[1MOREMOD]

My nest kind of sucks also. Thinks the temp in the house is 5 degrees or more higher than it is. Have to set the thermostat to 75 for it to be 70

[EL Jeffe 5]

Building new house here I will be doing a lot of automation.
I was thinking about buying ecobee 4 now you making me do even more research

[zx10guy]

Originally Posted by Who's on first

Wow. As a DTV customer this interests me.

Yes. This should interest you and everyone who is looking at any device which has a phone home capability. All this cloud enablement is great in the short term but the long term ramifications are hard to ignore. It astonishes me how willing people are to hand over access to a good chunk of their lives freely to corporations. As more and more things are IoT enabled, this should be the number one question you all need to raise.

As I found out something someone would never guess would be a privacy concern was with a DirecTV DVR.

[dreamingat30fps]

I have no issues with my ecobee3. I've had it loose connection to the bedroom sensor (furthest from unit) once or twice but didn't seem to have any effect on anything and it just reconnected on its own.

My biggest issue with the nest was that it only gathers data from the unit itself which would be on the wall in a hallway not near any of the living spaces. The temperature between my office, living room and bedroom can vary by like 5 degrees. I find I rarely if ever have to mess with the temperature setting on the ecobee.

[JasonCSU]

Originally Posted by zx10guy

Exactly. I hate anything cloud related to include storage. Why would you want to voluntarily hand over the keys to things you value such as intimate details of your personal life?

To provide proof about what can happen when you place a device in your home with access to your network, this is what I found out personally. I had a network attached printer, an Xerox 8560MFP/D to be exact. I set the eco mode on it so it would put itself to sleep to save on power. To my surprise, the printer was waking out of sleep mode every 15 minutes. I thought what the heck? Anyone who is familiar with these Xerox printers, know that they use solid ink sticks which require to be melted. Every time the printer wakes up, the printer draws a ton of power to start up the heating elements which in turn causes ink to be wasted as it's a by product of the heating element firing up.

Annoyed by this, I decided to sniff the network traffic going to the printer to figure out what is hitting the printer and waking it up. After sifting through the packet capture with Wire Shark, I found the culprit. It was the DirecTV DVR I had installed. The DVR was snooping the network and figured out there was a web server running on the local network. The captured data showed the DVR was sending HTTP GET commands and pulling hardware information from my printer. I had an immediate WTF moment. Upon discovering this, I isolated the DVR from the rest of my network.

Wow, that is crazy and definitely interesting. I should probably sniff my home network at some point to see if there is any unusual traffic.

[JasonCSU]

Originally Posted by zx10guy

Yes. This should interest you and everyone who is looking at any device which has a phone home capability. All this cloud enablement is great in the short term but the long term ramifications are hard to ignore. It astonishes me how willing people are to hand over access to a good chunk of their lives freely to corporations. As more and more things are IoT enabled, this should be the number one question you all need to raise.

As I found out something someone would never guess would be a privacy concern was with a DirecTV DVR.

Maybe the wakeup call will be when your personal data is used against you. One example I can see is with fitness monitors. Sure, they are great to track and monitor your health and fitness goals, but the convenience of doing so means the data collected by the device is being stored on a cloud server owned by the device vendor so that you can access it anywhere. Who's to say the vendor won't keep your data private and share it with a third party for profit. Think of how valuable that data would potentially be to the healthcare industry for setting health insurance rates on individuals. Until something like this happens, I think people will continue to either not care, or be oblivious to what is going on.

[BuiltnBoostedZ]

Originally Posted by EL Jeffe 5

Building new house here I will be doing a lot of automation.
I was thinking about buying ecobee 4 now you making me do even more research

Been in construction management for 20 years. I've tested many home automation brands. Good ones are below.

Honeywell lyric (square one)
TP-Link or Wemo hard wire light switches
Chamberlain My Q garage door system
Kevo smart locks

There are a few other good brands but these have been the most reliable in my experience. I will be building single family and multifamily projects in colorado and this is what I'll be using.

[askjeeves]

no issues with the ecobee 3 and it should pay for itself in less than a year.

[AIRPOWER]

Originally Posted by twin fed

I have an EcoBee3 and it works perfectly since day one. I highly recommend it.

Ditto! Love the EcoBee 3

[Xtabi]

I tried the ecobee and the nest. I liked the ecobee better by every measure except looks.

[3 Stripes]

Recently bought me a honeywell (through amazon) and was debating on an ecobee. Both Comed and Nicor give you sweet rebates on smart thermostats (honeywell, ecobee, nest). Ended up paying 14 dollars for my lyric t5 after rebates.


Rebates:
https://nicorgasrebates.com/your-home/rebates-for-home
https://www.comedrebates.com/smart-thermostat-rebates

[ciaranob]

Ditto - have two in home - no issues, rock solid.

Originally Posted by BuiltnBoostedZ

Honeywell has been making thermostats for ages. Honeywell Lyric here. Never disconnects, always works perfectly.

Originally Posted by twin fed

I have an EcoBee3 and it works perfectly since day one. I highly recommend it.

[EL Jeffe 5]

Originally Posted by BuiltnBoostedZ

Been in construction management for 20 years. I've tested many home automation brands. Good ones are below.

Honeywell lyric (square one)
TP-Link or Wemo hard wire light switches
Chamberlain My Q garage door system
Kevo smart locks

There are a few other good brands but these have been the most reliable in my experience. I will be building single family and multifamily projects in colorado and this is what I'll be using.

Thanks this is good info

Can you pleases tell me if Honeywell lyric will work with two stage furnace?
I will be doing Liftmaster garage door opener belt drive with My Q system
Some Wemo switches and Kevo smart locks for sure.
Five Hard wire cameras.

[BuiltnBoostedZ]

Originally Posted by EL Jeffe 5

Thanks this is good info

Can you pleases tell me if Honeywell lyric will work with two stage furnace?
I will be doing Liftmaster garage door opener belt drive with My Q system
Some Wemo switches and Kevo smart locks for sure.
Five Hard wire cameras.

Not sure. I'm sure honeywell has a product that does though. They have several different models that are smart.

[PoorLurker]

Originally Posted by ccdre

I have zero issues with my Ecobee. Sorry about the bad luck but it never skipped a beat for me.

Same here - no issues with my ecobee. Then again, I usually never run the heater or the AC.

[JackMayyam]

the built-in alexa for ecobee 4 is amazing. but the price isn't. You might want to take a look to it.

[Who's on first]

Originally Posted by JackMayyam

the built-in alexa for ecobee 4 is amazing. but the price isn't. You might want to take a look to it.

Lol. Did you even read the 1st post?
You should try that first before posting replies.


The Ecobee 4 started giving me false low humidity alerts 2 weeks ago. About 6-8 times a day. I taped 3 different sensors right next to the ecobee wall unit (all from different manufactures)... they all read 17% higher than the ecobee.

I've requested a manufactures refund.

Some things are just not meant to be.

[infinitekidM2C]

this thread is basically an advertisement for Ecobee at this point.

[mecheng77]

I can vouch for Ecobee, it is the most advanced system and works well. More sophisticated than Nest.