer than the downstairs. I have the Ecobee set to start using the temperature upstairs at 9pm, so the house cools down to that point and I don’t have to adjust the thermostat when moving upstairs.

The motion sensors work well if you have the thermostat in a room where you would want the motion detected. The problem for me is that the thermostat is in the hallway of the house, and the motion would be set every time you walked through. This made the house detection less useful for me. The motion on the sensor upstairs is good though, because it will cool the house more if it detects that someone is upstairs.

I would recommend this thermostat to people, but I don’t think the 4 is that great of a deal on here. If you have a 1 story house, I would just go for the 3 lite, but the 4 is a great tool for the 2 story homes.

Does the ecobee support Carrier units well, such as alerts for filters, UV lights, and furnace-only mode on a dual-fuel furnace?

I was using a Nest for a little over 3 months before Google Nest announced the upcoming shutdown of the Works with Nest program (they’ve since stepped back from a full shutdown, but have offered no commitment to continue supporting an open API for personally developed integrations). I develop my own smart home integrations, so this was devastating news for me. I couldn’t find any “tier 1” devices with a local API and my utility offered a substantial rebate on either Nest or Ecobee, so I decided to give the Ecobee 3 lite a try (I ruled out the Ecobee 4 because I don’t want Alexa in my house and saw no benefit to the price markup otherwise… ymmv if you need more advanced thermostat wiring). While the polling nature and slow updates in the Ecobee API leaves something to be desired vs Nest, it’s well documented and (afaik) remains open.

What I’ve really enjoyed with the Ecobee are the remote sensors. I’m not sure how these will factor into energy savings, but they definitely provide comfort improvements that I didn’t see with Nest. As for the comments about the schedule programming on the Ecobee, yes, it’s more complicated than the Nest, but it really starts to make sense when you have remote sensors. Rather than simply setting a time+temperature, the interface dictates creating comfort settings, which define temperature, sensors, and typical home/away settings. You then place these comfort settings into a schedule. For example, during the sleep setting, you probably want to select any bedroom sensors while in the evening maybe you want the thermostat to monitor your main room temperature. Any manual adjustments to temperature are handled as a hold where you can select from a set of options how long the hold is in place.

Another nice feature of the Ecobee is the information on the display, I really like that it shows the outdoor temperature with a weather icon and with a touch of the screen I can bring up an overview of conditions and temperature for the day and the next few days.

Finally, the Ecobee does require a C-wire while the Nest can run without one, but the Ecobee does include an adapter kit if you have one at the furnace but not wired to the wall. I was lucky to have a spare wire that I could simply connect to the C-terminal on the furnace. The Ecobee lacks a battery (Nest has one), so if your power goes out or the device is pulled from the wall it will need to reboot, all your settings are saved in the cloud or on device, so there’s no reprogramming, but there is a delay as it restarts… if that’s something relevant to you.

2 Likes

Awesome tip, thanks. I have Consumers Energy. With rebate, they have the ecobee3 for free or the ecobee4 with room monitor for $42 after tax and shipping, plus $100 gift card after the cooling season.

Sorry Woot, you’ll get my $$$ next time :smiley:

I’ve got one of these with 2 sensors. Coming from a cheap programmable and having a consistent 8-5 job schedule we didn’t initially see a huge difference. However, now that we come and go a lot and have a college aged nephew coming and going it keeps the house comfortable and the bills haven’t gone up.

If you got good savings by using a cheap $20 programmable thermostat you won’t see a huge difference but if you have a dumb thermostat you should really considering upgrading to, something.

It’s not really Woot’s fault that a power company is offering a rebate. Woot doesn’t get an incentive from people using less energy by installing this that the power companies may get and not every power company is offering that deep of a rebate and some are offering no rebate at all. I live in an area where the power company doesn’t offer a discounted smart thermostat.

So from the current price of $199 this is a deal if someone wants one and does not have a power company offering a rebate large enough to bring it lower than $180.

1 Like

Won’t let me select the 3lite any more…so I assume that it is sold out…like all of the other 9 out of 10 items that I try to purchase via Woot.

You need to shop earlier in the day. Sales start at midnight. :slight_smile:

1 Like