If you’re going on vacation soon, and don’t want to be bothered changing the thermostat as you’re trying to wrangle the family, the Ecobee3 actually allows you to schedule the thermostat to go into an away mode ahead of time.
How to Install and Set Up the Ecobee3 Smart Thermostat
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Setting up a vacation on the Ecobee3 is essentially just putting it into an away mode, which lowers the temperature settings so that your heating or air conditioning doesn’t run as often while you’re out of the house. Here’s how to set it up.
Start by opening up the Ecobee3 app on your smartphone and tapping on the menu button in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
Tap on “Vacation”.
Tap on the round “+” button in the top-right corner of the screen.
From there, first tap on “Departure date and time”.
Tap on “Departure Date”.
Select the day that you’ll be leaving and then hit “Save” at the bottom.
Next, tap on “Departure Time” and select the rough time that you’ll be leaving. You can only choose half-hour increments, so this doesn’t need to be exact or anything. Hit “Save” at the bottom when you’re done.
Once that’s done, hit the back arrow in the top-left corner of the screen and then select “Return date and time”.
On the next screen, tap on “Return Date”.
Select the day that you’ll be returning home and hit “Save” at the bottom.
Next, tap on “Return Time” and select the rough time that you’ll be returning. Again, you can only choose half-hour increments, so this doesn’t need to be exact. Hit “Save” at the bottom when you’re done.
Once that’s done, hit the back arrow in the top-left corner of the screen and then tap on “Vacation Settings”.
If it’s hot outside, turn on “Cool” and turn off “Heat”. Do the opposite during the winter.
Where it says “Minimum fan runtime”, you can select an amount of time per hour that the fan should run. Otherwise, the fan will run only when the HVAC is fired up. This is great to do if you know that the A/C or heat may not turn on many times (or at all) while you’re gone, so at least having the fan running will keep the air from getting stale.
When you’re finished, hit the back arrow in the top-left corner of the screen.
Hit “Save” down in the bottom-right corner.
After you hit save, your vacation settings will show up with date you’re leaving shown on the screen.
You can tap on it to change around any settings that you want. Otherwise, you’re all set and your Ecobee3 thermostat will automatically be put into Vacation Mode at the time and date you specified.