nest vs ecobee or other for HA integration?

[capall]

Hi all
I'm remodeling my house and am thinking about a smart thermostat. I'm not sure if we'll benefit the learning features, as we seem to change the temp. a lot, which means remote control or alexa may come in handy for.
 
I'm thinking of getting some type of HA hub, ELk, Omni pro, homekit, or even loxone next year, and would like to keep my options open in choosing the thermostat in order to integrate it onto the HA system I choose. Does that mean that the ecobee would be the best option, in terms of selecting a smart Tstat with an open platform?
 
thanks
derek
 

 

[picta]

Elk, omni and loxone are not "hubs", they are controllers capable of stand-alone automation. Homekit is not a stand-alone controller, it's a "service" of sorts. Depending on how you want to use the thermostat, just control it remotely, or actually integrate it with the rest of your automation, the best choice will vary. Ecobee is a cloud-based device, but it can be integrated with Homeseer. For a non-cloud thermostat take a look at zigbee or zwave models or hard-wired.

 

[ano]

For locks, light, thermostats its all the same. You have to decide how things will work and generally the "brains" can only exist in one place.  You can't install a smart thermostat, like the Nest, which is the "brain" itself, and then add a hub and expect this same thermostat to be controlled now by the cloud, or add a home controller like ELK or HAI and expect this Nest to magically operate with that. It just doesn't work like that. 
 
You have to decide what direction you are going to go, then build a system to support it. Don't get a Nest unless you are going to let it do its thing like it was designed.  If you get an HAI or ELK, then you get a thermostat that was designed to communicate with that. If you get a hub like Smartthings, then you buy devices that can communicate with that. There is no magical device that communicates with everything.

 

[LarrylLix]

Most of the Home Automation people I have talked to didn't like the Nest as it tries to automate itself and the user loses control with hundreds of temperature changes. This is not automation, just a memory bank that doesnt work for many. Most of the Nest features get disabled.
 
Two of my sons have Nests and they don't hold a candle to the ecobee3 and ecobee4.
After installing two Venstar Colortouches, a smart Honeywell, and now two ecobees I prefer the ecobee over any of them. The resolution is far ahead of the others with their 0.5C basic resolution and then trying to switch a HVAC system on and off at the same rough temperature click.
 
The Venstars are the only stats that support a local API, with no cloud service required for HA. However, they have short cycling problems and too coarse of resolution at 0.5C. The sensor calibration wanders from month to month. The Honeywell didn't wander as much. So far the ecobees don't wander at all that I can detect to 0.1C.
 
With ecobee, I can set up two schedules, one for heating and one for A/C, and switch between them with a couple of screen touches. Fan control is way more intelligent than the Nests or any other stat I have tried yet.
With the Venstar the schedule includes the cool/heat mode so the whole schedule has to be reprogrammed to switch back and forth. The list goes on and on. Ecobee is far more professional and made by people that understand stats.
 
One problem that exists with all smart stats is electronics heat.  The sensor will detect the internal heat from the electronics and throw calibration off. 
Just adjust the calibration to compensate  you say? That's what they have done and it's the problem.
 
When you have even the slightest draught or breeze from your heating system fan, the sensor cools of resulting in temperature wave of many degrees.ecobee has done the best with isolated compartments. Venstar tries to do it with insulation and foil, I am not sure what Honeywell does. I returned it too fast. Well done but the cheap model had no features.
 
Unfortunately all these stats require a cloud dependent API (except Venstar). I use an ISY994 HA box along with a RPi running Nodelink to bridge to my two Venstars, two ecobees, and a multitude of RGB LED strips and bulbs.

 

[pete_c]

Here is a discussion from 2015
HVAC Thermostat Automation
 
My serially connected Leviton Omnistat2 works fine for me.  I never touch it.  I have added local and remote temperature sensors (outside, attic, 2nd floor, main floor and basement) and mostly just do a look see to see it working.  I never make any changes to it and the temperatures in the home are comfortable. 
 
Energy savings here are related to the efficiency of my furnace and air conditioner and home insulation and not the thermostat.

 

[capall]

thanks guys, possibly putting the cart before the horse here, so I've taken a step back and asked a new more general question

 

[carealtor]

Like Larry, I have an ISY994 for HA.  But I have yet to find a reason for me to try and integrate my Ecobee stats with it.  They work really well on their own.  I'm actually more of remote control guy than a lot of HA, so I have my Ecobees tied into my Harmony Hubs so I can change the temp from my "TV remote".  Works great.

 

[ano]

I don't mean to sound down on the Nest, because I know many people that have them and love them.  But I am a HA person of a type unlike many here. In my vision of a "smart home," I see little need to access it remotely, or even ever touch it.  If its "smart" it can make its own decisions.
 
And my home can.  Probably about 40% of my programming is just for the thermostat, and surprisingly, it doesn't matter at all if I'm home or away. Only being on vacation changes it.  I have a quite complex electrical rate that has both a time-of-day rate change, and a peak demand charge.  My system monitors the weather, the weather forecast, and time of year, and various temps to determine when to run the AC and heat.  If it goofs up, even for a few minutes a month, this would cost me lots of money on my utility bill that month.  My system even learns from its mistakes, and will adjust a bit the next day.  A Nest, with just a motion sensor couldn't begin to do what my system does.  But all depends what you are looking for.

 

[LarrylLix]

Motion detection for home/away detection would never work in my home with my heating system.
 
If I got home after an extended away, my house could be down to say 12C. In the winter my home would take about 15-20 hours to get back up to 22C where I would be comfortable again. It would be a cold night.
 
The next day I would be going out of the house again before the stat even brought house up to temperature and it would start the temperature drop again. It would never catch up with my comings and goings. What would the point of having that dumb of a smart thermostat be?
 
I use a thermostat to make my home comfortable. That is the basic HA, it does all by itself. If I have to manually adjust it all the time then I need to change something, the stat, or the occupant's brain.
 
ecobee3 and ecobee4 have a bunch of sensor that help implement their "Follow Me" algorithm. This is another BS feature that can never work for me. I have five sensors and a few are off by 1-1.5 degree C from the crowd. Imagine I walk into a room with one of them and, even if my HVAC syste coud accomodate temperature changes that fast, then I have to go back into another room and either feel cold or sweat my balls off again for hours.
 
Home comfort at it's finest? FAIL!
 
It's just like politicians. Each company has to create some BS problem that only they can solve.

 

[Dean Roddey]

The Nest stuff isn't designed to play with others. It's designed to be a world unto itself, as is the case for almost all 'Internet of Thangs' devices. They are designed to be sold as standalone devices, or small worlds unto themselves. You can interface the Nest to your automation system, and CQC supports it quite well. But that's not really what it's designed for, and it requires a cloud based interface, so you have to go out of your system to their servers, and then back to the thermostat, for every transaction between the automation system and the thermostat. Obviously this isn't optimal.
 
It's also too different from most thermostats to easily support it within a generic view of thermostats that allows for swapping out of hardware or the creation of reusable interfaces and automation logic.
 
Ultimately the goal for an automated (or even smart) home isn't a bunch of smart individual devices, it's devices that do what they are told, under the control of a central automation controller, which is the only thing that really sees the big, big picture. IoTs companies are at the opposite end of the universe from that.

 

[pvrfan]

... Ultimately the goal for an automated (or even smart) home isn't a bunch of smart individual devices, it's devices that do what they are told, under the control of a central automation controller, which is the only thing that really sees the big, big picture. IoTs companies are at the opposite end of the universe from that.

Ah, Dean.  And what about complexity?  The relative success of Ecobee and Nest is that they encapsulate the tradeoffs between comfort and energy savings into a package that more consumers can digest.  
 
In your view of automation, somebody has to program that central controller.  Over the past few decades, it is apparent that only a small number of fanatics (like us here on this board) are willing to do it themselves.  A further small number have paid big bucks to have someone else do all the programming.  Arguing that this is "real automation" is pointless--the market is going to decide for itself what it thinks is automation.
 
Craig
(And modern IoT devices are not so much islands as you suggest.  Almost all of them speak one or more protocols that let them communicate with a controller and other devices.  The motion detector in the Ecobee remote temperature sensor can trigger lights or other actions.)

 

[Dean Roddey]

That's two different things though. If someone wants to use the Nest stuff and/or ten different standalone things each with their separate application and no real integration, then that's fine. It's their thang, they can do what they wanna do.
 
My comment was about real automation and the fact that those types of things are exactly not what is optimal. For those folks who are interested in automating their homes and creating an actually integrated system, they should look elsewhere. That is a growing number of people, both in the DIY world and professionally.
 
Of course there is the added benefit that those devices that just do what they are told aren't typically cloud based, so they aren't spying on you or likely to become a trojan horse that's used to infect your network.

 

[ano]

Here is why things can and will get complicated.  So where I live, I have an electric rate that varies with the time-of-day, and I have a peak usage charge that applies during certain times of day.  I also live where its hot.  A Nest thermostat can't begin to understand these requirements, so my home automation system uses weather, temps, etc. to precool my house and shift electricity from the high time to the low time.  Its quite sophisticated actually.  But this is today. 
 
Companies like Nest realize what my home automation system does, and are working on making this feature available to all. They are working with utilities to connect in real-time and do all the functions my home automation system does now, but put that in a Nest, and sell it to millions of people.  So what took a full programmable system, would now be available to the masses, cheap, and in fact the utility may give them to you for free. There is no reason a Nest couldn't do what my sophisticated home automation system does in terms of thermostat control.
 
Yes there is cloud questions, security, blah blah blah, but for the sake of argument, assume things are worked out. 
 

That's two different things though. If someone wants to use the Nest stuff and/or ten different standalone things each with their separate application and no real integration, then that's fine. It's their thang, they can do what they wanna do.

This is what you need to watch out about, because when that "future Nest" exists, it is now doing EVERTHING that a system like mine does, with little fuss, and for the masses.
 
Many many years ago we had mainframes. Only a few owned them, and many people shared them.  Today your smartphone has 1000X more power.  Bigger central systems are giving way to these "standalone" systems.  What makes you think home automation will be any different? 
 
If you could see the future 40 years ago, would you still chose to be a mainframe salesman? 
 
So be careful when you suggest that this all encompassing system will be the future. The future may be closer to what we may see in the future Nest.

 

[Dean Roddey]

I can't speak for other products, but we have never been competing at that entry level. That's already partly and later to be totally, a commodity world with low revenues and intense competition and low barriers (relatively speaking) to entry. The folks who need to be worried are the other folks who are in that world or looking to get into it.
 
If it is going to be for the masses it has to come at a price the masses will tolerate and that will always limit its capabilities compared to the sort of solutions our product is really targeting. And they can only go so far as an enclosed ecosystem driven from what is ultimately a fairly small and limited device as the brains, because they can only create so much stuff themselves and can only pack so much into a little device on the wall. But the day they move out of that closed environment, they pick up all of the complexity that everyone else deals with, of integration of disparate systems. 
 
They can push more and more of it to their servers, but that will just make their ultimate day of reckoning vastly more ugly that it will already be, when they finally get their first massive hack.

 

[pete_c]

It is all about what sells today and it is a win win for all of these companies. 
 
The basic thermostat design and function hasn't changed in 100 years. 
 
Many newbie automators are the same folks that sit and stare and sleep with their smart phones.
 
There is some new talk now about removing smart phones from kids when they go to bed cuz it is turning them in to zombies.  Same now for adults. 
 
Really what is the term Zombie apocalypse relating to?
 
My wife and I have seen entire families going to a nice restaurant and never really speaking to each other as each member of the family is buried in to their smart phones or tablets. 
 
Really the Nest is just eye candy with no huevos. 
 
What is sort of scary to see are folks shutting off human interaction and just interacting with their almost AI Amazon Echo or Google Voice.
 
I have spoken to friends and neighbors at BBQ's just purchasing thermostats like the Nest because of just the media hype relating to it and nothing else (mostly the average homeowner doesn't really know what makes a home energy efficient).
 
Really though it is what you think and want relating to automation. 
 
If having a thermostat widget on your smartphone makes you happy then have it at. 
 
Does the thermostat make your home energy use more efficient? Not really.
 
Newbie folks come to Cocoontech asking and many times (almost all of the time) are very surprised at the answers they read.
 
The Cocoontech forum is divided in to Home Automation, Home Security and Home Theater.
 
Personally have keep these three separate as I do not automate my security or home theater these days.  I do remote control this stuff but that is not home automation.
 
Well like purchasing a doorbell (which used to be $1 to $10) buying something around $250.00 because they can. 
 
The thermostat and doorbell though are more functional than pet rocks I suppose.