beestat

Beestat now supports direct giving

As beestat has grown, I've had the need for more flexibility in how users can contribute. In order to support this, I'm adding direct giving as the primary way for people to donate. I've tried to answer some questions below, but please reach out if you have any concerns.

What does this change for Patrons? Virtually nothing. No action is required. The Patreon status page in beestat will look slightly different and updates for supporters will either be email-only and/or a...

Merchandise!

Beestat now has some awesome stickers! If you're interested, please send an email to contact@beestat.io with a mailing address and I will send you two stickers for free as a thank you for being a supporter. Put one on your furnace (thanks for the idea, Eric!) and another one wherever.

The first set of orders should fulfill in about a week once everything arrives. If you want more than the two stickers or just hate free stuff, use the following links to make a purchase.

2022-10-10 13:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post

Early Access - 3D Visualization

Hi everyone! It's been almost a year and half since my last Patreon post and I have some cool updates to share.

First, I want to take a moment to highlight the private beestat Discord server. This is where I am most active these days, so if you'd like to chat make sure you get connected with your Patreon account to get access. We have a lot of fun and updates and feedback flow freely.

Now on to the fun stuff! I have spent the past two months tirel...

Time to Heat/Cool is now live for Patrons!

This will show up on the System card when the heat or A/C is on. It currently predicts the time to reach the desired setpoint at current conditions. It does not factor in future weather or system staging.

Please let me know if you have any feedback! It will go live for all users sometime in the next few weeks; you all get to try it out first. :)

Beestat is getting a logo!

Technically I have one, but the letters "bs" in a circle leaves something to be desired. :)

As supporters, I'd love to get your feedback on the top designs. Take the poll here:

https://99designs.com/contests/poll/40c3e2d001

Hug of death

Last week a post went up on Gizmodo from Alex Cranz reviewing the ecobee. The post contained a link to beestat with some nice comments. Thanks, Alex, and welcome to all the new beestat users and Patrons!

First of all, it was exciting to have beestat shared this way. Typically I see referrals from smaller c...

Metrics - No Early Access :(

A while back I enabled early access to a very rough version of the new metrics. I still hadn't figured everything completely out, but the concept was there.

Since then I've made a lot of improvements. There's nothing I want more than to share them with you all, but I had to make some changes that are incompatible with the live version of the site. What that means is I can't trivially give early access to any of the new features.

I'm pretty bummed about this, so really the only thi...

Migrating from Mailchimp to Mailgun (+Metric Sneak Peak)

The Status Quo

In my effort to be as cheap as possible, I constantly evaluate all of the third party services I pay for. Two weeks ago SmartyStreets (address validation) got some optimizations. So far I've seen promising results! This week we're on to Mailchimp.

If you didn't know, Mailchimp is used for email marketing. They're one of the more popular services used for spamming the crap out of your inbox. I use them to send a newsletter 2-3 times a year. They were...

Pre-screening for bad addresses

Home comparisons are a really neat feature of beestat; they let you see how your home stacks up against other similar homes in your geographical region. In order to do that, I need to know where you live. The good news is that ecobee provides this data in their API. The bad news is that the data isn't very consistent. Here are some examples of data I receive:

123 Main St, Atlanta, GA 30060, USA
123 Main St, Atlanta, Georgia 30060, United States

Any time I see inconsistent data ...

Keeping Things Running

Hi everyone...long time!

First of all, I apologize for not being very active lately. I've gotten away from my bi-weekly posts and been pretty slow to respond to emails and community posts. I don't really beat myself up too much since beestat is just a fun side-project for me, but I want to be sure I'm continuing to give all my supporters and users a quality app!

The biggest issue lately has been disk space. I've probably had three instances where the 100GB database disk filled up ...

Changes to background syncing

Today's Infrastructure

When you open beestat, your thermostat, sensor, and historical data is downloaded from ecobee.

Every five minutes, beestat checks locally for any updated data and updates the dashboard. This does not reach out to ecobee.

In order to keep local data up to date, a background sync runs for all users that reaches out to ecobee and updates the beestat database. Users who are actively using the application are set to sync on...

Welcome Back?

Hi there!

It's been a minute since I've done much active work with beestat...it's taken a backseat for a while as I've worked on managing the lives of my kids now that they are officially out of school for the rest of the year. You may have seen mention of my COVID K12 Community, something I tried to start to help other parents in the same situation. It didn't really take off, which is fine. I have my ideas on that...but I ha...

Bugs & Community

Bug Fixes

A couple weeks ago I got a little crazy and started developing a bunch of updates to the  Comparisons page. These features are available for Patrons but are still pretty buggy and lacking. I really want to work on them but I had to pull myself back because a few other things needed my attention first.

All of those things are outstanding bugs. I've said this before, but in order to keep this project running in a sustainable way I need to have as few ...

New Comparisons - Early Access!

All Patrons now have access to the new comparisons I discussed earlier this week. Please note these features are experimental, unstable, might be wrong, and will change often. But they're neat and interesting so I wanted to get them in your hands to explore.

Home Comparisons: Goodbye Scores?

First of all, the winner of the giveaway for a Sensor two-pack is Derek M. Congrats!

If you asked me which part of beestat I was least happy with, the answer would easily be Home Comparison Scores. They're really neat, and I originally loved the idea of consolidating performance into three simple scores...but now that the honeymoon phase is over I'm realizing just how wrong the idea really is.

Temperature Profiles

2020-02-25 15:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Sensor Giveaway...?

Hi everyone!

If you weren't aware, I was originally planning on giving away a sensor two-pack today. Unfortunately, it's been brought to my attention that this is against the Patreon TOS. This is basically because you are paying (Patreon) to win, which is considered gambling in many places.

I can still do giveaways, but they have to be structured differently. Basical...

Sensor Data is Live!

Check out the patch notes.

Also don't forget to join the new Patreon Discord! There's a link on your membership page.

Patreon Changes

Quick Note: Sensor data is live and will be officially announced with an email and another post Tuesday at 10am. Also SmartSensor two-pack giveaway on the 18th!

Hi all! This is more of an administrative note to inform you of some changes to the Patreon rewards. After surpassing $250 in pledges last month (thank you all!) I took another look at the tiers and noticed that they needed some work.

In summary, all three existing tiers have been combined into a single "P...