Controlling your smart thermostat remotely from your phone is cool and all, but don’t forget that you can also make it even easier on yourself and control it with your voice using Alexa. Here’s how to set it up.
RELATED: How to Get the Most Out of Your Ecobee Smart Thermostat
Before you get started, it would be a good idea to learn how to add Alexa skills to your Alexa account, as well as add smarthome devices to your Alexa setup. Once you’re familiar with doing both of these things, this guide will be a breeze. Let’s get started!
Install the Ecobee Alexa Skills
Yes, you read that right—skills, with an “s”. There are multiple Alexa skills for the Ecobee thermostats (two to be exact). You really only need the newer one, but the older one still has its advantages, and I’ll talk more about that further below.
Open the Alexa app and tap on the menu button up in the top-left corner of the screen.
Select “Skills” from the list.
Tap on the search bar, enter in “ecobee”, and hit Enter on the keyboard.
You should see two Alexa skills, one called “Ecobee” and the other called “Ecobee Plus”. As mentioned above, you really only need the latter skill, but in order to provide basic voice commands without saying “Alexa, ask Ecobee…”, then you’ll want the former Alexa skill as well—both can be installed and coexist peacefully.
Tap on one and hit “Enable”.
Sign into your Ecobee account.
Hit “Accept” at the bottom.
After that, close it all out by hitting “Done” or the X button.
You’re good to go from there and can move onto the next step!
Add Your Ecobee Thermostat to Alexa
Next, you’ll need to add your Ecobee thermostat to Alexa so that you can control the device using voice commands. From within the menu in the Alexa app, tap “Smart Home”.
Tap on “Devices”.
Tap on “Discover”. You might have to scroll down to get to it if you already have some smarthome devices added.
Give the app a few seconds to look for devices. Afterward, your Ecobee thermostat should appear in the list.
Voice Commands You Can Use
If you install the newer Ecobee Plus skill, you can say a whole lot of commands to Alexa in order to control your Ecobee thermostat, whereas the plain Ecobee Alexa skill only lets you set the temperature and find out what the temperature is (or what the thermostat is set to). However, this skill does allow you to forgo saying “ask Ecobee”, so all you’d have to say is “Alexa, set the thermostat to 75”.
With the newer Ecobee Plus skill, you have to add “ask Ecobee” in front of your voice commands, so it would be “Alexa, ask Ecobee to set the thermostat to 75”. It’s kind of annoying, so it would be wise to install the other skill as well.
However, the newer skill allows you to do a lot of cool things. Here are some examples you might consider using with your own Ecobee:
“Alexa, ask Ecobee to set the thermostat to home mode. ” “Alexa, ask Ecobee to resume the schedule. ” or “”Alexa, ask Ecobee to cancel hold. ” “Alexa, ask Ecobee if the heating is enabled. ” “Alexa, ask Ecobee if the dehumidifier is running. ” “Alexa, ask Ecobee to turn the fan on. ” “Alexa, ask ecobee to set a vacation from tomorrow to next Wednesday. ”
This is definitely an improvement over the older Ecobee Alexa skill, and it pretty much gives you the ability to play with frequent controls using your voice rather than having to use the app all the time for some things.
