It has worked perfectly for over a year, but last week it started having trouble running the furnace. It would actually fire it up, but then it would turn off after a few seconds, then repeat. I thought maybe the furnace had a problem, but I rebooted the ecobee and it started working again.

For a week.

This morning the problem returned, and a reboot didn't fix. I connected red to white, and the furnace fired up just fine. Luckily I still have my old thermostat, so I installed it and it seems to be running fine.

Since the furnace runs for about the same length of time with the ecobee, I thought the furnace had a problem. I mean, all the thermostat has to do is connect red to white and the furnace takes it from there, right? It seemed like a failsafe was tripping because it was actually firing before kicking back off.

But that doesn't seem to be the case, and I guess my ecobee is faulty. Has anyone seen an ecobee or any other thermostat act this way? The temperature is obviously not rising after running the furnace for 3 seconds, so why would the thermostat break the connection? I know only a little about electronics... could whatever component that makes the red white connection be failing under load?

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Posted by OSoBad

Member since Nov 2016

2007 posts

Posted on 1/6/18 at 7:50 pm to Korkstand

My Ecobee did this Monday night for about 5 minutes, I was really worried it would damage the furnace. The heat would kick on for about 15 seconds and cut off, wait about 30 or 40 seconds and repeat. It finally kicked on for good and hasn't messed up since.

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Posted by BR Tiger

Baton Rouge

Member since Mar 2004

4424 posts

Posted on 1/7/18 at 9:30 am to Korkstand

Did you check to see if the firmware needed to be updated or had recently been updated? Could be they pushed an update that messed something up. If that’s the case it will be fixed soon I would think.

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Posted by TechDadHere

Member since Jul 2017

45 posts

Posted on 2/5/18 at 5:07 am to Korkstand

I've had this before but with nest. We didn't really need advanced troubleshooting. We just powercycled. it sometimes fixes the bugs. I hope yours gets fixed soonest.

This post was edited on 2/9/18 at 12:16 am

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Posted by Korkstand

Member since Nov 2003

29044 posts

Posted on 2/5/18 at 8:53 am to TechDadHere

Oh! I guess I should have bumped this when I figured it out.

I can't even find the random board and thread that I found the answer in, but the ecobee has a furnace setting where you choose whether the ecobee controls the furnace startup procedure, or to allow the furnace to control startup itself once it gets the signal. Mine was set for the ecobee to control it, and apparently it worked most of the time (it worked fine all of last "winter" and most of this one), but I guess sometimes it just didn't work right. I changed it to let the furnace handle everything and it's been fine since.

Edit: Ah here it is

This post was edited on 2/5/18 at 8:57 am

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