smart thermostats: nest vs. ecobee
i moved to a new house about a year ago and decided to leave my nest thermostat behind hoping it would help sell the house. it had served us well for a few years and while i was satisfied i also expected other smart thermostats to be available by now, so i did some research. i ended up going with ecobee and it’s been a better fit for me and my house.
the first thing i discovered was that nest had just come out with generation 3 whose main new feature was a larger diameter. that may have been slightly helpful at my old house, but my new house has the thermostat in a narrow hallway so i have to be right in front of it to see it anyway. still, the existence of the 3rd-generation nest meant i could get a 2nd-generation (the model i had before) at a discount.
looking at other brands, i discovered ecobee3 and honeywell lyric. somehow even though the lyric was round like the nest it just didn’t seem nearly as fashionable. also it uses geofencing to manage away mode, so if everyone with their phone connected through the app is out of the house, it goes into away mode. since i have children too young to have smartphones, this makes getting a babysitter and going out with my wife more complicated. while geofencing seems great for a house full of people with smartphones, it’s not for where we are in life. i ruled out the lyric first. both nest and ecobee handle away mode via motion sensors, so if nobody’s walked by in a while they think nobody’s home. you can override away mode from the app (and probably could for the lyric as well) but really you want the thermostat to get it right.
ecobee comes with an additional sensor and the option to purchase more in packs of two. the sensors detect both motion and temperature and came in handy when we discovered we don’t walk past the actual thermostat enough for it to realize we’re still home. i used poster putty to put my sensors on the wall, but they can also be mounted with a single screw or the included double-sided tape (which didn’t stay on my walls). they also include a small stand in case you want to set them on a table. the sensors run on cr2032 batteries and i haven’t needed to replace any of them so far. with more than one sensor the ecobee can control the temperature based on which sensors have detected motion recently. since i have one sensor upstairs where the bedrooms are, i have it set to only use that one when we’re asleep and ignore the others.
while both ecobee and nest automatically go to away temperatures based on motion sensors, they set their schedules differently. nest is a “learning” thermostat which means you spend the first couple weeks turning the heat down when you go to bed and up when you get up so it can figure out your schedule. it’s possible to review the schedule it creates through the app, but doesn’t give you a good option to input a schedule yourself. maybe it’s because we’re engineers, but we never really liked or trusted its learning.
ecobee needs to be programmed. there are three different temperature ranges you can set (home, away, and sleep) and then you schedule what times it should switch to a different range (when it hasn’t automatically turned away mode on after not detecting motion). i like this better than learning, but i’d appreciate being able to add more custom temperature ranges. i don’t want quite as much heat while i’m showering and getting dressed, for example.
i installed both thermostats myself without issue. both houses control forced-air heat from a gas furnace and central air conditioning. the nest worked find with the 4-wire cable that was connected to my old thermostat, but for the ecobee i needed a fifth wire. my new house actually had a 6-wire thermostat cable run but with only 4 wires connected to the furnace, so i connected the fifth and was good to go. it came with a wiring harness that can piggyback the power for the 5th wire on one of the other wires in case your cable only has the 4 wires, but i didn’t need that. i had to open up the furnace to connect the fifth wire (to a screw terminal), and the wiring harness also requires that. nest attempts to draw its power from the 4 wires and also has a battery built in. i only had a problem with the batter dying when a service person forgot to turn the furnace power back on. a quick internet search showed me that i needed to pull the thermostat off the wall and charge it with a micro usb cable (the kind androids and kindles use). ecobee has no battery due to the more reliable power wire, but when your furnace is switched off so is the ecobee (not that it’d be useful then anyway).
while turning the temperature up or down was fast, easy, and even a little fun on the nest, everything else was cumbersome. the thermostat itself only has the scroll wheel around the outside (great for setting the temperature) and a single button you click by pushing the entire unit toward the wall. it takes a long time to enter the wifi password that way. the app has to work different since it’s on a phone with a touch screen, so that’s another thing to learn. ecobee is opposite all these things. the thermostat itself is a touch screen and works the same as the app. it pops up an on-screen keyboard for entering the wifi password. unfortunately changing the temperature setting is imprecise because it uses a slider — slide to 72° and let go and it usually jumps a couple degrees away. typically you only want to change temperature by a couple degrees so putting a slider here confuses me. i don’t find myself changing the temperature often but when i do it usually takes a few attempts.
each smart thermostat has one key feature that sets it apart. for ecobee it’s expandability through additional sensors. nest has learning, and lyric has geofencing. ecobee was the best fit for me having young children and a spread-out house. if everyone in your house has a smartphone and you want to save energy when nobody’s phone is home, consider the lyric. if you have a programmable thermostat but never bothered programming it, check out nest.