Ecobee SmartBuildings
I'm wondering if anyone uses the SmartBuildings side of Ecobee thermostats and has any workarounds for the disaster that their program is.
Smart Home/Away is utterly useless because if I have a room that is not schedule (thus in away mode) and someone just walks by the thermostat, it automatically puts it in Home mode for 2 hours. There seems to be no way to avoid this unless I want to turn off Smart Away (which I don't want to do. Often we have something scheduled in a room but the parties cancel or leave and I want it to catch that and go to Away mode after some time). I thought a work around to this would be setting the Home and Away settings the exact same and then using a Custom comfort setting for "Occupied" but custom comfort settings overrule smart home/away.
Scheduling more than one thermostat together is a nightmare. Grouping them to set a schedule, I have to first import the existing schedule, make changes to it (hopefully not forgetting to pull in the old one first) and then make adjustments and set it for those thermostats. And I can ONLY do that to Home/Away/Sleep, I can't use the Custom Comfort Settings that I have established unless I set the schedule for each thermostat individually.
The Schedule is not calendar based, so to make a slight deviation, I have to set an event to a specific date. If I want to do that, I cannot see them on the schedule for the week and have to go to a separate tab to see any events scheduled. The way around this would be if it would allow me to set recurring events, which it also does not allow. The schedule system is clunky and incredibly easy to screw up and lose the whole week's schedule.
No Google Calendar integration without adding another paid third party app, which adds another layer of complication for set up.
All in all, after speaking with their SB sales team and explaining what we are hoping to be able to do and being sold a bill of goods (and 32 thermostats) we are actually in a worse situation now than before. And the hour wait time for support makes it even worse.
Anyway, beyond just venting at what a trash product this is, I'm wondering if anyone else has had any ways to work around these issues.