Two questions re home/away state and sensors

I’m considering replacing a Nest thermostat for several reasons. Ecobee seems like the logical choice. I have a couple of questions:

1) Assuming Ecobee has a concept of home and away (and different temps /schedules for these two states), does this plugin have the ability to set these states via an Indigo trigger?

2) (Admittedly this is not an Indigo question) Are the room sensors sensitive to cats? We have two cats that are around 13 pounds each. I’m curious whether the room sensors would detect them and affect thermostat settings.

Thanks!

Ecobee has multiple "Comfort" settings, and the default list is: Home, Sleep, Away. And yes, you can override the current comfort setting with an Indigo action.

No idea about the cats, but I would think not if you locate them away from where a cat can get close to them. You can also disable the occupancy logic so that the sensors ignore any presence detection at all.

I like the concept of the sensors adjusting the temperature for rooms that are occupied. But I don't want the sensors changing the home/away/sleep setting -- I want Indigo to control that.

Does this sound like a configuration that the thermostat can handle?

Thanks!

Umm. No. The Ecobee does not do individual room changes based on presence. Unless you have a multiple zone system with a thermostat for each room, which is not common. It uses presence detection to determine if it should automatically switch from Home to Away and vice versa. If you have that enabled, which I do not.

I thought it temperature averaged across rooms (rooms with sensors) based on whether the room was occupied.

Their website says "Follow Me - Detects which rooms are in use and adjusts the temperature accordingly for comfort in those spaces."

That's what the website says. Maybe it doesn't work that way in reality?

Back to the plugin, can the plugin tell the thermostat which sensor to use for temperature?

I thought it temperature averaged across rooms (rooms with sensors) based on whether the room was occupied.

Their website says "Follow Me - Detects which rooms are in use and adjusts the temperature accordingly for comfort in those spaces."

That's what the website says. Maybe it doesn't work that way in reality?

Maybe that's how it's supposed to work. I don't know, I have all that disabled. Maybe it ignores the temp sensor in rooms that it thinks are unoccupied.

Back to the plugin, can the plugin tell the thermostat which sensor to use for temperature?

Hmm. It does not currently. Let me see if that's even available in the API....


No, I don't see anything in the API for doing that.

I've told other people this before - if you want to "roll your own" thermostat logic and make all the decisions in Indigo, don't use Ecobee. Use simple sensors and a simple z-wave thermostat.

Sounds like good advice. If Ecobee's averaging logic works, I'd be happy to use it. The only thing I truly want to control in Indigo is home vs away.

Last question. Is there any disadvantage to buying the new "SmartThermostat with voice control" instead of the "Ecobee 3 Lite"?
Thanks,
Mike

Not that I can think of. The API is the same for both, as far as I know.

Curious on the various state values for Home, Away, and Climate.. When/how do these change?

Climate is the current climate setting, which is set by your Ecobee schedule. The autoHome and autoAway are somehow controlled by the occupancy sensors and your Ecobee settings for automatic climate setting changes. I've never used that feature so I don't know the details.