The ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium is the most feature-packed thermostat in Canada, with a built-in air quality monitor, SmartSensor for room-by-room occupancy detection, and Alexa speaker built right into the display. It learns your schedule, integrates with virtually every smart home platform (Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, SmartThings), and can save up to 26% on heating and cooling costs annually.
6 mentions · 3 threadslast mention Oct 2024
Real comments from Reddit, linked to the original thread. Nothing paraphrased.
Ecobee exposes its occupancy and temp sensors individually in homekit...Scheduling is more complicated and granular in Ecobee, some find it more confusing but you can create a bunch of comfort profiles which include high/low temp and sensors and then schedule those throughout the day.
I'm more interested in finding out why they never released a software update to fix the awful temperature control on the device itself. Looks like they knew it was an issue after looking at the new one..
Ecobee is in a different league. Its best feature is that it comes with sensors you put in various rooms...If your south facing room is always very hot, the sensor will detect that and cool the floor a bit more and try to average out the south room with other rooms.
I hated our Ecobee and swapped it for a Nest. It was just frustrating...the ecobee would refuse to switch on the ac...Theres apparently a current leakage issue with ecobees that they have never fixed and causes odd issues like this.
I also have Starling and when a thermostat went out last year in replaced it with Ecobee. The fan is not exposed to HomeKit as an independent control with Ecobee like it is using Starling. I really miss that feature and regret changing to Ecobee.
One thing which sways be to Ecobee is that I can access more granular historical home temperature data. Another is the room sensors. I also like Ecobee's scheduling feature a lot better.
Owner sentiment on the ecobee Premium is evenly split: of 6 mentions, 3 positive and 3 negative, no mixed. Fans single out the individually addressable room sensors and granular historical data/scheduling as genuine advantages over rivals like Nest. But the negative reports raise real reliability concerns — one owner describes a known current-leakage issue that intermittently keeps the AC from switching on, which they say ecobee has "never fixed," and another misses independent fan control that competing thermostats expose to HomeKit. This is a thermostat with standout smart-home features undercut by a persistent hardware quirk some owners have hit. Good for buyers who want the best room-sensor and scheduling flexibility on the market; if you've had heat pump or fan-control issues with ecobee before, or that risk concerns you, weigh it carefully.
