The Ecobee SmartThermostat has a lot of beneficial features and functions for making your home smarter. Inside the sleek, shiny, black and white device lies some pretty cool technology including a humidity sensor, scheduling, comfort settings, multiple room monitoring, and a motion sensor to name a few. The scheduling, comfort settings and motion sensors are the key features that we are going to be using for total control of your home’s heating and air conditioning. Using these features to their potential will keep your thermostat working efficiently during your daily schedule and when you’re away. I will walk through how to set up the Ecobee for maintaining a comfortable temperature in your home with minimal interaction from you. But first, let’s walk through some features to get started with the setup.

Comfort Settings

Before setting up your schedule, attention should be focused on the Comfort Settings. Setting up the schedule to work with your actual schedule will require some Comfort Settings to be created for identifying activities that you may do throughout the day. Here you can create settings for both the heating and cooling of your home. I believe the Ecobee comes with a few Comfort Settings options already configured. You can customize the presets to get a better feel of how they work. If none are present then here a few from mine to get you started: Home, Away, Sleep, Exercise, Wake/Shower. I love the exercise setting, it drops the temperature in the living room for an hour while I exercise and then resumes normal daily temp and schedule shortly after. Don’t get too hung up on the names as these are just examples as your list may vary, the main goal is to identify your activities and your temperature settings for comfort.

Schedule

After setting up your Comfort Settings we can now start scheduling when the to activate them. The Scheduling interface is robust and pretty easy to set up within the app or through their website. I personally would recommend the website for initial setup of scheduled days and their time while leaving the app for the fine-tuning and quick adjustments. I really like the copy feature, it’s perfect for duplicating your schedule across multiple days with the same Comfort Settings. Whether you have a 9-5 or something completely different, the Ecobee schedule setup process has you covered.

Motion Sensor

The wall unit actually has a motion sensor located inside the unit, that alone is a great idea! Combine it with a schedule and now it’s a smart idea! The sensor inside the unit is perfect for identifying whether a living space is being occupied. Use the internal motion sensor along with the SmartSensor room sensors to keep everything in sync. The sensors check for motion during Comfort Settings on your Schedule. When movement happens in a certain area the sensors trigger your Comfort Setting in that area per your Schedule. If the sensors do not see any movement during a time of scheduled activity then the Schedule will not activate that Comfort Setting unless a set sensor sees movement. Here’s the cool part, if that last sentence didn’t get you. You can set sensors up like zones/rooms and ignore them for certain Comfort Settings! If you are at work, you may want to set up the living room sensor for the Work/Away Comfort Setting, so that way the cat doesn’t trigger the sensor when he jumps on the couch for his third daily nap. This alone is the coolest feature ever! As humans, our schedules are dynamic and can change at the drop of a hat. Having technology that responds and adjusts to our daily schedule in a consumer grade device is absolutely innovative!

Making it work

Once the Comfort Settings and a Schedule have been created, now we can switch focus to putting it all together. In the Main Menu of the app in the sensors screens, you will find the option for Enabling the Smart Home/Away. This allows the sensors to switch the thermostat between Home and Away mode based on sensor activity without interactions from you. If no activity is reported during a scheduled Comfort Setting then it will enable this feature. Next up is to activate the Follow Me function in the same Sensors Menu. Follow me uses the sensors in the Ecobee and the standalone SmartSensors to determine where there’s motion/activity, like in a Dining Room or Living Room. It will then control the thermostat temperature to that occupied area using your set Comfort Settings and Schedule.

Next up is adjusting the sensor’s settings, go to the Sensors area where you can tap on the actual sensor name and adjust its settings and also create “zone” areas. Adjusting your sensor’s settings creates another layer of configuration to keep your thermostat running efficiently when periods of inactivity happens during a scheduled Comfort Setting time. As mentioned before, if your schedule shows that you will be home at 5 but no activity is seen at 5, then the schedule will be overridden as being Away until a sensor sees movement. This setup will make your Ecobee hands free for the hot and cold seasons. The only interactions with the Ecobee would be making the change in the HVAC tab to switch from cooling to heating during the change of seasons. If you are okay with that then this will be the end for you. Dot dot dot.

Want to go a step further and make it hands-free? Here are a few more steps to complete. From the actual Ecobee wall unit, go into the Main Menu and navigate to Settings and select Installation Settings (Advanced Options). Here you will find all the detailed settings and configurations of your thermostat. If you installed this device yourself then you are familiar with this screen already. Next, find and select Thresholds and while inside be sure to Enable Auto Heat/Cool. Also, take a look at the Heat/Cool Min Delta, this setting is the span between what temperature the heat and cool turn on at. You may have to adjust this setting to find your sweet spot to keep your system from cycling back and forth between heat and cool during Comfort Setting changes. I currently have a span of two degrees and I never had an issue but mileage may vary and I urge you to find what’s best for your setup. In the Main Menu inside System and HVAC, you will find all states for your system, here is where we wrap it up by putting it in Auto. After backing out to the Main Menu, you will now see there are two setpoint numbers on your main display, one for heat and one for cool. Those two setpoints will change along with your Comfort Settings and Schedule.

There you have it, total hands-free setup for year-round operation. Unfortunately (disclaimer time) this doesn’t cover the “I’m Cold” and the “It’s cold in here”! Good luck from Tony @techdhome!