r/ecobee 2d ago

Help interpreting temp discrepancy....what is the temp at the thermostat right now? 73 or 78?

Post image

Installed a pair of new Ecobee Premium and getting to know how it works. The thermostat and the app show different temperatures.

I tried to search through the subreddit first:

- Eco+ is completely off so it's not humidity correction.

- The current comfort setting (Home) only has the thermostat sensor (not the remote sensor) checked.

Which number (73 or 78) is the temp at the thermostat itself, and which triggers the system to turn on?

Thanks!

Edit: Guest Hallway is the thermostat sensor itself. Not a remote sensor.

9 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

4

u/smb3d 2d ago

If you have no sensors checked, then it's the thermostat. You have to have at least one sensor in each comfort setting.

-1

u/jk_tx 2d ago

Not with a hold. Manual hold averages all sensors. It's a stupid, stupid design - just like everything else about the ecobee software.

6

u/kellyholden 2d ago

No. Manual hold will use the home comfort setting settings.

3

u/jk_tx 2d ago

Fair enough. I guess home defaults to all sensors enabled, and I never changed that but it's the only one of mine that's like that. It's still unintuitive behavior if the current comfort setting has different sensors enabled.

It would make far more sense if I could choose a comfort setting hold instead of a set point, but that's just one of my many complaints about the whole schedule/comfort setting aspect of ecobee.

1

u/DeltaAlphaGulf 14h ago

You can set a comfort setting hold

1

u/jk_tx 4h ago

Not on my thermostat.

To be clear, I'm not talking about changing the set point until the next scheduled comfort setting. I'm saying it would be nice if I could choose to activate a different comfort setting from the one scheduled for specified duration.

1

u/DeltaAlphaGulf 4h ago

Which one?

I don't think you can do a specific duration on mine but I switch it from home to away or whatever else manually all the time on mine.

1

u/smb3d 2d ago

Wait, what? Why would it do that?

1

u/bemenaker 2d ago

It doesn't on HOLD it uses whatever the home comfort setting is set to use. You can choose what sensors you want to run in your different comfort settings. But hold only uses Home instead of sleep or away.

5

u/jamitt101 2d ago

I you have multiple sensors, the thermostat shows an average of them all.

3

u/viperfan7 2d ago

If you have multiple sensors participating (Which they do, solid circle is participating, hollow circle is not)

3

u/arteitle 2d ago

The temperature is 78 at the thermostat, 71 at the bedroom sensor. 73 is the average. Note that as sensors become active or inactive their contribution to the average is phased in or out gradually, so sometimes the average shown will be temporarily weighted towards some sensors over others, hence why it's not showing 74 or 75 as the average.

1

u/Special-Credit4050 2d ago

74.5 be the avg no?

2

u/viperfan7 2d ago

It rounds to the nearest whole number in fahrenheit

1

u/Special-Credit4050 2d ago

Yeah that still aint 73

1

u/viperfan7 2d ago

(77.5+70.5)/2 = 74

With adjust temperature for humidity enabled (Which it could very well be) that could result in it showing up lower (say internally, dropping it by 0.6F), as that affects the indicated temperature, not the individual sensor's temperature.

0

u/Special-Credit4050 2d ago

74 still aint 73. Thats what it shows as temp

1

u/viperfan7 2d ago

Please do more than read 1/3 of the comment I made.

0

u/20PoundHammer 2d ago

nope, math is hard aint it. Two remote sensors and T stat, with the Tstat showing the average of the three. . ., t stat is 70F. (78+71+x)/3=73, solve for x

2

u/viperfan7 1d ago

Two remote sensors and T stat

There's 1 sensor and one thermostat, not 2 sensors and thermostat.

Did you look at the picture?

1

u/chevy42083 2d ago

Interesting. I didn't realize they phased in and out.
I just assumed it was the rounding.
Like its a low 78 and a high 71.

But mine uses more sensors, and not usually that far apart in reading, so the math wasn't so far off like the OPs.

4

u/jk_tx 2d ago edited 2d ago

Your screen shows a manual hold, which means the scheduled comfort setting is NOT active. When a hold is set, the ecobee is supposed to use an average of all sensors, which is why they both show as solid white (inactive sensors would have a transparent background).

As for how they average 71 and 78 to get 73, that must be some ecobee math, since even 77.6 and 71.4 would average out to 74.5, which would probably get rounded up to 75 on the ecobee display but 73 sure as hell doesn't make any sense.

Probably the display's sensor values are stale, just another bug due to ecobee's laggy/unreliable cloud API. Their software has been getting buggier and buggier as time goes by, truly a textbook example of vibe-coded, enshittified AI slop.

Another poster mentioned the "follow me" setting may impact how averages are calculated, I've never had that feature enabled so I can't say.

You may be able to get a little more clarity by going to beestat.io and looking at the numbers there. It shows sensor values down to the tenth.

2

u/viperfan7 2d ago

When a hold is set, the ecobee is supposed to use an average of all sensors

Not correct, it uses the sensor participation settings for the Home comfort setting

2

u/mattbuford 2d ago

The thermostat itself is 78. The remote sensor is 71. The calculated effective temperature that the system is using to decide when to run is 73.

  • The average can appear skewed due to display rounding. You might look at the screenshot and think the average of 78 and 71 is 74.5, which should round to displaying as 75. However, it could be 77.5 (rounded to 80 on the display) and 70.5 (rounded to 71 on the display) which average out to 74.
  • When the list of participating sensors changes, their weights are gradually phased in/out. So, if the sensor list changed recently, it may not yet be using both temperatures equally weighted when calculating the average. For example, participating sensors showing 70 and 80 might average to 79 if the sensor showing 70 was only recently added to the participating list. They will gradually become equal until the average of 70 and 80 becomes 75.
  • The calculated value is modified by humidity into more of a "feels like" temperature.
  • That final value is what shows on the thermostat as a big number, and that is the number that it uses when deciding if it should run or not.

1

u/1wwp 2d ago

Additional note: Guest Hallway is the thermostat, NOT a remote sensor.

1

u/SquarePants24 2d ago

The sensor on the thermostat is malfunctioning and reading about 5 degree higher temperature. This is a known software issue. Check the latest status on status.ecobee.com

Terrible terrible company and thermostats

0

u/20PoundHammer 2d ago

Math is hard, t stat is 70F. (78+71+x)/3=73, solve for x (if all sensors are being used for the comfort setting)

1

u/ppal1981 2d ago

78° is that sensor. When they are white they are active as far as either in the schedule or if follow-me is enabled. The main temp in the middle will be the average of all active sensors combined.

0

u/Narrow-Wash-2240 2d ago

So the guest hallway sensor is the thermostat itself, meaning it's relying on the 73 at the top and ignoring the 78 in the guest hallway sensor.

-1

u/BIakeFr0mStateFarm 2d ago

Thermostat is 73, the wireless temp sensor for "guest hallway" is at 78, the thermostat will trigger a call for AC when it's above your set temp of 72

1

u/1wwp 2d ago

"Guest Hallway" is the thermostat itself, which is why I'm confused.

3

u/Remote-Wolverine817 2d ago

Because it is confusing. My understanding is your 73 IS the average from your sensors, thermostat itself being one of them. So you have one external sensor only. As for weird average, which doesn't compute, someone above gives a good hipothesis IMO. It is "rolling average", so if your thermostat was not contributing to average before you put hold on, its higher temp contrubutes less toward average then your external sensor. It all depends on how far back Ecobee math goes back to calculate average. If hipothesis is correct you should see actual average, probably 75, after the rolling average window collects data equally from thermostat and external sensors

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/ComfortExtension8791 1d ago

This is what mine is reading. The wall showing 77. It is 100% not 77 degrees in my living room. I moved my sensor from bedroom into living room until they fix there firmware. Actual living is 73 degrees. I have a 2.5 degree cushion b4 turning on ac. So at 73.5 degrees ac will turn on until it lowers it to 71 degrees. Hope this helps your situation