Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Poor occupancy detection by Ecobee3 remote sensors

Do you use an Ecobee 3 thermostat and have been noticing unreliable occupancy detection by remote sensors? Solution may be as simple as replacing battery.

I use 5 remote sensors with my Ecobee3. The system had been working very well for 20 months or so and then the occupancy detection reliability started to go down. Sensors in rooms that no one had been in for hours would show them occupied frequently. When I looked at the Home IQ report on ecobee app, I could see occupancy detector reporting occupancy more often than when someone was in that room. It got worse as time went by until the sensor was reporting room as occupied nearly 24 hours a day! This happened to 4 of my 5 sensors one by one and they all followed this pattern of degradation. I verified my remote sensors were assembled correctly and had the sensor inside lined up with the window on sensor body.  I tried resetting the sensor, I unpaired and left sensor with no battery for couple of days before powering it back up and pairing it again. None of that helped. I even put a sensor inside a box for 5 days and yet it continued to report the room as occupied more than 90% of the time! Finally I got a low battery warning on one of the sensors. That got me thinking if they all were running low on battery but not triggering low battery alert. I changed battery on all sensors. Lo and behold! all sensors went back to normal reliable operation.

If you see unreliable occupancy detection from a remote sensor and are not getting low battery alert, try a fresh battery first and see if that solves the problem.

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