On this episode of 6 Months Later, we'll be taking a look at the Ecobee3
smart home thermostat. Does it really save you that much money in energy consumption?
And what benefits does it have over its competitor, the Nest Learning thermostat?
This is 6 Months Later
Smart thermostats have been around for a while now and were often thought of as
one of the first true smart home appliances.
It's impossible to talk aboutsmart thermostats without first mentioning the most famous one,
The Nest Learning Thermostat. Now what the Nest does is it's a learning thermostat,
it learns the way you like to set it to based on a variety of different factors
including the weather outside the time of day and the humidity levels. Then what
the Nest does is it applies machine learning and it learns your habits and
anticipates what temperature you're going to what the thermostat set to, based
on all of those factors it takes into consideration; making adjustments by you
to the thermostat less and less likely over time. The Ecobee3 on the other hand,
is not a learning thermostat. What the Ecobee is it's a smarter programmable
thermostat that connects to Wi-Fi, knows whether your home or not to save on
heating and cooling costs, allows you to adjust it from the phone app, and it can
read multiple data from multiple sensors in different rooms around your house.
Often times in homes and apartments, rooms can vary a few degrees from each other.
Now what the Ecobee can do is it can aggregate all of the temperature and
humidity data it receives, from multiple sensors in multiple rooms, giving you a
true average temperature of your residence, which is will either heat or
cool to. Now this is opposed to what most thermostats still do today, which is just
give you a temperature reading of what it is at the thermostat itself. After 6
months of use I still really like using my Ecobee smart home thermostat. I never
find myself going over to change the temperature which is great because it
already knows what temperature I want it to based on my schedule, and it knows if
anyone is in my residents or not, based on all of the sensors I have in all of
the rooms. Those sensors not only take into account temperature and humidity data
but they also act as motion sensors, so the thermostat actually knows if the
residence is empty or not and if it is, it will then set the
temperature higher during the summer and lower during the winter, ultimately
saving me energy. With the Ecobee you can also set vacation reminders, you can
access your data sensors remotely, and one of my
favorite features is it will give you a visual icon of what the weather is
outside as well as what the temperature is. It's great to get that visual
reminder of the weather as I'm walking past my thermostat out the door in the
morning and if you want any more information on the weather just tap the
weather information on the thermostat and it will bring up an extended
forecast for you. Now over the past six months I've been looking at my energy
usage from my energy company as compared to last year, and what I've found is on
average per month I'm saving about seven kilowatt hours
which is about .01% of all of my energy usage. So it's a very
very slim decrease, it's probably not even a decrease at all when you consider
the variability of climate from year to year, so at least in my case I have not
seen significant savings with my Ecobee smart thermostat, however, I will say I've
only had the thermostat during the winter and spring months so far and have
not had it during the summer months which are typically, at least in my
residence, the months with the highest energy consumption. So I'll be sure to be
on the lookout for that data and compare it to last year to see if I see any
significant savings this year with my Ecobee now energy savings are of course
great but they weren't the main reason why I wanted an Ecobee smart thermostat.
the reason why I bought my Ecobee, was one, I wanted to be able to control my
temperature from anywhere I had an internet connection around the world, and
two, I wanted my thermostat to integrate with Siri. I wanted to be able to tell
Siri to change the temperature to whatever I wanted. Now, at the time when I
bought my Ecobee six months ago I was under the impression Siri would be the
assistant for my smart home, however more recently I've changed my tune towards
HomeKit and Siri using them as the platform that connects all of my smart
home devices and instead I've opted for the Google Assistant through the Google
Home appliances I now have in my residence. Now I'll have a video later on
reviewing the Google Home and my thoughts around that but I wanted to
mention this because it's becoming inherently clear that whether you're
looking to buy a smart home thermos that are any smart device, you really
have to pay attention to what ecosystem the device you're looking at is going to
work with. Now the Ecobee works with Amazon's Alexa and of course Homekit and
Siri, but it does not work with the Google Assistant and I contacted Ecobee's
customer support about this a couple months back and they gave me
no indication that they were going to natively support the Google Assistant
anytime soon. Then a few months later they came out with the Ecobee4, which
baked Amazon's Alexa right into the thermostat itself. Now you can get around
Ecobee's lack of support for the Google assistant by using services such as If
This Than That (IFTT) or Stringify, but there are some limitations that I've
run into specifically with IFTT. For instance, if you want to set the
temperature to 74 degrees for 4 hours, guess what you can't do that with Google
with IFTT you can only set a temperature to an odd-numbered degree.
So, you can't do some before degrees, but you can do 73 weird things like that. Now
I just think it's a shame that the Ecobee decided to go all-in with Amazon's
Alexa now of course it does work with apple's Homekit as well but by baking
Alexa directly into the thermostat it is clear that ecobee is betting on Amazon's
Alexa as the platform for the smart home. Now of course the Ecobee is not the
only smart thermostat picking favorites here
Google's Nest smart home thermostat doesn't work with apple's Homekit though
that's partially due to apple's Homekit having strict hardware requirements for
Homekit enabled devices. Smart home devices and especially the ecosystems
that support them, are just a mess right now and smart home thermostats are no
exception. I really wish the manufacturers of these devices would
instead of trying to pick one ecosystem over the other, would just take the
Philips Hue approach and just work with everything it would make life so much
simpler on us all. That way we don't have to try to figure out which platform is
going to win out in the end. But until that happens, it's just going to be a
messy patchwork of smart home devices and unfortunately I don't see that
getting better any time soon. Now back in 2011 when the Nest
thermostat first came out and the whole category of smart thermostats really
started, it was all about being able to whip out your phone wherever you are and
change your temperature and have the thermostat learn your habits of what you
want the temperature set to, but today it's becoming more and more clear that
smart home thermostats, along with the category of an entire list of other
devices that all connect to your smart home, it's becoming more and more
important that you choose what ecosystem you want for your smart home, and that is
going to dictate what device like a thermostat you are going to get. Right
now it looks like it's either going to be Google's Assistant which is also the
Google Home or Amazon's Alexa with the Echo or apple's Homekit. Now smart home
discussion aside, though the Ecobee is still a really great thermostat and
especially if you already have an Amazon Echo, or you use Alexa, or you rely solely
on apple's Homekit in Siri it's probably going to be the thermostat you're going
to want to go with. However, if you're the type of person that does not want to have to
program anything, you just want the thermostat to learn what you do and then
you never have to touch the thing again, you're probably going to want to stick
with the Nest Learning Thermostat. Now why do I keep recommending the Ecobee over
the Nest, even when I use Google Assistant in my apartment? Well the
reason for that is the ability of the Ecobee to aggregate all of that data
from multiple sensors in different rooms and give you a true residence
temperature. Now the Nest can do some of this, if you have multiple Nest devices
such as their smoke detectors, and another nest thermostat on another floor
of your home, but that functionality just does not compare to the affordability
and ease of use with the Ecobee with the little sensors they sell. And you can
have like twenty to thirty sensors paired to one thermostat. The Nest just
cannot compete with that degree of functionality. Now in the future if the Nest
does offer that functionality, I'll definitely have to take a second look,
but for now I'm sticking with the Ecobee. For 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder.