A whole crew spent a  good chunk of the summer of 2014 installing several HVAC systems in a beautiful new home on Canandaigua Lake.  The end result was one of the most beautiful homes we’ve ever been a part of.  What followed was one of the coldest and most miserable winters many of us can remember.  I don’t think a single flake of snow melted from Thanksgiving until April.  That created a major problem for heating systems, because snow drifts were building up against homes and covering up our exhaust flues.  When they become covered, the furnace triggers a shut down so that the dangerous gases don’t fill your home.  Almost half of the service calls we received from January – March of 2015 were for this very reason (those homeowners were happy because they didn’t need to pay for a service call, they just needed to run outside with a shovel!).

The ecobee3 thermostat was a part of this lake home’s HVAC system.  We received a call out of the blue that winter from the homeowners.  They were on vacation in Europe, and had received an email in their inbox that the thermostat triggered an alert for low temperature.  We went out and found that the flues were covered by snowdrifts, and had shut the system down.  Had that been left unattended until they returned to their lake house in spring, there is no telling what amount of damage could have been done to their beautiful new lake home as pipes froze and potentially burst.  They were very happy ecobee and Boccacino customers after that experience.