Heat Stage 1 suddenly became Aux Heat in Thermostat Summary

I have a heat pump - though for reasons I won’t get into it is wired to the Ecobee like a furnace & air conditioner would be wired.

I’ve previously set my System Type in Beestat to Compressor for both Heat and Cool, and to None for Auxiliary Heat.

This was fine and has been for over a year, but suddenly my thermostat history is showing as if my Heat is Aux?

I’m not sure what changed to cause this, and I’m not sure if it’s a big problem, but it’s definitely odd!

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

My bad…

To clarify, what’s correct? If I look at the data ecobee sends me, there’s a hasHeatPump flag set to false. However, you’ve changed your system type to compressor manually in beestat.

We may have discussed this before but if so I’ve forgotten. The reason your usage is showing up as aux now is because I am deferring to the reported value when setting a few things.

I have a heat pump, but Ecobee believes I have a gas forced air furnace.

My wiring is Rc/C/G/W/Y, rather than standard heat pump wiring of Rc/C/G/Y/OB.

Beestat detects my setup as “Electric (Detected)” - not sure why because Ecobee is confident I’m burning gas. I overrode Beestat and it’s worked fine until all of a sudden.

Hope that makes sense.

Mine is doing the same thing too. My system was detected as geothermal but it’s gas. I think it was caused by testing the multispeed fan option when it was initially installed. It doesn’t really affect me that much but it does stop it from graphing the heating data in comparisons. Would there be a way to reevaluate the detected value so it is detected as the right type?

@Shaun_R, @cscott92:

I think I’ll just need to change beestat to use your beestat-reported system type instead of the detected system type.

Thanks for your work, Jon!

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Just looked at this a little bit closer and I’m actually on the other side of the fence now.

For a heat pump, ecobee reports heating data in two columns: compressor and aux. The compressor column represents compressor runtime, and the aux represents aux runtime. Simple.

For non-heat-pumps, ecobee reports heating data in one column: aux. This is a little bit confusing, but the aux column generally just represents heat generated at the furnace (heat strips, gas, whatever).

I do not attempt to interpret or change this data when I import it into beestat. I have columns in my database to match ecobee. In the GUI, I generally display compressor data in orange, and aux data in red. If you have non-compressor based heat, I actually just rename and recolor aux data so it looks correct.

In your case, your ecobee is wired in a way that your compressor runtime is being reported in the aux column (like if you had a gas furnace). If you tell beestat you have a compressor it’s now going interpret your data as such and treat the aux column as aux heat.

So what you’ll see is all your normal compressor usage showing up as aux heat. Your temperature profile happens to be showing up “correctly” in orange, but I just adjusted that as well so it will start showing up as an aux heat profile soon enough. This way everything is consistent.

The only real significant impact in the GUI other than colors/names is metrics. You’ll lose the ability to compare your profiles in any meaningful way. Your normal heat profile will be an aux heat profile and won’t get compared to other systems properly.

Open to ideas on how this could be resolved. I’m glad I got this figured out and made consistent, but I’m not sure if there’s a great way to resolve this.

Thanks for the detail, Jon.

I guess I liked it better when it was “broken”, haha!

If I set my system type in Beestat back to Gas - because that’s what Ecobee believes I’m using - will my metrics work and heat profile etc display in Orange rather than Red?

Yes. When your system type is gas beestat will treat the aux column as regular heat. The only problem is then your metrics will be comparing you to other gas systems. Big lose-lose I guess and the is currently no way to change that.

I definitely hate to leave this with that answer. The best idea I have at this point is to allow you to change the system type you compare to in metrics.

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