Can I keep My Location if I unsubscribe from Haven? Life360 (on the phones of everyone in your household) keeps track of where you all are. No C-wire? Thus, being the most like product of this time. Nest calls its geofencing “Home/Away Assist”, a clunky name that’s meant to invoke a certain level of intelligence in your Nest-brand devices. UPDATE: I originally wrote this tutorial for use with the ecobee3 smart thermostat. Setting up Geofence on Ecobee4 with iPhone. If you get set up with IFTTT and Life360, you can use it to control nearly any WiFi enabled thermostat on the market right now. Posted by 2 years ago. Once you enable Use phone location in the My Location menu, you can improve the accuracy of My Location by enabling Wi-Fi presence, which associates the ecobee app with your home Wi-Fi network. ecobee … When the last person leaves, it goes into “away” mode. Required fields are marked *. According to Ecobee, this is a more reliable method than its competitors', which draw power from the wires used to control the heater and air conditioner, but don't provide as steady a current. (We’ll try it ourselves at some point in the future, but for now, IFTTT and Life360 seems to be the way to go for ecobee owners. Looking for pros/cons. Even better, geofencing isn’t limited to just thermostats: many sophisticated smart home hubs exist to control all of your home’s smart devices based on whether you’re home or not. The extra setup steps are worth it – most people seem to be happy with the end result. Read our detailed review of the Nest Learning Thermostat. Rather than configuring individual devices to manage automation, you can link all your smart home devices to a hub and control things through that. When you’re “inside” the border you’re considered to be “home”, so your thermostat makes things nice and comfy for you. Nest uses a combination of cell and WiFi data from your device to figure out if you’re home and raises/lowers the temperature accordingly. Supported by both Nest Learning Thermostat (flagship model) and Nest Thermostat E (budget model), Some users report it conflicting with the schedules they’ve created, Might interfere with “Learning” feature if your coming and going during the learning period isn’t typical, Only works with Nest products, not other home automation devices (such as Hue bulbs), You cannot adjust the geofence radius, which might be useful for cases such as heading home from 50 miles away or working just 2 miles away, More help with enabling ecobee geofencing through, Might work better for people with unpredictable schedules and people who are in/out of the house all day, Using IFTTT and Life360 (you need both, and they’re free) seems to create the optimal ecobee geofencing experience (, Use instead of pre-programmed “Away” settings, Ecobee’s innate geofencing is kind of sucky and conflicts with schedules you might’ve set up or room sensors you might have throughout your home, Ecobee’s innate geofencing requires additional equipment if you’re on iOS (such as an AppleTV or iPad at home all day), Ecobee’s innate geofencing takes precendence over motion detected by the room sensors (ie: if you leave, but your spouse is still home sitting in front of a motion sensor, the geofence settings will prevail and the thermostat will enter “away” mode), Puts your home in “hold” mode, rather than resuming the current schedule (you have to flip it back to the intended schedule once you’re home, a seemingly unnecessary step), Works with or without a pre-programmed schedule, All members of the household must share one account, and any of those people can disable the geofencing or alter the existing schedule, Only works with Sensi thermostat, not other home automation devices (such as Hue bulbs), The geofence radius is locked at 3 miles, which for many people will treat them as being at home even though they’re at work, school, or running errands around town. Currently, there are a few hubs and kits for SmartThings to choose from.. Install a Nest thermostat at your own risk, Best WiFi-enabled Smart Thermostats of 2018 – Holiday Buyers Guide, Crunching the numbers: 3rd-party projects and alternative ways to analyze your Ecobee or Nest data, 6 reasons you might NOT save a bundle with a smart thermostat, Android: turn location services to “high accuracy”, Support for multiple individual accounts in a single “family” – no need to share login information, along with certain permissions for individuals. Simply install the ecobee plugin to use ecobee thermostats as part of your home automation ecosystem. You can only assign one device per account (but you can associate multiple accounts with your home). I’ve got a full 7 day schedule setup on the Ecobee app on my iPhone. Life360 follows all of your family’s phones (up to at least a couple dozen) and you can customize multiple fences, ie: around your home(s), work, school, etc. Assuming you do get the geofencing set up, you might be surprised to find that it doesn’t really coordinate with the temperature/motion sensors that helped make ecobee so popular in the first place. Before proceeding, ensure your phone is connected to your home's Wi-Fi network. Using My Location for Enhanced Smart Home and Away is only available to eco+ users. Let it figure out when you’ve left and when you’ve returned, and take all the effort out of trying to develop a schedule that suits your unpredictable days. I just had installed ecobee thermoststs.problem is ecobee only can set geofencing for 1 user & I cant setup my wife with her phone. Y wire and w wire not detected. On iOS: We don’t recommend using My Location and HomeKit’s geo-fence feature at the same time to control your thermostat settings, as they may impact each other. Imagine an invisible border surrounding your home. r/ecobee: A subreddit for ecobee and all their smart home products. Ecobee and Nest are arguably the two dominant smart thermostats in the market. Can I use the existing Geofence and My Location at the same time? Comparison: Emerson Sensi ST55 vs. Honeywell Wi-Fi 7-Day Programmable Thermostat (RTH6580WF), Review: ecobee4 adds Alexa, keeps everything else that makes an Ecobee thermostat awesome. Since Ecobee has always depended on this IFTTT solution, they never developed native support for multiple location devices to be used in their geofence setting in the Ecobee app. When your phone first connects to the Wi-Fi network, it will be marked as, When your phone disconnects from your Wi-Fi, we set a timer for a certain amount of time and if the phone does not reconnect to the Wi-Fi within that window, we can assume the user has left home and mark them as. Press J to jump to the feed. For those people, geofencing can be a useful feature that takes some of the … ... Ecobee wiring boiler, Installed. In the summer, that means letting it warm up. We think this is the way to go – it’s free, easy to set up, and compatible with virtually everything. When you’re outside that boundary, your thermostat lets the home’s temperature rise (or fall) a bit to save you some money so you don’t cool or heat an empty place. easy to find other people recommending them, The Smart Cave has a detailed guide for getting started with IFTTT and Life360 with an ecobee thermostat, Read more about Sensi geofencing here (sensi.com), Here’s a page of steps to help with connecting IFTTT to Ecobee. The timer is to avoid marking you as Away when your phone temporarily disconnects from Wi-Fi, but you are still home. To use Ecobee geofencing with an Android phone, you can configure it through the ecobee app itself. Everyone in your household needs the Ecobee … Your email address will not be published. The geofence option inside the ecobee app will only allow one iPhone to control whether the system is in Home or Away mode. Highly-rated alternatives to our best selling smart thermostats. Both are free, and the setup is pretty straightforward. (We haven’t used it ourselves.). Furthermore, the ecobee geofence triggers seem to act like “holds” rather than a return to schedule. So I tested the thermostat models from both brands over several months to find out which one was the … Fix the Ecobee smart thermostat's most annoying feature. Geofencing is a feature offered in most of the smart thermostat models like Nest, Ecobee & other popular thermostats. My Location provides a much better experience around the presence detection of family members when compared to the Geofence option on the Android app. ), Sensi’s geofencing is like a circle with your home at the center. The geofence option in the Ecobee system leaves quite a bit to be desired, and the Life360 triggers worked nearly perfectly for us - switch to 'Away' when the last phone leaves our home location, and … Also, SmartThings lets you control virtually any WiFi-enabled smart device, such as smart lightbulbs, home cameras, smart outlets, and more. Get in touch with our support team. when your phone temporarily disconnects from Wi-Fi, but you are still home. To do this ecobee uses a feature called geofencing. Read our detailed reviews of the Emerson Sensi and the Emerson Sensi Touch. To enable geofencing, simply open the ecobee app and do the following: 1) Tap "Account" icon in the bottom right corner. On Android: No. The impression we got from playing around with ecobee’s geofencing feature is it’s kind of a mess right now. (In the winter, that means letting your home get cooler while you’re gone. These two factors work together to automatically and accurately report when you are home or away. This works great for my partner, but not for me – I’m on iOS. If you and your phone are set up with ecobee’s geofencing, and you leave (taking your phone with you) and go out for the day, but someone else stays home, their motion won’t be enough to keep the ecobee in “home” mode – the geofencing setting will prevail and they’ll be left cold (or sweating). ‘Geofencing’ feature in a thermostat tracks the homeowners … Was a 2 wire boiler. The Ecobee SmartThermostat's speaker is a bit beefier, making this a passable entertainment device. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. eco+ is being progressively rolled out to everyone in the field. After years of testing four different Ecobee models, I determined the latest Ecobee SmartThermostat (Ecobee5) is the best overall because it comes with a SmartSensor and has an Alexa speaker built-in. Sensi’s geofencing feature is quite basic – you’re either in the 3-mile radius or you’re not, and every member of your household has to share the same login credentials in the app in order to take part in the geofencing. Here’s a page of steps to help with connecting IFTTT to Ecobee, since ecobee’s built-in geofencing leaves something to be desired, but IFTTT is compatible with nearly every smart thermostat on the market right now. Once Homekit is enabled, go to the Home app on … The geofence is then paired with a hardware/software application that responds to the boundary in some fashion as dictated by the parameters of the program. This saves you energy and is supposed to be more or less invisible to you, since it happens when you’re away.). So far I’ve added the official Ecobee … What is the difference between My Location and Geofence currently available in the Android app? ecobee Plus is a newer Alexa Skill that also enables … Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts ... for a location based geofence system to … In the context of a thermostat, you can use IFTTT recipes to do the following: When last person leaves the home fence, set thermostat to “Away”. At this point, we threw our hands up – this is just way too much overhead for a thermostat, something that should be effortless and almost completely out of mind. It is currently on track to reach $1 billion in sales with its revenues doubling every year. When your phone disconnects from your Wi-Fi, we set a timer for a certain amount of time and if the phone does not reconnect to the Wi-Fi within that window, we can assume the user has left home and mark them as Away. Close. To use SmartThings, you need a hub. Here’s what happens to your smart thermostat, ecobee’s new SmartThermostat gets better at everything – but it’s still a thermostat. The most basic is the SmartThings Hub … When the first person comes back, it goes back into “home” mode. 5. Can My Location be used in tandem with Smart Home and Away on my ecobee thermostat? We did not try either of these solutions ourselves, but it’s easy to find other people recommending them. You need both, and they are both free. Voice Control. How to get big savings out of your new smart thermostat, Ecobee SmartThermostat review: premium thermostat delivers comfort and convenience, Server outage? Samsung’s SmartThings Hub (which we have not personally used) is an oft-recommended smart home management device. However, the same general process can be used to setup geofencing for … If you have subscribed to Haven or have installed your SmartCamera with voice control, and you have eco+, then you can use My Location. Once set up, most people seem pretty happy with this combination. Need more help? Heating and cooling account for nearly half of your home's energy costs! There are a few options here, but none of them are optimal … 11) Allow the IFTTT app to access your ecobee account tapping "Connect." Paul Quinn over at androidpolice.com reports this issue in greater detail. I also have geofencing active (linked to HomeKit). When Use phone location is enabled, the Improve Accuracy menu will appear on the My Location screen, allowing you to enable Wi-Fi presence to enhance the ecobee app’s ability to detect when you are home or away. Control4 is a complete, high-end home automation hub for all your internet of things devices including ecobee… We think Nest has the best implementations of geofencing on the market right now, namely because it supports multiple accounts (one per member of your household) and can track all of them simultaneously. Archived. While I have an Apple phone, I don’t have any of the other devices, so I wasn’t able to get into the ecobee geofencing party myself. Read more about Sensi geofencing here (sensi.com). They figure out when you’re home (or away), and “assist” by adjusting the temperature accordingly. A geofence is a perimeter boundary created around the location of a smartphone or other device, based on GPS or RFID signals. WiFi-enabled thermostat reviews and comparisons. What is geofencing and how do smart thermostats use it? Geofencing is ideal for people who are in and out all day, or don’t follow a set schedule day-to-day. My Location is only available to Haven and SmartCamera customers. To help determine if you are currently home or not, the My Location feature uses two key factors: By accessing the My Location option in the app under Account and enabling Use phone location, your phone will notify the ecobee app when it enters or exits the 100m geofence radius around your home. Voice control is the number one way I interact with my smart thermostat. I’ve found … Your email address will not be published. (By default, that means lowering the temperature by 3 degrees in heating mode or raising it 3 degrees in cooling mode.) We discovered the IFTTT/Life360 combo when trying to get geofencing working with our ecobee. HomeKit is another way to automate your thermostat and set it up with geofencing, and it lets you do some pretty neat things (ie: talk to Siri and ask her to raise or lower the temperature) but this one comes with so many caveats we hesitate to recommend it: If your family is entrenched in the Apple ecosystem and loves it there, by all means – check out HomeKit. Is My Location available to all customers? You need at least one of those products to have access to My Location feature. When you set up your Nest account, you can enable the Home/Away Assist feature and assign it a device to watch. The ecobee Smart Home Skill lets you control the temperature with your voice and ask Alexa what the temperature is in a certain room. Their native solution works well as long as it is only important for the Ecobee … The Alexa-enabled Ecobee 4 is coming, but the developers over at Ecobee have been busy working on their app. Old spin thermo used r … If I arrive home or leave my home at a different time than what is set in the … We love ecobee, but we ran into a lot of frustrations trying to use this specific feature. Now you just need two IFTTT recipes: one to set your ecobee to “Away” when the last person leaves the home, and another one to set your ecobee to “Resume program” when the first person returns home. Integration created by Cocula Software. For those people, geofencing can be a useful feature that takes some of the effort out of adjusting the thermostat. Geofencing is ideal for people who are in and out all day, or don’t follow a set schedule day-to-day. However, you can save substantially with Ecobee3 Lite if Alexa isn’t important to you.. First, I’ll compare and contrast the two models (Ecobee3 Lite vs. Ecobee … Once you get back inside that 3-mile zone, the thermostat returns to the originally selected temperature. on What is geofencing and how do smart thermostats use it? And, apparently, so did a lot of other people – so many, in fact, that ecobee themselves suggests ecobee users rely on IFTTT and Life360 to manage geofencing and their products. If you have previously given permission, you can skip this step 12) Set the parameters for the action you wish to send to your thermostat when the geofence … Your smart thermostat can use your phone’s location to figure out if you’re home or not. NOTE: Your phone’s Location services feature must be turned on and set to allow ecobee in order for My Location to function. Which smart thermostats are compatible with Alexa? The circle is 3 miles in radius, and when you’ve gone 3+ miles away from home home, the Sensi will signal to your thermostat to raise or lower the temp accordingly. and HomeKit’s geo-fence feature at the same time to control your thermostat settings, as they may impact each other. Here's how to make it right. Ecobee has a schedule but I’m wondering can I set … While geofence-based … In comparison, the Geofence feature via the ecobee app does not take individual family Members or their phones into account, so anyone logged into the ecobee account with their phone will trigger the geofence action by entering or exiting the geofence coordinates. There is currently no way to adjust the 3-mile radius. 2) Tap "Geofence" 3) Tap the toggle switch on the right You'll be presented with the following options: Geofence Radius: Tap this to open a separate screen to configure the geofence… Basic’s not so bad, though – after all the craziness we went through trying to get geofencing working with an ecobee thermostat, we have a renewed appreciation for basic. ecobee and Nest are the biggest smart thermostats even in terms of market share. Did you know ecobee can start to adjust to your perfect temperature before you arrive home? My Location is a feature for Haven and SmartCamera with voice control users that gives the ecobee app the ability to determine when you or any other Members of your ecobee Home are home or away. Hi Everyone, I just recently added an Ecobee to my ST ecosystem and just had a few questions regarding certain smartapps and device handlers. Geofencing will allow you to trigger certain Scenes/commands based on your location. ecobee was the first company to bring smart thermostats to the market back in 2009. To use it with an Apple (iOS) phone, you have to configure it through Apple’s own HomeKit app, which requires a hub (such as an Apple TV, a HomePod, or an iPad that stays home all day). To use the geofencing feature, you will need an Apple home hub—either an iPad or Apple TV (generation 3 or … How does SmartThings work? When first person re-enters the home fence, set the thermostat to “Resume Program”. No, for now My Location is only available to Haven and SmartCamera customers. Informative article thermostats are the most effective in energy saving. Geofencing, or location-based triggering, uses your phone to detect when you’ve crossed a set boundary, and sends a corresponding signal to the iCloud servers. Ecobee can start to adjust the 3-mile radius the ecobee Geofence triggers to... 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