How to Improve Your Home’s Energy Efficiency with Home IQ

It takes a lot of energy to heat and cool your home. While a conventional thermostat maintains the same indoor temperature all of the time, your ecobee thermostat saves money and reduces power consumption by running your HVAC equipment less when you are asleep or away.

The Runtime Report shows you how much energy your ecobee saves each month compared to a conventional thermostat.

How it works: In the example below, the red bar shows you how long your HVAC system ran in a given month. The wider, orange bar shows you how long your equipment would have run if you replaced your ecobee with a conventional thermostat and left your home at a steady 72°F (22°C) year-round.

ecobee runtime reports also show you how much money you saved since you first installed your thermostat, as well as your monthly savings. Your estimated savings are based on the cost of energy in your area.

In the example above, the ecobee thermostat used the HVAC equipment 105 fewer hours than a conventional system would have, for a monthly savings of $69.76.

For some friendly competition with your neighbors, dive into Community Comparisons, which takes your ecobee runtime savings and temperature preferences and compares them to the average in your state or province.

The top half of the Community Comparisons screen shows you how your monthly energy savings compare with the provincial average. The closer you are to the right of the scale, the better you’re doing.

In the example above, the owner’s runtime savings (13 percent) trail the state or provincial average, indicating that there may be room for improvement.

The second part of Community Comparisons gives you a more descriptive breakdown based on your Comfort Settings. The color-coded horizontal bars show how your Home, Away, and Sleep temperature preferences compare to the state or provincial average.

A smiley emoji means you are on the right track, saving as much or more than the state or provincial average for that Comfort Setting. But a sour-faced emoji means you may be able to unlock additional energy savings by adjusting your desired temperature.

For example, if your desired temperature when you are home is higher than the average (like in the example above), you can lower it to access more savings and turn that frown upside down.

Use the Home Efficiency tab to see how energy efficient your home is compared with others your state or province. Similar to Community Comparisons, the higher your percentage, the better you're doing.

When it comes to the energy efficiency of your home, we're talking about how well it retains thermal energy:

• How quickly it heats up and cools down.
• How long it can hold the desired temperature without running the equipment.

System Monitor is a set of charts that give you a granular look at your home’s heating and cooling patterns. You can even download several months of runtime data to see how your home heating and cooling patterns change with the seasons.

The black line on the graph above represents the average outdoor temperature for each day of the month. The colored bars indicate how long your heating equipment (orange) or cooling equipment (blue) ran on each day. The longer the bar, the longer the equipment ran.

In the example above, the heating equipment ran for over 5 hours on May 1, a monthly high.

Your thermostat data belongs to you. To export it, click the Download Data tab on the left-hand column of the System Monitor. Next, pick a date range and download your energy history as a .csv file. You can now open your thermostat data as a spreadsheet.

Now that you have everything you need to get started with Home IQ, here are 10 more easy ways to optimize your smart thermostat for energy savings and comfort.