I was never happy with my Nest thermostat and learned about Ecobee while reading complaints by other owners of Nest thermostats. It has wireless "sub-sensors" that you can put in other rooms and the Ecobee will read those sensors and average the temp in the house, or, I put one in the master bedroom and have the thermostat work off of only it at night. Our bedroom is now comfortable all night – instead of the hall way where the Ecobee is installed.

Ecobee gives you a LOT of reports, including inside and outside temp and humidity, Heat setting, Cool setting, HVAC Fan and actual inside temp, all on one graph so you can see how your system is working and performing. And, it will give you history all the way back to installation. Unlike Nest that only goes back 10 days.

Installation was easy. The app tells you to take a photo of the existing system and then tells you where to connect the wires on the Ecobee. It took 15 minutes and that was double checking all of the instructions.

I only review products that are extraordinarily bad or incredibly good. This product merits the latter, not just for its programming and control features, but for outstanding customer service.
My dated HVAC system does not have a C wire, which is necessary to power most modern programmable thermostats. Fortunately, this top of the line ecobee thermostat comes with a hack, called a power extender kit. Unfortunately, the power extender kit is not an easy install. That’s where Ecobee‘s amazing customer service comes into play.
For more than an hour, the Ecobee’s customer service rep, using my digital photographs uploaded to the company’s portal, and with clear, highly skilled communication, walked me through the wiring process, not just at the newly mounted thermostat but also deep in the innards of my furnace to mount the power extender.
Keep in mind, time was of the essence, considering the furnace had to be shut down in early January in Chicago. We got it done in an hour or so.
Had Ecobee not been there to walk me through this, I would’ve had to remount the old, persnickety Nest thermostat given the winter time urgency, and call an HVAC guy. I doubt my handyman would’ve had the expertise to mount the power extender kit without help from the company.
The Ecobee with the power extender is not inexpensive but considering the time and cost of fish taping a C wire through the wall to connect to the old furnace, it’s a reasonable price.
If your furnace is like mine and has only four wires leading to the thermostat, chances are you need this.
Bottom line: an excellent product exceeded only by its outstanding customer service!

I'm about a month into using the ecobee Smart Thermostat. This thermostat does everything I wish my Nest had done, with a surprise. Read until the end!

You can skip this paragraph if you want to just read about the ecobee thermostat. I'm not new to smart thermostats. My first smart thermostat was a 3M Filtrete. Not a lot of features, but it worked well. I had a Nest several years ago and left it with my previous house when I sold it. Had a Honeywell thermostat for a couple of years, and it was OK, but had some quirks. I thought maybe I'd like the new Nest better and tried one for about 6 months, but hated incompatibilities and a super poor user interface. Plus I wasted over an hour before I searched online and found out that the GOOGLE Nest wasn't compatible with Google Workspace accounts. Go figure. So I'm done with the Nest permanently, thankfully. Rant over. 😉

The ecobee has some features that I didn't know I wanted. The remote unit is cool (or warm), and when I'm in the bedroom, it adjusts temperature there to my set program. I'm thinking I'll probably get a couple more occupancy sensors to make this even better as I move around the house.

The ecobee app interface is really good, especially compared to the Google/Nest interface. It's very good about respecting settings I put in place, unlike the Nest.

The Amazon Echo/Alexa support surprised me. I was expecting a connection to my existing echo devices, which is there, but the ecobee thermostat has a speaker in it and actually functions as an Echo device. I wasn't expecting that, and it works well. I wouldn't recommend it if you were thinking about it for music, but it's nice to have since it's in an area where I didn't have an Echo device.

The installation and setup was really easy, though this is my 5th or 6th smart thermostat. One takeaway from my first thermostat installation – cut the power to your furnace/AC before you start installation. I know the instructions say to do that, but on my first installation, I had a really cold night!

The big surprise for me was when I went to see what the vacation mode looked like. I was really excited because it had a feature I hadn't expected. On occasion, I'll forget to turn my thermostat to vacation hold right when I leave, but when I went to that section, I found I could actually *schedule* vacation holds! Now, as soon as I book my flights, I can set up a vacation schedule so I don't have to think about it when I'm getting ready to travel. I can set efficiency to happen automatically when I'm going to leave, and set to be comfortable just before I plan to be back. Great feature, and something that I'll definitely use.

I highly recommend this thermostat, and even though I've gone through several over the past 10 years, this one feels like the best fit for me so far, and I'm likely to stick with this one for a significant amount of time.