TORONTO, ON. ecobee Wi-Fi thermostat customers who upgrade to a BlackBerry® 10 smartphone will be pleased to know that they’ll be able to download the ecobee application right away. With the ecobee app for BlackBerry 10, ecobee customers who want to use their new BlackBerry 10 smartphone can be sure they are comfortable when they are home and saving money when they are not.

ecobee is proud to be able to offer the most complete offering of mobile apps in the marketplace for their products. The application, which is available free of charge, offers ecobee users the convenience of being able to control home comfort from anywhere at any time, and provides them with more opportunities to save energy.

“ecobee is built on the simple idea of making it easy and convenient for our customers to conserve energy and save money. The mobile experience is a big part of that,” says Stuart Lombard, President and CEO of ecobee. “The BlackBerry 10 app is another way for our customers to control their heating and cooling with their ecobees any way they want, anywhere they want.”

“We’re clearly seeing mobile computing extending into the realm of home appliances. ecobee’s smart energy solution leverages mobile technology to allow BlackBerry 10 customers to manage and control their thermostats from virtually anywhere they are,” says Martyn Mallick, Vice President, Global Alliances and Business Development at BlackBerry.

To download a PDF version of this press release click here

About ecobee

ecobee delivers intelligent energy management solutions. Installed in homes and businesses across North America, the ecobee Open Energy Management Platform is the easiest way for residential and commercial customers to understand, manage and reduce their energy consumption. Servicing both the Utility and HVAC markets, ecobee’s line of Wi-Fi enabled thermostats, online web portals and smart phone apps are the products of choice for ease of use, energy efficiency and demand response programs. ecobee has also won significant industry awards which include the ASHRAE/AHR Innovation Award for Building Automation, the Dealer Design Gold and Silver Awards and the Deloitte Green 15, among others. ecobee is supported by a network of over 2,800 quality HVAC contractors and distributors across North America.  For more information, visit www.ecobee.com

BlackBerry and related trademarks, names and logos are the property of Research In Motion Limited. BlackBerry is not responsible for any third-party products or services.

On Sunday evening we hosted our agents sales meeting at the Iron Cactus in downtown Dallas for roughly 50 of our agent partners. What a great venue, great turnout and a great time. As an Inside Sales rep, it was great to finally meet some of the agents I deal with on a regular basis. It was also nice to catch up with agents I dealt with while participating in the ecobee road trip mid last year. The first part of the evening was spent mingling with all of the agents in attendance.

After spending about 45 minutes meeting and catching up with our agents, we got everyone broken up into their groups and settled into their seats. Derrick Boyce our VP of Sales then got the evening started and MC’d us through the evening. Stuart Lombard, President and CEO, gave a short presentation to thank all agents for their hard work, updated them on some of our highlights and successes for the past year, and shared ecobee’s goals are for the coming year.

Next up it was the Regional Sales Manager turn to walk the agents through condensed presentations highlighting the key messaging and value that make the ecobee products stand out against the competition. The RSMs rotated through a series of five mini sessions, covering Home IQ, competition, commercial, residential and marketing. It was a great way to interact with the agents while reinforcing why ecobee should be an everyday product solution for our customers.

The night was very successful, all of our agents enjoyed the format, we were able to address a number of questions and received some great feedback.  The show opens up today and we are all looking forward to a great 3 days.

Travis Boyce

Monday, January 28, 2013: ecobee Inc., makers of the award-winning EMS (Energy Management System) and EMS Si Wi-Fi thermostats announced the launch of their new commercial smart phone application for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Providing added convenience, the new App will allow ecobee customers to monitor and control an unlimited number of ecobee EMS and EMS Si thermostats in multiple locations, from anywhere.

ecobee EMS and EMS Si wireless thermostats offer a cost-effective, centralized solution to monitor and control a building’s heating and cooling system—at the fraction of the price of a full-scale Building Automation System. Thousands of school districts, worship facilities, quick service restaurants, retail facilities, and government buildings have been able to realize significant cost and energy savings with ecobee EMS and EMS Si thermostats.

“The new EMS App was developed in partnership with our commercial customers who range from HVAC contractors and distributors, to facility managers and business owners,” said Stuart Lombard, ecobee’s President and CEO. He continued, “During the development process, our customers’ told us that their biggest challenges included high demands on their time, responding to a large percentage of unwarranted service calls, and dealing with repeat occurrences at one or more facilities. These challenges resulted in wasted productivity and unnecessary costs.”

The EMS App was developed to address these challenges and to provide ecobee customers with a simple and easy way to monitor and control all of their EMS and EMS Si Wi-Fi thermostats while on the go. “The EMS App allows users to be more responsive to their tenants, employees and customers, identify and address problems quickly, decrease the number of unnecessary and expensive on-site service calls, and increase their overall efficiency,” said Lombard. “Our customers played an integral role in helping us design this commercial App that addresses their business needs, and delivers an outstanding user experience.”

With the ecobee EMS App, customers can create a custom “Watch List” of thermostats to quickly keep tabs on priority spaces, and locations with repeat issues. The “Alerts” list summarizes all current issues and maintenance actions, allowing customers to address problems immediately. Additionally, the App provides customers with visibility into each of their ecobee thermostats, and enables them to make simple adjustments to ensure their facilities are comfortable when occupied, and saving energy and money when they’re not.

The ecobee EMS Apps for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry are now available to download for free.

To download a PDF version of this press release: click here

Warming up to Smart Technology

Charitable organizations don’t always have the budget to implement the latest and greatest in energy-saving technologies, but landing upon the
right mix of capable volunteers, supportive suppliers and a bit of creativity to make all the parts fit brought comfort and energy control to one such organization in Toronto earlier this year.

The Good Shepherd Centre, one of the Good Shepherd Ministry’s main buildings, had an outdated heating system – or more correctly, a wide array of systems that services the disparate parts of the facility – and a control system that matched the variety of terminal units in use at the site.

Not one to shrink from a challenge, Craig Flatley, manager of Complete Mechanical Heating & A/C in Toronto, volunteered to take on the task of upgrading the centre’s thermostat control systems to improve energy efficiency and comfort levels within the building.

Click here to read the full article published by Mechanical Business Magazine.

Release your inner artist and custom design a GelaSkin for your ecobee!

GelaSkins are removable laminated vinyl decals designed to protect and personalize your ecobee thermostat.

Match the look of your ecobee thermostat to the style of your home décor.  Inject your own personal flare with customized colours and patterns, or choose an awesome design that suits your taste from the GelaSkins gallery.

You can also create your own unique and personalized GelaSkin using a fun family photo or your favorite piece of graphic art to bring your ecobee thermostat to life.

Create a GelaSkin for your ecobee today!! For step-by-step instructions please click here and select GelaSkins!

On April 13th 2012, Stuart Lombard, ecobee’s President and CEO, proudly accepted the prestigious Green Toronto Award in the Energy Conversation Category on behalf of the company.

The Green Toronto Awards recognize organizations and companies that help lead the way to a cleaner, greener Toronto. Winners received a $5000.00 prize that could be used to further their environmental initiatives or donated to a registered charity of their choice.

ecobee proudly choose to donate our $5000.00 prize to the Evergreen Brick Works, located in the heart of Toronto’s Don Valley. The ‘Brick Works’ engages visitors through interactive workshops and community festivals and offers a variety of programs that combine ecology, design, technology and the arts. At their awe-inspiring facility, visitors are offered the unique chance to experience nature, culture and community within their urban city.

ecobee supports Evergreen’s mission to empower Canadians to take a hands-on approach to their urban-environment and to continually improve the health of their cities.

Evergreen Executive Director Geoff Cape and ecobee President/CEO Stuart Lombard at the Evergreen Brick Works

ecobee is pleased to announce the beta launch of Home IQ™—a new value-added service that provides our customers with unique and personalized insights into their home’s heating and cooling performance, energy efficiency, and savings.

ecobee’s Home IQ™ is integrated into each customer’s ecobee Web Portal.  Home IQ™ displays your ecobee rating (a relative assessment of your home’s energy performance), their estimated monthly energy savings, monthly heating and cooling summaries, details on performance influencing factors such as the weather and average set point, HVAC runtime reports and more.

The Science behind Home IQ™

Over the last 3 years, ecobee has collaborated with some of the brightest scientists in the field of energy conservation to develop this unique and innovative service.  Home IQ™ takes thousands of data points, automatically collected through a customer’s ecobee thermostat, and uses advanced math and physics to create a model that learns about their home, and provides them with insights into their home’s energy performance.

What’s your Home IQ™?

We developed Home IQ™ because, for most people, it is difficult to understand their homes’ energy performance without an expensive home energy audit.  ecobee’s Home IQ™ provides many of the benefits of a personal home energy audit, at no additional cost.

When developing Home IQ™, our goal was to answer questions like:

• How energy efficient is my home?
• How can I optimize my settings to drive more savings?
• How do my energy savings compare to that of other ecobee customers?
• Do I need to upgrade my insulation or install weather stripping?

Home IQ™ is just another example of how we continue to bring innovative, value added services to all of our customers. What’s more? We’ve got big plans to build upon the existing Home IQ™ beta platform to add further insights into your home energy performance.  Genius!

Click here to learn more about Home IQ™, or visit your ecobee Web Portal to see it for yourself!

At ecobee, we’re not just all about thermostats — we’re about energy solutions. That’s why we’ve manufactured our very own Smart Plugs, to give you another way to understand, manage, and reduce your energy use. Smart Plugs can be programmed to add additional control to certain elements of your home and they can be monitored and managed through your personal Web Portal.

We asked our current Smart Plug users how they are using them and we discovered that we have some pretty clever members of the ecobee family! A huge thank you to all those who responded – below are some of our favourites:

• I use my Smart Plug to turn the bedroom light on 5 minutes after the alarm goes off in the morning.
• My second Smart Plug controls an attic fan.  On days that I am not using my AC, I can program the Smart Plug to switch on the Attic Fan throughout the day to circulate air in the house.
• We have setup 2 Smart Plugs to control lights for security when we are away on vacation – the lights are programmed to turn on & off as if we were home.
• I use my Smart Plug to control my lawn and garden irrigation system.
• I use my Smart Plug to control my dehumidifier, and maintain reasonable humidity at MINIMUM electricity usage.

Here is one use that deserves it’s own special mention!

• We just had a wonderful confluence of events, aided by a Smart Plug.  My wife and I, having never watched the soap opera, “Dark Shadows” as we were in college in the late ’60s, so we’re running through the whole thing, now.  Meanwhile, we bought an old, Victorian house a year and a half ago.  While we were watching a “Dark Shadows” episode, which involved some of the ghosts which haunt the protagonist family’s house, my wife thought to ask if I’d be amused to find that our old house is haunted (not that either of us believe in the supernatural, mind you).  There’s more…  Years ago, we bought a player piano, not for the player mechanism but because it’s a particularly nice instrument.  But, now, we’ve just gotten the player mechanism to work and, when she asked about the ghosts, she asked, “What would you do if you heard someone playing the piano in the middle of the night?”  So, I moved one of the smart plugs to the piano’s vacuum pump, set-up a roll and temporarily disabled the plug’s program and left it off.  At night, a few minutes after we’d turned out the lights, I turned on the plug from my Android phone, starting the player piano.  The result was quite amusing, to say the least.”

If these uses and stories have inspired you to install an ecobee Smart Plug – they are available for purchase on the Buy page of our website!

Do you have a Smart Plug and want to share your story? Please email barbara@ecobee.com – we would LOVE to hear it.

We all know that ecobee’s line of Wi-Fi enabled thermostats are pretty darn smart (hence the name!). But have you ever wondered how ecobee always knows the current weather conditions at your home?

Here’s how it works:

When connected to your Wi-Fi network, the weather forecast and current weather displayed on your ecobee thermostat is determined by the address you used when you first registered it. With that information, your ecobee determines the latitude and longitude for the exact location of your home.

ecobee’s weather service provider maintains tens of thousands of weather stations across North America—so the ecobee uses your coordinates to find the closest weather stations to your home. The ecobee then uses an algorithm to interpolate the data, based on geography, to derive weather for your (very specific) location!

So, say you live in Houston,  weather.com may give you the weather at the local airport. But the ecobee goes even further.  It will take several of the closest weather stations based on your home’s coordinates, run an algorithm, estimate the weather at your house, and it instantaneously appears on ecobee’s  full color screen display!

But how does ‘knowing the weather outside’ help save me money?

Aside from being a convenient feature for our ecobee customers (you’ll always know when you need a jacket!), there’s a more important reason why ecobee needs to know what the weather is like outside your home.

ecobee thermostats have built-in scientifically proven algorithms that take into account elements including the weather, your equipment’s historical performance, size of your home, number of family members and type of HVAC system to make intelligent heating and cooling decisions on your behalf. That way, you can rest assured that you are always saving the most energy possible, every day!

How smart is that?!

Great news BlackBerry users! The new ecobee BlackBerry Beta app is now available for BlackBerry OS7 touch-screen mobile devices. Visit the BlackBerry App World to download the new ecobee Beta app today and start controlling your ecobee thermostat from anywhere via your mobile device.

We’ve also made some improvements to our iPhone and Android mobile apps! Updated versions of the ecobee Apple and Android apps are now available through the App Store and Android Marketplace.  The updated versions include performance improvements, the ability to view your 4-day weather forecast right through your mobile app and more.

Please note that effective July 5^th, 2012, ecobee iPhone app versions earlier than 2.0 will no longer be supported.  Therefore, if you are running an earlier version of the iPhone mobile app, you must upgrade to the latest version now by visiting the Apple App Store.

What our customers are saying:

“In August I upgraded to an ecobee Smart thermostat. It is a great product and I enjoy both using it and showing it off. It has truly made a difference in the way I manage my HVAC, and has given me huge peace of mind when away from home.” Mike, Home Owner