Average Zwave temp sensor with nest

The first smart stat I tried was the ecobee3 stat because it had small sensors that would average the temps in my house. Because of other issues with that stat I am deciding to return it and I just installed a nest. The nest doesn’t have this feature quite yet but I was thinking if I bought a zwave sensor and could have the veralite get the temp at the stat and the temp from the sensor I could average the temps in vers and then request more heat from the stat until that average is met. Does anything this this is feasible?

This is possible but would require you to write lua code to do so. Can you elaborate on why you returned the ecobee?Q

  • Garrett

I returned the ecobee3 because the smart home feature kept enabling itself when no one was home. All the sensors and stats would report no activity yet the heat would turn up as if someone was home, wasting energy. I tried two different stats from the company, both exhibited this same symptom. To me this feature is completely broken and is a huge part if what is supposed to save me money. I can program any stat around my schedule as it is pretty consistent, however I am paying a luxury for this stat so that days when I am not around it should determine no one is home and then down the heat. With this feature disabled the stat will just maintain a programmed schedule.

I am hoping that nests away will work out better. That said the house did feel more evenly heated with the 3 sensor in the upstairs.

[quote=“dbldown768, post:3, topic:185217”]I returned the ecobee3 because the smart home feature kept enabling itself when no one was home. All the sensors and stats would report no activity yet the heat would turn up as if someone was home, wasting energy. I tried two different stats from the company, both exhibited this same symptom. To me this feature is completely broken and is a huge part if what is supposed to save me money. I can program any stat around my schedule as it is pretty consistent, however I am paying a luxury for this stat so that days when I am not around it should determine no one is home and then down the heat. With this feature disabled the stat will just maintain a programmed schedule.

I am hoping that nests away will work out better. That said the house did feel more evenly heated with the 3 sensor in the upstairs.[/quote]

I prefer to let my Nest manage my heating/cooling schedule (I disabled auto away in the Nest). I have a set schedule, but when I don’t, I can always change the “Home/Away” setting manually. After a while, the Nest schedule for cooling/heating/both is pretty spot on.

I only let Vera change the Home/Away. Being able to adjust the Nest via Vera is nice, but I rarely use the adjustment feature of the Vera app and would not automate it :-). I do like seeing the Nest humidity and temperature in Vera; I use these as my “true” values in any automation (like turning on/off my humidifiers).

Anyone with an ecobee3 have a stat with the same symptoms? Been running on the nest now for a few days. Would be nice if I could ass sensors to that system but I’m not buying a wally for $300

I can watch my mother’s ecobee3 via the plugin, and I notice that it will try to bring the house up to the desired temperature of the next schedule change, even it’s detected that she’s not currently home. In her case, I don’t think it’s an issue, but you may have to use the “vacation” feature (thermostat and native web UI, not currently exposed in the plugin) to override this. I’m not sure; I haven’t tried to defeat the default behavior. But if you use the plugin’s “Away” button, it sets an indefinite hold to lower the current program’s heat and increase the current program’s cool setpoints using the “QuickSave” relative offsets you can set in the native web UI. These setpoints should stay in effect indefinitely until you resume the program or press the plugin’s “Home” button (or automation equivalent).

For the Nest, the Away mode works as you would expect, mapping directly to the thermostat’s Away function. It is roughly equivalent to the Ecobee plugin’s Home/Away buttons, but seems a bit simpler in practice.

watou