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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io

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Ecobee Thermostat (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey all. Thanks in advance to this amazing community for all it help. You guys are awesome.

I have a small home with in floor heating and an ERV. The infloor heating has two zones. One for bathroom and bedroom and another for kitchen and living room.

Wondering if the ecobee thermostat is my best option. Hoping that it can control both zones and switch them with the ecobee sensors or via homekit/HA. Will I be forced to buy two thermostats? Its a really small home, so two sensors isnt great and dont necessarily want a display panel mounted in the bedroom.

Is it possible to run the the ERV independently? Ie can I have the ERV controlled by a CO2 sensor independent of temp control? Ive been seeing conflicting info.

Im reading the manual but im not sure whats possible if integrating home kit/ha. Any and all advice welcome!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I haven't used Homekit, so I can't speak to that, but I have had an ecobee for several years now, and it's integrated into HA.

It's not clear to me if your setup is "1 heating system for one room, and a second system for a different room", or if it's two heating systems for the same area.

In the first case, I don't think it'll work - ecobee is only designed to control one heating system. The remote thermometers just tell it what's going on where they are, so it knows if that room needs more heating or cooling. If they do, then it fires up the HVAC to make that happen. You can tell ecobee which thermometer(s) to use to trigger the HVAC - at night, you probably care about the bedroom more than anything else, while in the day you probably care about the living room more. But it can't simultaneously control two separate systems.

If it's the second case, ecobee does, I think, have provisions for two stages of heat, so it's possible you could set it up to use the second HVAC as stage 2. But I'm not certain about this at all. You might need an additional relay, I'm not sure.

But I think there might be an easier solution that doesn't require a full blown second thermostat using HA, and this is what I do for our pellet stove (we have a main household HVAC, and a pellet stove for extra heat). Get something like a Shelly 1 and use that to trigger the second heat system. Then put in a temperature sensor - an ecobee remote sensor, bluetooth, wifi, Zigbee, etc., whatever works best for you - and with those two things, you can create a "thermostat" entity in HA, then use a thermostat card to control it. Assuming HA is running and it's getting info from the thermometer, it works well. Of course you'd mostly access it on a phone or computer, not something mounted on the wall (unless you put a tablet on the wall to view and control HA, but that's a whole different project).

This isn't necessary for it to work, but I have a script set up that has logic such as: []If the outside temperature is above 50 degrees, set the thermostat to 50 so the pellet stove shuts down and doesn't restart. (Don't need it.) []If the outside temperature is below 45 degrees, set the thermostat according to the rules below. []At night set it to 70 degrees, during the day, 72.
[]If the outside temperature is below 32 degrees, set the thermostat to 78 degrees so the pellet stove stays running.