ecobee SmartThermostat with Voice Control

So I have been turning my home slowly into a smart home over the past 3 years with smart switches, bulbs, plugs, locks and a Wink Hub 2 to help them all work together. I have avoided thermostat's because I was concerned about others in my house not knowing how to use them.I bought a Nest thermostat about a year ago and it just didn't operate the system I bought it for correctly, ever. I was always adjusting it up or down constantly; not really what you want to do if you are looking to save energy.So I looked at Ecobee. I have heard the problems with the Ecobee 3 working with Alexa or being sub-par in its Alexa integration so I held off. Then they came out with this "Smart Thermostat" with full Alexa integration, better speaker, etc., so I decided to try it.My house is large, I have 4010 square feet, 2 furnace/ac setups and 3 zones. I tried the Ecobee Smart Thermostat on the largest, single zone section of the house for a week. To say installation was a breeze is unacceptable; it was done within 30 minutes, including removing the old stat and installing the new one (10 mins), I had it configured to work with my newly installed app in another 10 minutes. Schedule was done in the last 10 minutes.Its very intuitive to use, simple on the main screen where anyone can simply look and see what it is set to, what the current room temp is and current humidity reading; that's it. If you want to change the temp its a simple slide bar on the right side of screen.While it is simple enough for anyone to change it has many features in the menu and app to let you drill into setting up the optimal schedule, limiting ranges that people can change the temp, as well as reviewing trends in your usage. Just an overall excellent product, well made and very thoughtful interface.I like it so much I bought 2 more for the other 2 zones which sit on the same furnace/ac unit and has a zone board with 2 electrically operated baffles, making these a bit more difficult to install. Also, one of these did not have a G or C-wire.I decided for these 2 additional stats I would go with the Ecobee 3 lite Pro since I wasn't worried about talking to it directly (yet they both still function through Alexa, allowing you to change their temps or get info from them through Alexa using one of my other Alexa devices in the house).I had to work with the Ecobee support team to figure out how to set these up correctly. The only thing I had to do special is make sure I wired up the G and C wires in the zone board at the appropriate terminals and then connect them to the stat as normal. This was made easier since the wires were actually there just not being used in the old stat or the zone board for some unknown reason.All in all, my house is now fully smart when it comes to the thermostats now and I am already noticing the temperatures are more consistent with the stat readings. I fully expect to start saving money with these things quickly. I am glad I went with Ecobee instead of Nest, including with all the recent talk about Nest moving away from Google Assistant (which I also have in the house).Hope this helps.

Purchased this unit after installation of a whole home humidifier specifically an AprilAire 500 series. Connection is quit straight forward and the step by step instruction are easy to follow. In my case I had an extra wire already running up to my thermostat so that was handy. Mainly I want to discuss the humidity control, if you have it set to a bypass style humidifier it will only run when the fan is engaged thus your humidity will never rise very much. We hovered around 30 with it set this way. Now, the cool part if you set the Ecobee to Steam Type humidifier it will run your unit until the requested humidity is reached and then shut off. This setup is not freely explained in the instructions and i found it on a REDDIT page. Hope this helps somebody out...

This is a fantastic product that requires some thought and work on initial setup (and may require some adjustments for a while at the start.) The payoff however is very rewarding and works slick. It does NOT require advanced technical knowlege but techies will probably enjoy setup much more.Installation advice:After opening the product and breezing through the instructions I downloaded the app and discovered that it had a very well made setup process directly through the app. I tore my old thermostat off the wall, connected all the wires, tried to trun on the device and no lights, nothing. After panicking for a bit i went to my heater and discovered that while i had a blue 'c' wire on my thermostat end it hadn't been hooked up on my heater. After attatching it i had no further wiring issues.Pros:Easy to set up home/away/sleep temperature ranges and then schedule your week out. Smart presence sensors to make schedule diviance a non-issue.Saves a history of temperatures, humidity, and run cycle.Warns the user if the temperature falls outside of acceptable ranges.Alexa feature is handy and easy to set up.Well thought out and atractive user interface.Oddities:The app interface and that on the thermostat are very similar. What took me a while to realize (having set up most of the software with the app) was that there are features on the ecobee menu that are not available or accessable in the app.There is a third party app called beestat that offers a superior method to see your data that i highly recommend otherwise you MUST go to their website. The ecobee app does not show any of your user data. Additionally, i had issues with the ecobee holding away or home idenfinitely until i turned the smart presence features on. I purchased this thermostat so that I could monitor the temperature in my house while I was visiting family over Christmas. I live in a cool climate and with this i don't have to worry as much about my pipes freezing

If you aren't good with technology or basic wiring I can see why some people might have difficulty with this thermostat. But for the rest of us... this is a great thermostat! Used to have a Nest and that was nice, but this thermostat really has options that are focused on saving money and building a comprehensive schedule. The online access is very comprehensive as well.The only questionable designed choice on this thing is to have Alexa built-in. Making it controllable with Alexa is great, but actually having Alexa built-in to play music or something on it? Who is doing that?! I have three other Alexa's within speaking range of my thermostat so that just seems like a completely useless feature, but at least they are trying to add as much technology into it as possible I guess.

So I gave tech support one star because no way to give none I never talked to them it works great on it own.So my house was built in 2000 and original thermostat that you can to manually switch it from heat to A/C and it drove me insane not alone the extra cost to keep having to switch it daily. So I bought this because I have no common wire for any auto thermostat and this came with an adaptor. Now I also have an old furnace so I couldn't get to the panel to install it do called a Hvac place and was over $300 to install which really sucked but after a couple weeks I love this thing. Literally a 20 year upgrade! And its almost too good 8 can see this saving on bills for sure.