Amazon Prime Day 2021: Ecobee's got some good deals on thermostats and cameras - CNET

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This story is part of Amazon Prime Day 2021, CNET's guide on everything you need to know and how to make sure you get the best deal.

Amazon Prime Day is here, and that means there's an awful lot of stuff on sale -- and an awful lot of manufacturers competing for your shopping attention, and a place in your cart.

Smart home brands are among the most prolific of participants (especially the ones that play well with Amazon's Alexa). Among them, you'll notice a couple of particularly good deals from Ecobee, makers of our all-around favorite smart thermostat (nope, it's not quite the Nest). You'll find that Editors' Choice-winning thermostat at an attractive discount today, along with deals on other Ecobee models and bundles, including some featuring the company's smart indoor camera. I've outlined the offers below, and will update this post if I spot any others.

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Ecobee's flagship smart thermostat is the top competitor to Nest, an Editors' Choice-winner here on CNET, and CNET Smart Home whiz Megan Wollerton's top-recommended smart thermostat overall. Along with letting you program and monitor your home's heating and cooling needs from your phone, the full-featured Ecobee thermostat includes a very handy remote sensor accessory for tracking the temperature and occupancy in whatever room you like, it supports voice controls via Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, and it even includes its own built-in speaker and microphone to let you chat with Alexa right at the wall. Later this year, it'll support built-in Siri access, too, though you'll need to have an Apple HomePod Mini smart speaker already on your network (which, admittedly, kind of seems to defeat the purpose of the upgrade).

Regardless, this is an excellent smart thermostat, and it's $51 off for Prime Day, bringing the price down to $198. That's about the same as what it sold for on Black Friday the past two years, and only a few bucks above its all-time Amazon low of $192.

Read the CNET review.

Chris Monroe/CNET

If $200 is still more than you want to spend on a smart thermostat (or if you just don't want another device with a microphone in it in your home), then check out the Ecobee3 Lite. It doesn't include built-in Alexa controls or its own built-in occupancy sensor like the voice version above, and it doesn't come with a remote occupancy sensor, either (though you can add them later). Apart from that, it's basically the exact same smart thermostat with the same attractive mix of features, including support for voice controls via Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant (you'll just need to talk to a separate device).

The Ecobee3 Lite is already priced as a value pick at $169, but you'll find it marked down by $25 to $144 on Prime Day. That's about $15 more than what we saw on Black Friday last year, and it's well above the all-time low of $119, but it's still a good deal for a "lite" smart thermostat that's heavy on features and integrations.

Can't decide between Ecobee's voice-enabled thermostat and the Ecobee3 Lite? Here's a full rundown of everything that separates them (toldja Megan was a whiz).

Read the CNET review.

Ecobee

It's not just thermostats -- Ecobee is in the indoor camera business, too. Its camera of note features built-in Alexa voice controls, plus two-way talk, and it usually retails for $100, but you can score one for $70 on Prime Day.

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Ecobee

Here's another Ecobee bundle that packages one of those cameras with the company's voice-enabled thermostat. The camera doubles as an Alexa smart speaker like the thermostat does, and it features two-way talk, too, so the pitch is that you'll use it as a baby monitor, complete with temperature and occupancy-sensing for the baby room via the thermostat. That said, you don't need a baby to buy this bundle -- you could use that camera and the thermostat's remote sensor wherever and however you like.

The best part is the price. On their own, the camera and thermostat would cost you $350, and up until Prime Day, the bundle knocked the price down to $300 -- but now that Prime Day is here, Ecobee tells us that it plans to offer the Sweet Dreams Baby Kit for just $210. That's essentially like buying the voice-enabled thermostat at the very decent Prime Day sale price listed above, and then adding the camera in for another $12.

We haven't seen this deal live on Amazon just yet, but I'll update the post once we've spotted it.