Good thermostat with remote sensors?

[gwichman]

currently my thermostat upstairs is in a hallway and when the heat comes on, the rooms get VERY hot when the doors are closed at night (because the thermostat can't measure the temperature in there).

looking for solutions to this problem.. i've been playing with an aetoc multisensor 6 with poor results. at the moment it seems like it isn't updating the vera fast enough such that the vera can turn the thermostat off with my PLEG routines.

so i'm thinking about just replacing the thermostat with a model that supports a remote temp sensor of some kind but is also zwave compatible.

anyone have experience with either? either a better thermostat or successfully leveraging a sensor like this to accomplish it? any help appreciated.

[bore]

You can poll the master device and after that the temp will be updated.
I have a post from today with the Temperature Container - you can use this device and I am sure you will be ok with the Aeon.
I use it and I use Virtual Thermostat with some modifications and everything is fine.

You can see here:
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,42397.0.html

[fitz2380]

My son uses the ecobee3.  It does have remotes sensors that you can then use to set the thermostat temperature to, based on the remote sensors at a given time/day.  I know that he uses one sensor to control his bedroom temperature at night.  It supports zwave as well.  I would take a look at this, but it is a bit pricey.  We just hooked up his whole house humidifier to his furnace and his ecobee now controls the humidifier based on his desired setting, but also takes into account the outside air temperature and attempts to control it so that it does not create moisture on the windows.  We live in the cold midwest....

[Mike Yeager]

I love my Ecobee3...

[agoodman82]

currently my thermostat upstairs is in a hallway and when the heat comes on, the rooms get VERY hot when the doors are closed at night (because the thermostat can't measure the temperature in there).

looking for solutions to this problem.. i've been playing with an aetoc multisensor 6 with poor results. at the moment it seems like it isn't updating the vera fast enough such that the vera can turn the thermostat off with my PLEG routines.

so i'm thinking about just replacing the thermostat with a model that supports a remote temp sensor of some kind but is also zwave compatible.

anyone have experience with either? either a better thermostat or successfully leveraging a sensor like this to accomplish it? any help appreciated.

I use my Radio Thermostat CT-80 and several Everspring ST814's to accomplish remote temperature control. I have a house with one-zone heating and like you, my upstairs rooms get very hot when the heat is firing frequently in the winter since my thermostat is located on the main level of the house.

[Chrisfraser05]

Personally I think your are over complicating the issue here.

I had the same issue and I replaced all the TRV's in my radiators with digital ones, not Zwave or networked but with a timer program.
They were about ?15($20) on Amazon.

I have higher setpoints in the morning/evening, and lower through the day and at night.

The only rooms without a trv are my bathroom and the hall where the thermostat is.

Now when the boiler kicks in the rooms already up to temperature don't heat any further.


Going down the route of smart trv's in each room or multiple thermostats etc can very expensive and complicated.

I now have a very comfortable house without having broken the bank.

The only down side I have is if one room is cold for whatever reason but the rest of the house is up to temperature the heating doesn't come on automatically.
In my mind this is good, as I might have one room where I've opened the window to air the room.

If I decide I do want to heat the room though I ask alexa to "torn on comfort mode".

This is a virtual switch that when on sets my thermostat setpoint higher for two hours.

This heats the hall, bathroom and any room currently below the TRV setting.

[FilthyBeast]

I use an EcoBee as well.  You can have the sensor follow-you around and keep that room to the set temp or have it use different sensors for different scenes / schedules.  You can also have it use the avg temp across sensors.

Mine during the day averages the temp in my home office and family room to control the heater and then at night it uses the sensor in the master bedroom to control the heater.  This is all built into the ecobee and does not need anything done in Vera.

[lingerba]

I use ecobee3 and absolutely love everything about it.  I tried going the route with a zwave thermostat and zwave temperature sensors and have vera do the logic.  It worked okay, but the ecobee3 does it way better.  The plugin for ecobee and vera works great!  You can't go wrong with ecobee3.

[TinCup]

+1 for ecobee 3 here, too ... love the smart home/away and follow me settings.   Plus it has a built in humidistat which is something my previous CT-100 was lacking.

It also integrates with the Amazon Echo so that's pretty cool, too.

[gwichman]

so after looking into ecobee i went ahead and bought one. i just finished installing it and then logged into vera to install the ecobee plugin. I entered the pin on the ecobee website to add it as an app. All that went smoothly.. but in the Vera UI the device doesn't look like a thermostat. What am i missing? it looks like some kind of generic zwave device with only one button - "get pin". I guess I was expecting basic thermostat controls.

[Don Phillips]

Sometimes the device category or subcategory is messed up.  I have 3, identical z-wave switches, bought and installed at the same time. When added to Vera, all three were showing up as 3 different categories. Only 1 was correct so I edited the other 2 and now all show up as switches. Here is the list of categories: http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Luup_Device_Categories 

[Mike Yeager]

If you haven't already done so, click the get pin button. Log into the Ecobee website and while you're looking at your thermostat on their page, click on the menu icon (looks like a person with lines next to it) in the top right corner. It will open up and there will be an entry that reads "my apps". Click on that and enter the pin exactly as it appeared in the vera interface. That will authorize the plugin to allow vera to see the thermostat.

Many of us are having an issue at the moment of having to go back in every few days (some are experiencing it more frequently) and removing the app from Ecobee's website and reauthorizing it with a new pin. There are people working on it and hopefully they'll resolve it soon. If you have questions, ask away. Welcome to Ecobee!!!

[gwichman]

So after living with my two ecobee's (upstairs and downstairs) i have to admit they're great. They solved my main problem thanks to the extra sensors which works perfectly. Up until now i've left them to work on their own and haven't integrated them with the Vera since I saw no real reason to. But there is one thing that i'd like to implement..

Previously I had a vera proximity fence that would trigger as i left work and was heading home to put my honewell thermostats to auto from off such that the house was warm by the time i got home. If I add the ecobee's to vera, is there a way to force the ecobees off of "away" mode and into "home" mode through a vera proximity fence event or similar? Or how are you all solving that problem?

Currently when i get home the house is cold until one of the sensors senses movement and then the ecobee switches from away to home mode and heats up the house. So i'm cold for 10 minutes..

[Mike Yeager]

Sure is. It's all fairly easy as well...

[rafale77]

So after living with my two ecobee's (upstairs and downstairs) i have to admit they're great. They solved my main problem thanks to the extra sensors which works perfectly. Up until now i've left them to work on their own and haven't integrated them with the Vera since I saw no real reason to. But there is one thing that i'd like to implement..

Previously I had a vera proximity fence that would trigger as i left work and was heading home to put my honewell thermostats to auto from off such that the house was warm by the time i got home. If I add the ecobee's to vera, is there a way to force the ecobees off of "away" mode and into "home" mode through a vera proximity fence event or similar? Or how are you all solving that problem?

Currently when i get home the house is cold until one of the sensors senses movement and then the ecobee switches from away to home mode and heats up the house. So i'm cold for 10 minutes..

I have an ecobee with a bunch of sensors throughout the house, I too initially just used the smart home/smart away feature. I ended up using the ecobee plugin along with the iphone locator plugin and stopped relying on the schedule. The sensors are used to balance the temperature in my house between the different rooms by tuning vent register openings in each room. I coordinated the 4 vera house modes with the ecobee housemode. What you could do is use a 2 level geofence. When you approach your house at a certain distance, I switch the ecobee to home mode before I get home and trigger the second geofence changing the vera housemode to home.