Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium Review: Expensive, But It Does Everything
8.3
Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium
Like
- Packed with smart features
- Great app
- Geofencing
- External sensors
I don’t like it
Some “smart” thermostats take your standard thermostat, add a Wi-Fi connection and an app that lets you set the temperature remotely, and voila. Then there’s the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium.
This $250 smart thermostat could become the centerpiece of an entire Ecobee smart home ecosystem if you add the company’s features smart doorbell or other home security devices. As a thermostat, it can set schedules, determine when you are home and away, adjust temperature for humidity, and connect to cost-saving community energy systems.
It may be the Cadillac of thermostats, and it has a Cadillac price tag. Is it worth choosing over a Chevrolet?
I recently tested several smart thermostats, evaluating their features, apps, connectivity, and usability. I also took price into account when choosing the best of the best. Here’s what I found out during my in-home test of the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium.
Getting Started: Installation and Configuration
Like most smart thermostats, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium requires a C wire to power it. Older HVAC systems may not have one, but luckily this one comes with an adapter, so if you’re a bit handy and don’t mind wires, there are additional instructions for setting that up.
Installation is handled through the Ecobee app, which offers extensive guidance, including my favorite step: asking you to take a photo of your current wiring, since it’s so easy to forget which wire goes where. I’ve installed quite a few thermostats myself and in my testing of products, so your experience may vary based on your experience level, but I had no trouble getting this one into the wall. It comes with an optional wall plate to cover the area around your thermostat and make it stand out, but you don’t have to mount that part if you don’t want to.
Ecobee offers a few different ways to connect your thermostat to your Wi-Fi, including typing in the network name and password directly on the thermostat, but I guess my network name was too long and it had trouble connecting that way. I also got errors when trying to connect it to my iPhone via Apple HomeKit, which should be as easy as scanning a QR code. Those errors were fixed after I turned my phone and the thermostat off and back on, and everything was smooth sailing from there.
The thermostat offers a few different ways to learn your habits and set comfort settings for you. You can set up geofencing, which uses your phone to track when you’re near the thermostat and when you’re away, so the thermostat can use more energy-saving settings when you’re not home. The thermostat can also use your home and away behavior to better tailor schedules to your habits, taking some of the work out of manually programming schedules.
If you want to program schedules manually, it’s easy to do. You can do it right on the thermostat, which has a large (3-by-3-inch) touchscreen display. It’s easy to set a schedule for one day and copy it to the next, meaning your weekdays can be synchronized, or changed if you’re running a different schedule. The app is great, but you don’t need it to do most things.
An abundance of features
The Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium does things you might not expect. It integrates with smart home and home security systems, and works with Alexa, HomeKit, and Google Home. It has geofencing, so it knows when you’re home and away and can adjust the temperature accordingly. And there’s more.
The Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium comes with a remote room sensor, allowing it to monitor multiple areas of your home. We all have a room that gets extra cold, extra stuffy, or extra hot, and multiple room sensors are an important way to ensure that your thermostat is capturing more than just what’s right in front of it.
The Room Sensor was incredibly easy to set up, as simple as scanning a QR code and placing it on a shelf. It’s a cute little device (or a potentially unplanned cat toy). With the Room Sensors, you can have your Ecobee thermostat “follow you,” detect which rooms are occupied, and set the temperature to either heat or cool the occupied room. For example, if I’m in the office in the morning, it can make sure the temperature there is comfortable, while the living room is warmer or cooler. Then, when I’m done working and want to curl up on the couch, it switches rooms.
Perhaps my favorite feature, as someone who’s looked at a lot of thermostats that have similar features, is that the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium is a pretty good Bluetooth speaker. It’s a strange experience writing this review while listening to music on the same device that sets the temperature, but that’s technology.
Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium Features
| Price | $250 |
|---|---|
| Geofencing | Yes |
| External sensors | One included |
| Smart Home Compatibility | Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa |
| Need C-wire? | Yes (adapter included) |
Is it worth it?
If you’re paying cash, you should think long and hard about whether a tricked-out thermostat is worth the money. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program estimates that an Energy Star smart thermostat will save you a average $50 per yearSo in terms of cost savings, the payback period for something like the Ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium is half a decade. Compare that to less than two years for the Amazon Smart Thermostat, which can do much of what the Ecobee does.
A smart thermostat, like any other technology purchase, isn’t always a purely money-saving endeavor. It’s a lifestyle choice. Maybe you want to invest in Ecobee’s security devices. Maybe you want a wide range of control and information. Maybe you want something that can play music on your living room wall. Maybe you want a thermostat with room sensors because your home heats and cools unevenly.
There’s also the question of whether you’ll pay full price. Utility companies, local governments and other agencies regularly offer rebates, discounts and even free thermostats. Keep an eye out for one of these and you might just snag a Cadillac for the price of a Chevrolet.
How we test smart thermostats
Most of the home energy products we test and evaluate here at CNET have a bunch of numbers attached to them: the efficiency of solar panels and the power of batteries. Not so with smart thermostats. All of the thermostats we tested can perform the basic functions of turning on your heat when it’s cold and your air conditioning when it’s warm. While some of our scores are based on tangible, mathematical data, it’s all about the myriad ways you can interact with the thermostat to get the comfort level and energy savings you want.
We tested and experimented with all the thermostats in this list. We installed them on a test rig that simulates a standard HVAC system, programmed them, and tried out their various functions.
We used this setup, built by our CNET Labs engineers, to connect several thermostats to test their interfaces and apps.
The 10-point scores we give smart thermostats are based on the following metrics:
- 20% is based on available connectivity for smart homes and other features including geofencing and remote room sensors.
- 20% is price, with a formula that rewards cheaper products. Devices that come with an external sensor are rated based on their price minus the retail value of an external sensor.
- 60% is completely subjective and based on our assessment of what the device has to offer, how easy it is to install, how easy the app or interface is to use, and what features it has that may not be standard for thermostats but are useful or helpful to consumers.
Choosing a thermostat is a subjective and personal choice, and our goal in scoring is to highlight the products that perform the most and best. Your purchasing decision should be based on your priorities, which may not exactly align with ours, so be sure to look at more than just a score when choosing a device that you’re likely to deal with almost every day.
