ecobee3 Lite Smart Thermostat – Programmable Wifi Thermostat – Works with Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant – Energy Star Certified – DIY Install, Black

Software could use some improvement. PEK is useless for most people. Every part of this is ridiculously expensive. So first of all I want to tell people about a strange thing that happened with mine. I honestly thought I had a C-wire when I ordered this and then find out the hard way that I, in fact, do not. (Curiously enough the installer even ran five wires through the wall and just left the C-wire disconnected.) So when I found out I just figured I would simply connect the C-wire and no trouble (ok, it was a bit of trouble since I had to figure out exactly where to connect it — despite all the pictures they may show in their manual not all devices will have a nice simple board with properly labeled terminals and all for you to connect to. Mine just has wires running to a transformer and various relays all unlabeled. Fun. If anyone is looking into this, you want to connect the C-wire to the other side of the same end of the transformer that the R-wire runs from — you should read about 24V AC between the terminals +/- maybe as much as 4 or 5V while idle, but not much more than that. If you get 40+ or something you’re on the wrong terminals and absolutely _must_ not connect it this way.) But for some reason this didn’t work. At first… I thought I must have been doing something wrong, so I got an external power kit wanting to do this thing right and proper (and this way if I ever change thermostats again to anything newer in the future I’ll be able to power the new one too.) It still didn’t work. It wouldn’t even turn on either via the C-wire or external power, so you can imagine my surprise and how unhappy I was. I was beginning to think I must have a defective unit. I even disconnected it and ran a couple of alligator clips to the external power supply (and nothing else) just to see if it would turn on and it still wouldn’t. In sheer desperation I install the “Power Extender Kit” (PEK) mostly just so I could be sure I wasn’t just somehow doing something horrendously wrong. Now suddenly it turns on. But with caveats (more on that in a moment.) Since the PEK wasn’t working out I decide I’m going to call them and find out what’s going on, but of course since I’m a night person and this has already taken many hours their phone lines are all closed down. Meanwhile, I take the PEK out and connect the wires normally again. In sheer frustration I put the thing back in one more time just because. This time it turns on FROM the C-wire. So apparently it had to be powered once via the PEK to function. This is obviously not as intended and not normal, but now it has worked 100% perfectly since then running entirely from the C-wire with zero troubles. Anyway, the moral of this little story is: if yours won’t turn on, maybe try the PEK for just a few minutes and then try the C-wire again. No, this doesn’t make any sense at all. But apparently it works…——————————————————————————Anyway, on to the actual review. Firstly, for the most part it works very well. Like some others I really wonder why it can’t let you just connect directly to the thermostat while you’re in the same house though. It’s great that it uses the cloud for maximum connectivity, but there’s no reason it couldn’t run a local server (it’s not like it needs anything really complex just to run on the LAN.) When your connection goes down you can only control it — as others have said — by actually walking up to the thermostat. And this isn’t just a question of laziness. It takes a lot more fiddling with the small low resolution touchscreen than the much easier to operate interface with a mouse or even phone/tablet touchscreen to do things like adjusting comfort settings or even just manually turning on the fan or something. Though if you just need to do a quick temperature override it does this quickly and easily enough on the touchscreen. (You can even set it to ask every time which sort of override you want, so this is a nice plus at least.) It’s very worthwhile here to take note of the fact that cloud-only functionality means that if they ever take down their servers or if the servers are ever seriously hacked or anything then you won’t be able to control it away from the actual thermostat anymore… They likely won’t support the same old hardware forever, so someday these may ultimately just quit working outside of controlling directly at the thermostat essentially (thus they go from being a “smart” thermostat to being a classic dumb one just with a touchscreen.) Some people can afford to update expensive things like this every time a new revision comes out. Some of us have to keep using the same thing as long as there is no new functionality added by something new that we actually require (and what else is a new one going to do?) There is no technical reason the device can’t do this — in fact, if nothing else they could give us software that connects to the same interface it uses going to the Internet instead of it doing two services — it just does not.Also, it looks like if you want more complex programming it CAN do it now. It looks like you can simply add more comfort settings and put them in the schedule at different times to suit your needs. It’s probably a bit more complex to set up scheduling than it is on simpler thermostats, but overall it isn’t too bad. I saw reviews saying it only had two programming settings which (if you exclude away) is technically true only in that by default this is all that is on there. More accurately it only understands three main situations: home and away (sleep apparently is just plain separate.) But you can add multiple comfort settings in each of these two categories. I’ll admit I haven’t played around with this though. I prefer to keep it relatively simple. Especially with the addition of actual sensors to detect when I’m away since that’s the main time I would want it to stop cooling or heating as much. Perhaps other reviews are right in that it doesn’t actually allow the temperature to go far from the normal setting in away mode though. I haven’t tested that. Still, it’s going to save a little bit of power versus no away mode as with a standard thermostat at the very least. It does have a vacation mode which I presume sets things much more loosely. I haven’t tested this at all.One big plus though is the support for external sensors. Very few “smart thermostats” support external sensors. In fact, at the time this was the only actual smart thermostat I could find that didn’t have horrendous software. Seems even the Nest doesn’t? Maybe I’m missing something, but regardless, this one definitely does support sensors. Unfortunately, the sensors come only in a two pack and this two pack is ridiculously expensive for how little they ultimately actually do. (A person with the appropriate know-how could get an Arduino or RPi and temperature sensors and connect them up — assuming they don’t use some sort of encryption or something — for maybe between half to a third of the cost because the actual hardware involved is very uncomplicated. Unfortunately this is beyond most of us and they are taking advantage of that. Actually, someone with the know-how to do these could rig up an external sensor controlling even a Nest or whatever, but again, beyond my abilities sadly.) I feel like every part of this is more expensive than its competitors, but I did need the sensors and couldn’t build my own.One problem would definitely be the power extender kit (the “PEK.”) Many buying this already know if they have a C-wire or not I suppose, so probably not many are counting on having to use this, but I should warn those that do: it basically downgrades this thing to barely being able to do anything. For starters, when I set it up there was absolutely no point in the configuration in which I could specify that a wire was connected to PEK. It always showed that slot as being disconnected in all the menus and nothing would allow me to set otherwise. Worse still though, it basically removed almost all functionality. Since it used the green wire as some sort of virtualized common wire (or at least seems to? I didn’t actually test the system using the PEK) it can’t even so much as control the fan. There was no cooling option at all, so it was stuck only in heat mode (not a good thing in the summer!) I guess because the W-wire is still connected to the W-wire connection even with the PEK but the Y-wire is not. I had assumed the PEK had done something such as just running the green wire together with the others (eg force the fan to be immediately on and off with cooling and heat) but it seems not. Or if it does there’s no way to configure the device to recognize this. Given that I wasn’t sure it was even setting itself up right though I didn’t really test out the PEK by actually turning anything on, so it may be that this isn’t even right (for example, maybe it really was supposed to be as I guessed and the software simply wasn’t setting itself up right.) Regardless, I think it may be a really bad idea to buy this intending to use the PEK. I think you should expect to either install a proper C-wire (it’s not that hard — it’s just a common ground that doesn’t connect through any relays as the other wires would do and I don’t know why people don’t tell you this) or run an external power kit (they sell plugs that provide 24V AC — you just connect the external hot to Rc with your system’s own R going to Rh — and the neutral to C. Well, this may not work with two transformer systems. _Perhaps_ you could use its neutral alone without the hot wire. I’m not sure how well that would work out, but presumably the potential is about the same.) I guess the only value the actual PEK may have is powering on the system that first time if it acts up like mine did — which is obviously not its intended purpose, but whatever I guess. Otherwise you’re going to be stuck with only heat functionality. (I guess you could try to trick the system by connecting the cooling to W instead — assuming it actually works and doesn’t blow something up — but if you did this it would get very confused and you’d basically have to just manually run the cooler since it would otherwise keep trying to cool more and more trying to get the temperature up while it only goes down in heat mode. At that point I’m not sure a smart thermostat would be a good idea anymore.)As long as you can stand the extra expense, you get the advantage of fairly decent software and the surprisingly rare advantage of sensors that just work right out of the box with no significant setup or any soldering involved. Just make sure you do either have a C-wire or external power kit — do not count on using the PEK if you want to use this thing normally (perhaps the PEK is supposed to be able to, but all I know is the software won’t actually allow it to do so and it has been long enough that they would have updated it by now if this were just a minor bug — and I know mine updated itself at some point in the process of setting it up.) Unfortunately it will probably never be possible to control it via software via the LAN without connecting through the Internet which is kind of silly, but this seems to be the norm among smart thermostats. (I just don’t agree that it should be, so this is a negative on them all IMO. The cloud should be secondary — a convenience only — not only.)

After researching and reading many reviews about this thermostat, decided to purchase from US Amazon. Surprising it worked very well in Australia.We had a very old analog thermostat (using mercury and springs) which replaced it with this Ecobee3 Lite. It made our air-conditioning system new and smart. The Apple HomeKit integration is much better than I expected. It has temperature sensor and humidity sensor. The smart schedule feature is very advanced and learning the current temperature to adjust the setting automatically.The Ecobee app is great and it receives regular updates.Love the bee flying animation on the screen at the beginning of the setup.Maybe it is a bug, but during the setup, when choosing Celsius as the display unit, it still uses Fahrenheit during one of the following steps: setting the comfort temperatures. After that, everything is Celsius.

El termostato funciona muy bien, pero para poder enlazar Alexa con Ecobee se tiene que hacer desde la app de Ecobee, ya que en las skill de Alexa en México no aparece.1. Instala tu Ecobee.2. Configura tu cuenta Ecobee.3. Agrega el termostato a tu app.4. Toca el monito de arriba a la derecha en la pantalla principal. Y en la parte inferior, podrás enlazar a Alexa.Como ya agregaste tu dispositivo, Alexa lo reconocerá y podrás conectarlo.