Hands On with the Drivers Lab’s Control4 Driver for ecobee Thermostats

Anyone who has visited my home in the past year or so has probably gotten tired of me talking about all of the things my Control4 home automation and Lutron lighting control systems can do. Sure, there’s the touch-of-a-button home theater control. Yes, I can turn my lights on with a flick on my iPhone. Yes, I can remotely unlock my doors and monitor my security cameras from anywhere in the world. But… There’s always the “but.” But, I’ve grown used to saying, it can’t operate my ecobee Smart Thermostat. Yet. Now, thanks to The Drivers Lab, I can wipe that sentence entirely from my vernacular.

You, like many of my beleaguered guests, may be wondering why, exactly, I would want to integrate my ecobee into my Control4 system at large. After all, ecobee’s app control is amazing, its setup and online monitoring tools are beyond compare, and once the thing is set up, you rarely if ever need to touch it, aside from letting it know that you’ve replaced your filter (or if you’re walking by and just want to check the local weather conditions and forecast). One of the things that I tried hard to stress in my review of the Control4 HC-250, though, is that remote control isn’t the coolest thing about the system. Yes, Control4 is amazing at it. Yes, having one app to rule all of the connected electronic devices in my home is wicked cool.

But more than anything else, the real selling point of a control system like Control4 is the ability to have your electronics automatically do all of the things that you would normally do to them yourself. The few seconds of programming here and there that shaves literally minutes off of your day-to-day routine, every single day.

Full Story: http://www.technologytell.com/hometech/100639/the-drivers-labs-control4-ecobee/

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