Ecobee Thermostats Installed!

Ecobee Thermostat Installed on my wall

I finally bit the bullet and bought the Ecobee Smart thermostats.  They were $260 each which wasn't too bad.  Installation was a little bit of a hassle. It was difficult because the instructions were not clear for my geothermal installation.  To me, it was not clear what Power went where. Below is a pic of the former Honeywell thermostat.

Pic of the wiring from the former Honeywell Prestige IAQ Thermostat

 Luckily, the Ecobee support team was great. I emailed them and they were very prompt in their response. We went back and forth a couple times (thank you Gus!) and eventually we found out that I only have 1 @ 24V power supply while the diagrams listed two supplies.  So I needed to run a jumper wire from one 24V input to the Ecobee to the other side of the control board.

Ecobee Control Module Installation.  I did clean the wiring up more after the pic was taken.

Once that was determined, it was a breeze.  The upstairs unit includes the flood sensor (the thick red wires on the bottom left in the above picture).  If the flood sensor registers a flood it will shut down the air handler AND will send me an email.  Pretty cool, huh?

Final Installation of the upstairs Ecobee Control Module.

Programming the Ecobee was very easy.  For the most part I kept the default settings that were recommended by Ecobee for a geothermal install (that was a menu option in the Installer Setup).  The only things I changed were the delta for when the system turns on/off and the Stage timing.  For the delta, I set it to be 1.5F instead of 1F.  For this I'm just sacrificing a little bit of comfort for more energy savings.  For the Stage timing, I set Stage 1 to run for a max of 2 hrs before Stage 2 turns on.  Stage 2 will run for 3 hrs before it calls for the emergency electric heat.  Thus, my system would have to run for 5 straight hours before it will call for the expensive, inefficient heat.  In addition, the system will stay on the most efficient stage as long as possible.

The web interface is pretty cool.  A pic of it is below.  I can pretty much change any setting I want from the portal.  And its generally much easier to do it here than on the thermostat.  Below is a pic of the thermostat settings.  The dark blue is "sleep", orange is "awake", green is "away", and light blue is "home".  So for Monday-Friday, the vast majority of the time is "away".  Then on weekends, I have more "sleep" and "home" time.

Ecobee Web Portal

 The only cool thing is that I can check out graphs on how my systems are operating.  I can see the setpoints, the indoor and outdoor temperatures, humidity and the system run time.  It's very cool.  The Ecobee site also produces monthly runtime reports and lets me know how my system is doing compared to other homes of a similar size and geographical location.  Since I've only had it installed for +/- a week I'll have to wait to show y'all the results of the report. 

Downstairs Themostat Operational Information

Upstairs Thermostat Operational Information

 The Operational data is all downloadable.  What would  be VERY COOL would be if I could link this system data with my TED5000 home energy usage data.  This would allow me to track exactly my energy usage from HVAC.  That's probably a task for someone smarter than I.

There's also a Android App that I use on my phone.  It essentially lets me change the temperature, turn the system on/off, check the weather or set a vacation schedule.  Below is a screenshot from the phone. I can easily switch between thermostats too.

Screenshot from Ecobee Android App

 What would be really cool would be if I could look at the Operational information from the App.  Right now the only way to to do it is to login to the website from my phone.  It's a little bit of a pain...but not too bad.