Crunching the numbers: 3rd-party projects and alternative ways to analyze your Ecobee or Nest data

Ecobee and Nest both offer emailed monthly data reports containing information such as how many minutes your system ran, whether it was heating or cooling, etc., but the reports don’t give as much nitty-gritty detail as many users would like (and you have to wait at least a month to get them).

Fortunately, a few independent projects exist to consume your ecobee or Nest data and render it into useful charts and graphs. If you want a better understanding of how your HVAC system is running with a smart thermostat in place, consider getting set up with one of the following projects.

(And if you’re a developer who is interested in making your own data analysis tool, check out the Ecobee API and/or the Nest API. Respond in the comments if you build something and we might feature your project here!)

beestat for ecobee (and eventually Nest)

Technical skill needed: none

If you have an ecobee thermostat check out beestat.

Beestat is an independent project that grabs your ecobee data from ecobee.com and presents it in a tidy web-based dashboard that’s better than the official one. (Note that beestat is not an app, you must use it via a web browser.) The dashboard shows your thermostats, their current status, and a few “recent activity” style charts like this one below:

Don’t worry – the data it uses is only exposed to beestat if (and only if) you authorize the app through ecobee’s official website.

Ecobee made their API publicly available so that individuals and other companies might be able to grab your data and do new and clever things with it.

As of the time of this writing, beestat only supports ecobee, but Nest support is in the works. Check out beestat’s dedicated subreddit community, r/beestat, for updates from the developer and to give input on upcoming features.

Nest History (with Raspberry Pi)

Technical skill needed: medium, plus a Raspberry Pi

Nest also has a sufficiently open API that allows developers to do some neat things with the data generated from a Nest. Nest History by Thomas Beverley uses a Raspberry Pi to capture and display Nest thermostat data like so:

This app requires some setup on your part, but once it’s all set up, you can look at the data captured by your Nest thermostat in real time.

Nest data dump (from nest.com)

Technical skill needed: high

Nest also gives you the ability to download a huge raw dump of data from nest.com. If you already have a nest account, go here to get your data.

This dataset contains:

• Current and Target Temperatures & Humidity
• Time to Target Temperature
• Target Temperature Mode, Fan Mode
• AC, Heat, and Fan Status; On/Off
• Manual and Automatic Away Mode
• Location Information
• Network Information
• Currently Active Schedule (by Day)
• Next Scheduled Event
• Last 10 Days Energy Report

If you’re technically inclined, you might be able to parse this dump for interesting insights. Nest won’t spoonfeed it to you, but you can probably crunch the numbers and find some trends yourself.

Are you developing an app for analyzing smart thermostat data?

If you’re a developer maintaining an application that analyzes Nest, Ecobee, or other smart thermostat data, please let us know in the comments!

We would love to feature more projects here!